Manumee Anawak

Manumee Anawak is Leon Anawak’s deceased father, a figure the story presents through memory, a brief account of his sudden death, and the rituals of his burial. His return to the narrative is inseparable from Leon’s return to Cape Dorset after nineteen years away. Though Manumee is absent from the reunion, his death forces Leon to face an old estrangement—and to question whether the places he has called home still belong to him.

Identity and Background

The novel offers little biographical information about Manumee apart from his connection to Leon, his death, and the gulf that had opened between them. He belongs to the family and community life Leon remembers in Cape Dorset, on the south-western extremity of Baffin Island. In Leon’s recollection, the Sikusiilaq region was named for a sea where ice did not form, because temperate currents kept the water around Foxe Peninsula from freezing even in severe winter. That precise, familiar geography frames a homecoming that is not emotionally simple: the landscape can summon affection, but it also brings Leon back to the parents and experiences that drove him away.

The remembered Cape Dorset includes Mallikjuaq Island, with its nineteenth-century fox-traps, ancient Thule ruins, burial sites surrounded by legends, and a lake where Leon and others had camped. He remembers stone kayak-stands and acknowledges, in effect, that he had loved the place. The recollection does not establish which details belong specifically to Manumee’s life; instead, it places the father within the homeland Leon once shared with his family and later left behind. The contrast between that remembered attachment and the distance separating father and son gives Manumee’s absence its weight.

Death on the Land

When Leon asks how his father died, Ijitsineq Akesuk answers plainly: Manumee had been out on the land when he saw a hare and began to chase it. He suddenly collapsed and died. The account is brief, with no illness or other explanation supplied. Its circumstances place Manumee in the outdoor world of the family’s remembered home, but the suddenness leaves little room for preparation or a final reconciliation.

The news reaches Leon during a reunion already charged by the years of separation. Akesuk has welcomed him back with an embrace, while Leon responds to his uncle with limited warmth. Manumee’s death therefore does not reunite father and son in life; it confronts Leon with the irrevocability of a relationship he had already experienced as over. The story does not specify what Manumee had done, or failed to do, to produce their estrangement. It preserves that silence rather than supplying a cause, keeping the focus on what the loss means to Leon now.

Burial and Estrangement

The burial is short and unsentimental. Before the ceremony, Leon has to shake hands with everyone; people he has never seen embrace him. A priest reads from the Bible and says a prayer, then Manumee’s coffin is lowered into a shallow grave. Blue plastic covers the earth before the men add stones. The cross stands askew in the hard ground, like the other crosses in the cemetery. These spare, concrete details make the burial a communal rite, but not an intimate farewell between father and son.

Akesuk puts a small wooden box with a glass lid into Leon’s hands. Inside are faded artificial flowers, a packet of cigarettes, and a metal-capped bear’s tooth. With a small shove from his uncle, Leon walks to the grave and sets the box beside the cross. The gesture gives him a task within the ceremony, but the narrative does not turn it into a declaration of forgiveness or reconciliation. Leon had already declined Akesuk’s offer to see his father one last time. As the priest speaks, he tries to picture the man inside the coffin and finds it difficult to believe anyone is there at all.

Instead, Leon recognizes the finality of death: Manumee can never do anything wrong again, and questions of guilt and innocence have lost their force. Whatever his father did or failed to do in life seems meaningless now that the coffin is surrounded by cold earth. For Leon, the relationship had ceased to matter long before the funeral; his father had been dead to him for years. The burial feels less like the beginning of grief than an overdue formality confirming a separation already established in life.

Homecoming and Narrative Significance

Leon has stopped trying to make himself feel something at the burial. He wants only to leave and go home, but the word no longer points securely to Vancouver or Tofino, the places he had assumed he meant. As the congregation begins to sing, he experiences isolation, and his shivering has nothing to do with the cold. The funeral thus changes the meaning of the homecoming: returning to Cape Dorset has not restored a settled sense of belonging, but it has exposed how incomplete Leon’s idea of home was.

The scene culminates in a physical collapse of perspective. Leon stares into a black hole; his field of vision narrows, the world spins, and darkness sweeps over him with the force of a wave. He feels like an animal trapped and unable to escape what is approaching. The passage does not make Manumee’s death a simple reconciliation or a resolved mourning. Instead, the father’s burial brings Leon face to face with estrangement, the permanence of loss, and the disorientation beneath his attempt to name another place as home. Manumee’s narrative importance lies in that consequence: even in death, he is bound to the unresolved past Leon has carried away from Cape Dorset.