The longest story
Kiviuq's story is not one tale but a cycle of episodes, told from Alaska to Greenland and arranged differently by every teller. Inuit elders have said that it could take many nights to tell in full, and that Kiviuq has lived many lifetimes and is still travelling. What follows is a summary of widely told episodes, drawn from published collections of elders' tellings, especially those gathered by Kira Van Deusen with Inuit storytellers; it is not a fixed sequence.
The orphan and the storm
In many Canadian tellings, the story starts with an orphan boy who lives with his grandmother. The young men of the camp mock him and mistreat him; in some versions they tear his clothes or throw him into the water. His grandmother, a woman with power, makes a magical seal, or dresses the boy in a seal skin, and sends him out to lure the young men far out to sea in their kayaks. When they are far from land, a storm rises, and all of them are drowned except one: Kiviuq, the strongest and most skilled kayaker, who is carried away across the sea. So his wandering begins, from an act of cruelty and its punishment.
The woman who meant to kill him
Kiviuq comes to a house where an old woman, sometimes called the bee-woman in English retellings, lives with her daughter. The woman plans to kill him while he sleeps, as she has killed others, using her ulu (woman's knife) or cooking him in her pot. Warned in some tellings by the daughter or by his own suspicion, Kiviuq escapes, and in several versions he turns the woman's own trap back on her.
The snapping shells
On his journey by kayak Kiviuq must pass between the two halves of a giant mussel or clam that opens and slams shut on anything that tries to cross. He waits for his moment and paddles through as it opens; the shells snap shut just behind him, catching the tail of his kayak but not him. Other episodes set him against giant fish, cannibal giants, and dangerous landscapes that must be crossed by skill and patience.
The fox-wife and the goose-wife
Kiviuq marries more than once. In one episode he returns home to find that his house has been cleaned and his clothes prepared, and discovers a fox who takes off her fur and becomes a woman; she becomes his wife, until a slight about her smell, in some tellings, drives her back to her animal form. In another, he takes the clothes of a woman who has shed her goose skin, so that she cannot fly away, and marries her; later she gathers feathers and flies south with the geese, and Kiviuq follows her on a long and difficult journey.
Still travelling
Tellers disagree on how the story ends, or whether it ends. Many say Kiviuq is still alive, wandering somewhere in the Arctic, and that he will come back when he is needed. Kiviuq is honoured today in Nunavut in schools, books, films, and the names of places and organisations.
What the episodes teach
Each episode carries lessons: the danger of cruelty to the vulnerable, the need for caution with strangers, patience and skill in crossing danger, and the respect owed to animals, who may be people in another form. Van Deusen's project shows how tellers in each community adapt the episodes to their own landscape and concerns, which is part of what keeps the story alive.