Split Tooth

“Something awoke in me, an old memory; an ancient memory, of eating live flesh. It is a true joining of flesh to flesh. My spine straightened. When flesh is eaten live, you glean the spirit with the energy. That is why wild predators are so strong.”

The act of consuming live fish while swimming at the lake later gives the narrator several abilities and awakens in her ancient memories. This passage reflects the cyclical nature of life, where predators hunt prey. It also reflects the cycle of past lives. Reflecting on them, she gains knowledge about the world that aids her several times over the course of the narrative.

“I wonder what the process of letting it in would be. I am not afraid, only curious. I don’t feel like prey. I too am a predator.”

The knowledge that the narrator gained from eating live flesh aids her when she confronts the evil spirit, telling her what to do. Because she has the wisdom of a predator, she is an even match for the powerful spirit, ultimately defeating him alongside her cousin.

“I wasn’t brave enough to look again. I just pretended it wasn’t happening.”

When the narrator experiences sexual abuse and assault, she often describes feeling outside of her body; it is her way of Surviving Trauma and Abuse. When it happens to a girl sleeping in the same room as her, the narrator experiences a similar out-of-body moment. She is unable to acknowledge what is happening or speak up to stop it, and the cycle of trauma and isolation continues.

“I feel deficient in this class. My mother never speaks to me in Inuktitut anymore. Residential schools have beaten the Inuktitut out of this town in the name of progress, in the name of decency. Everyone wanted to move forward.”

The legacy of the residential school system is evident in the narrator’s community, where residential schools robbed people of their language. This cycle of colonial violence continues decades after the last residential schools have closed, creating a knock-on effect for later generations, who are alienated from their own heritage.

“Sometimes the devil comes to impale me, slice me sideways and quarter my loins. These dreams are horrid, but the ones where people get tortured are worse because I can never help them.”

The narrator’s dream foreshadows the end of the book, when she reveals her grandmother’s prediction that she would go to Hell. This foreshadowing suggests that her grandmother may have been right about her fate, though the narrative never says for sure.

“People try to hide from themselves, but I see through people.”

The narrator can see through the divide between Reality and the Spirit World to discern the difference between the facades people project—often, the novel implies, artifacts of colonialism—and their true spirits, which they themselves are unwilling to recognize. This is another of the abilities she gains through her experiences in the spirit world.

“Empathy is for those who can afford it. Empathy is for the privileged.

Empathy is not for Nature.”

The narrator acknowledges that nature, and the spirit world, kills living beings all the time, without remorse or empathy. This foreshadows Savik’s violent nature and the narrator’s unwillingness to condemn him for his actions. Savik’s brutal nature reflects the fact that he is not entirely human but also the child of the Northern Lights, as much an expression of the spirit world as the human one.

“How can Christians shame the process of welcoming spirit into flesh? How can Christians say we are born in sin?”

When colonial settlers brought Christianity to Inuit communities, they forced a worldview onto the Inuit that was rooted in shame, particularly regarding sexuality. The narrator is frustrated by this worldview, considering its damage to her community.

“A glimpse into the living room reveals ten people in the process of driving away their Protectors. This always seems like the goal. Get fucked up enough that the shell of who you are gets cast off, leaving room for who you don’t want to be.”

The narrator observes her family members getting intoxicated and interprets their actions as a desire to become different people. Her family sheds their colonized facades in these moments but do not become their authentic selves, instead making room for evil beings to take over their bodies and turn them into something they are not. They numb the pain of one trauma in exchange for another, temporarily less painful, one.

“What happens before birth and resumes after death—this is more real than the brief spark of life. Our lives just carry the physical burden of carrying energy forward.”

Reality and the spirit world blur into and subvert each other. As the narrator gets closer to the spirit world, she becomes less invested in the quotidian struggles of her everyday life. The spirit world is more vibrant and eternal than the physical one.

“I never understood how foreigners could come and tell us where to die and where to live. Where to be buried and how to breed.”

When European settlers arrived in the Arctic, Inuit life changed forever. Christian colonizers enforced their worldview on the Inuit and told them that their way of life was incorrect, ignoring how these customs developed in response to the harsh environment and thus making survival more difficult. Decolonization means questioning narratives of cultural superiority and making space for diverse ways of life.

“Just because we are the crest of the wave does not mean the ocean does not exist. What has been before will be again. We are reverberations of our Ancestors and songs of our present selves.”

The narrator does not see life as having a beginning and an end, but rather as a cycle that repeats, or reverberates, again and again—an idea here metaphorically likened to waves. Split Tooth is full of cycles: the cycles of trauma and abuse, colonial violence, and life itself. These cycles connect to each other and outlast individual lifetimes.

“Maybe parts of me will become the Old Blood in millennia, the Old Blood we suck out of the earth to burn and destroy the surface, to burn and eviscerate the clouds.”

The narrator imagines her life continuing, in a way, after her death. When her body returns to the earth, it will become part of other plants and animals, and part of the earth that humans extract as oil. Her life cycle will continue after her death, even in the violent cycle of resource extraction and exploitation that threaten life in the Arctic. This merging suggests that even evil and death are not absolutes but rather intertwined with goodness and life—an idea symbolized by the narrator's two children.

“Just like how the Northern Lights mirror each other on each pole, my children are not two, they ARE one.”

The author often describes Savik and Naja as one soul in two bodies. They reflect the dual nature of their father, the Northern Lights, and complicate the distinction between reality and the spirit world, being both humans and supernatural entities. They are also manifestations of the narrator’s opposing desires for violence and healing.

“It’s a relief for people to release their troubles, but troubles must emerge when they are ready to. Forcing out that agony leaves an open wound, it leaves people depleted.”

The narrator contemplates the difficulty of breaking away from trauma for those who are not yet ready to confront their pain. Addressing trauma cannot come from other people; it must come from within a person when the time is right. The word choice implies that trying to force healing merely perpetuates trauma, the image of “depleted” people echoing the resource extraction threatening the Arctic landscape.

“I can feel Savik calling to him people that hold a lot of negativity. He tells the pain to grow. He likes to be held by those he can hurt easily.”

When Savik feeds off other people’s pain, he grows stronger. He forces people to bring their pain to the surface, regardless of whether they are ready to confront it. This does not help people heal from their trauma but rather brings further pain, exacerbating harmful cycles.

“She cleans people. She sees too much. Cruel people are not comfortable with her, because their impoverished way of thinking is denounced by her countenance.”

Unlike her brother, Naja takes people’s pain away and feeds off their healing. She does not allow cruelty or violence to fester; instead, she gives people the healing they need to break free of their cycles of trauma and abuse. However, cruel people do not like to hold her, suggesting that they are not yet ready to heal.

“We cannot always be what we wish to be. I cannot be perfect for my children. These twins have lived many times, intertwining in echoes over and over. Isn’t it time to heal the cycle?”

Just as the narrator is stuck in her cycle, so too are Naja and Savik. Their lives have repeated many times, and the narrator can see that they all repeatedly make the same mistakes. She wants them all to heal the cycle but does yet know how.

“Savik’s power exists because he has been born of my own evil, my own hunger, and our ancestors’ hunger. Nature is not merciful. Neither is he. He just is.”

The narrator knows that Savik only acts according to his nature, which is part “Nature.” She will not hold his behavior against him, even after he kills her uncle. Savik becomes the personification of the narrator’s unhealed trauma as well as generational cycles of trauma.

“I realize only once my spirit is leaving that all those nights my bedroom door got opened taught me how to be numb, to shut off, to go to the Lonely Place. I was forced out of my body. I was forced to pretend I was a shadow. Those nights gave me the pain that has guided me to death.”

After surviving trauma and abuse throughout her life, the narrator has learned how to separate from her body, or dissociate, during sexual abuse. This dissociation was metaphorical death, though it also helped her survive the abuse. Now, dying, she realizes that what once helped her survive was a form of death.

“I leave my body and hitch a ride with the wind. I am not a human now; I am only Lament. The wind is the only song. This is why the Arctic wind screams.”

Separated from her children and ancestors, the narrator merges with the Arctic wind. She now embodies her own anguish and torment, giving the wind the voice of grief and mourning with which she will lament forever.

“I am to spend eternity hurting more than could possibly be comprehended, to work for heaven, for benevolence and love.”

The narrator’s grandmother’s vision of her fate in Hell comes from a dream, but the narrative foreshadows it before this point. The reader never sees the narrator go to Hell, but the repetition of the cycles of trauma and abuse trap her in a perpetual cycle of pain and hurt even as her sacrifice saves millions of others. The narrator finds this idea, couched in the colonialist language of Christianity, repellent, but the novel itself suggests an intimate relationship between suffering and compassion.

“I do not forgive and forget

I Protect and Prevent

Make them eat shame and repent

I forgive me.”

The narrator believes that forgiveness and forgetting keep people trapped in repeating cycles of violence and abuse. Healing is impossible without remembering pain. She resolves instead to focus her energy on preventing abuse, protecting herself and others. She finds forgiveness for herself alone.