Split Tooth

Split Tooth is a genre-bending novel by Canadian Inuk throat singer, artist, and writer Tanya Tagaq. First published in 2018, Split Tooth tells the story of an unnamed teenage girl growing up in the Canadian territory of Nunavut in the 1970s and 1980s. Parts of the work are memoir, while other parts are fiction, poetry, and Inuit folklore. Split Tooth is a magical coming-of-age story that describes the challenges of life in the Arctic and the impact of colonialism on Inuit communities. It won the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for English Prose and has received widespread critical acclaim. Tagaq dedicated Split Tooth to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and survivors of residential schools.

This guide uses the 2018 Viking e-book edition of the novel.

Content Warning: This guide includes discussions of sexual abuse of children, rape, infant death, substance abuse, self-harm, domestic violence, anti-Indigenous racism, colonialism, suicide, and anti-LGBTQ+ bias.

Plot Summary

This book has an unusual format. Instead of numbered chapters, the book features prose sections, poems, abstract dreamlike sequences, and illustrations. Some sections have names; others do not.

Split Tooth begins in 1975, when the narrator, an unnamed Inuk girl, is a child in a small Arctic town. She hides, along with her friends, from drunken adults at a wild party. The narrator’s teacher and the boys in her fifth-grade class abuse her. In the summer, when the sun is up for 24 hours a day, she and her friends play dangerous games to entertain themselves. Multiple times, an unnamed adult man (or possibly several) sexually assaults her in her home. When she is alone, the narrator finds lemmings on the tundra and brings them home in secret to play with them. When the narrator is around 11, she and her friends are spending time together unsupervised. The narrator feels a dangerous spirit enter the room. Nobody else notices except her cousin. Together, they combine their strength and leave their bodies, traveling to the spirit world. The evil spirit tries to take over the narrator’s body, but she shoves him aside at the last second. 

In 1978, the narrator is in the eighth grade and struggles to learn Innuinaktun, an Inuit language. She has a crush on Best Boy, the boyfriend of a popular girl, Alpha, attracting Alpha’s ire. The narrator starts inhaling butane to get high. One night, someone enters her room and sexually assaults her. In the next chapter, a similar incident occurs when the narrator, who is sharing a room with an older girl, witnesses the older girl being assaulted in the next bed. The narrator pretends not to know what is happening.

One day, the narrator ventures out onto the frozen sea ice to avoid a raucous party at her home. The Northern Lights descend and communicate with her. The narrator has a gruesome dream in which someone is endlessly tortured. In another dream, she meets an anthropomorphic fox who is under a centuries-long curse for his greed. She lifts the curse by performing oral sex on him.

The narrator reflects on the changes her mother has experienced. When she was young, before Christian missionaries impacted the community, she lived a traditional Inuit lifestyle. The narrator witnesses domestic violence at a friend’s uncle’s house.

The book skips forward to 1982, when the narrator returns to her hometown from residential school after a suicide attempt. She is now 17. At a party, she encounters the teacher who sexually abused her and pushes him down the stairs. She recounts the story of Sedna, an Inuit sea goddess whose father threw her into the ocean when she got pregnant, resulting in her becoming the mother of all sea creatures. In a dream, the narrator meets and becomes a polar bear.

The narrator has a brief romance with another girl, and she and Best Boy kiss. When Alpha finds out about the kiss, she and her friends beat the narrator up after school. The narrator does not tell her parents but goes outside and lies down under the Northern Lights. This time, the lights descend from the sky and enter her body in a terrifying magical experience. When the lights recede, 12 hours have passed, and the narrator is naked and bleeding on the ice. She soon realizes that the Northern Lights have impregnated her but tells no one. In the weeks that follow, the narrator gains new powers. She heals quickly from any injury, gains spiritual insight, becomes more confident, and her eyesight improves. Best Boy falls in love with her, but she now sees him as a friend. When Alpha and her friends try to target the narrator, she fights back, and they leave her alone.

The narrator knows she is pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl, with whom she can communicate in utero. As her pregnancy becomes more obvious, she befriends Best Boy’s grandmother, Helen, who understands the spirit world. The narrator’s parents struggle to accept her pregnancy. In her womb, the twins sometimes conjoin and then separate again. The narrator prepares to give birth in an igloo with only Helen for company. To make the birth easier, the babies become worm-like creatures before morphing into ordinary newborns. The narrator names the boy, who has the power to cause illness, Savik, and the girl, who has the power to heal, Naja. Naja is not as strong as her brother. As the babies grow, they still sometimes fuse into each other. The narrator keeps her babies’ powers and origin a secret, letting everyone believe that Best Boy is their father. Savik weakens and eventually kills the narrator’s uncle with his power.

When Savik starts to weaken the narrator’s father, the narrator moves in with Helen and Best Boy. However, Savik goes after Best Boy, and she realizes that he will eventually kill everyone. Though she loves him deeply, she cannot let him continue. She brings them onto the ice and tries to strangle Savik but fails when Savik turns into a seal and slips into the sea. During the struggle, Naja freezes to death. The narrator puts Naja’s body into the ocean, where she and Savik join bodies as a seal. The seal swims away, leaving the narrator distraught. She dies by suicide on the ice but cannot enter the spirit world. The narrator recalls that her grandmother once told her that her destiny was to stop the souls of the damned from being destroyed by Hell. The prediction horrified her because it was antithetical to her own beliefs. The story ends with two poems that leave the fate of the narrator’s spirit ambiguous.