Jonas Allooloo died on Feb. 24 in Ottawa. He was one of four Inuit Anglicans who translated the Bible into Inuktitut.Edna Rabago / Canadian Bible Society/Supplied
Rev. Jonas Allooloo, one of four Inuit Anglicans who embarked on the project of a lifetime – translating the entire Bible into Inuktitut – has died. He was 79.
Their Inuktitut Bible was the first one ever published in Canada by translators whose mother tongue was Inuktitut, rather than by missionaries. The work took 34 years.
The response from the Inuit was tremendous. “Many people have personally thanked me for it,” Canon Allooloo said. “I have even had people come up to me amazed, saying, ‘Now God speaks my language!’”
The 2021 Canadian census reports that 70,545 individuals identify themselves as Inuit, of whom 37,520 self-reported Inuktitut as their mother tongue.
Canon Allooloo died on Feb. 24 in Ottawa, where he had been receiving medical treatment.
Ordained in the mid-1970s, he served faithfully in parish ministry and was dean of St. Jude’s Cathedral in Iqaluit from 2012 until his retirement in 2018.
Then in October 2020, the former cathedral dean found himself homeless in the very community he had long served. Although the situation was eventually rectified, the incident caused a huge embarrassment to the Anglican Church of Canada.
The first five verses of Genesis in Inuktitut.Jared Osborn/Supplied
In December 2020, the Anglican Journal published an article titled “No room in the inn,” detailing how Canon Allooloo became effectively homeless two years after his retirement.
The housing crisis in the North, which includes low vacancy rates and some of the highest rents in Canada, had left Canon Allooloo and his wife, Meena Allooloo, unable to find affordable housing. To cope, the couple moved in with their daughter, a cook who lived in staff housing.
Salaries for clergy in the North are substantially lower than in the rest of Canada, while living expenses are high. Most live in church accommodation while pastoring, but have difficulty finding a place to live after they retire.
“The homes that are allotted [in Iqaluit] are for people who are coming in from the South,” Canon Allooloo told the Anglican Journal in January, 2021. “We, the Inuit, are set aside as second-class citizens.”
Anglicans across the country were shocked to learn of the couple’s plight and donations enabled them to find a one-bedroom apartment. However, they had to keep most of their possessions in storage.
Realizing that Canon Allooloo’s situation was not unique, the Anglican Church Women established the ACW Council of the North Retired Clergy Fund with the Anglican Foundation on Nov. 15, 2022. This fund provides financial support for housing and living expenses to retired non-stipendiary clergy in the Council of the North’s nine dioceses.
Jonas Allooloo was born on Oct. 25, 1946 near Igloolik, an Inuit hamlet in Foxe Basin, Nunavut. His childhood was spent in a camp near Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) on the top of Baffin Island. There his father, a Christian lay leader, led Sunday services out on the land.
The moon sinks toward the western horizon behind a large inukshuk that stands above the town of Igloolik, Nunavut on Nov. 26, 2013.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
Jonas attended a residential high school in Churchill, Man., and later studied at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg. He had Christian friends in the city and they attended church together.
In Winnipeg, he also experienced racism. “Once I got kicked out of the Hudson’s Bay store for being an ‘Indian,’” Canon Allooloo said in an interview with The Living Church, an Anglican magazine, in 2016. “Another time I was coming home from school with my book bag and I stopped at a store. The owner accused me of stealing and searched my bag. I often felt like white people were looking down on me and belittling me. That hurt. But during this time I sensed God was calling me to go back to the North and to minister to my own people.”
From 1972 to 1975, he studied theology and trained for the ministry at the Arthur Turner Training School, the Diocese of the Arctic’s theological college, which was then in Pangnirtung. It was there that his interest in Bible translation emerged.
Like most Indigenous languages in the Americas, Inuktitut did not have a writing system before contact with Europeans.
In Nunavik and most of Nunavut, Inuktitut is typically written in syllabics – a writing system originally created for the Cree in 1840s by James Evans, a missionary in Manitoba. This system was later adapted to Inuktitut and spread by missionaries and Inuit themselves in what is now Nunavut and Nunavik. (Inuktitut also has an orthography based on the Roman alphabet.)
The college was using a very old version of the scriptures. The translation was challenging because it combined Northern Quebec and Eastern Arctic dialects. Whenever he and his fellow Inuk classmate Andrew Atagotaaluk read that old translation in class or during Morning Prayer, they would correct the typos and change some words.
“That old translation … wasn’t perfect, but God still used it to bring people into his church,” Canon Allooloo said. “But how much more impact would a modern translation have if the Inuit could better understand what they read?”
There are distinct dialects in the Western Arctic, the Kivalliq region, South Baffin, North Baffin, and Nunavik (Northern Quebec) while the Inuit in Greenland speak a different dialect entirely.
Jonas Allooloo (left) seen working with other members of the Inuktitut Bible Translation Team: Benjamin Arreak, Andrew Atagotaaluk, and Joshua Arreak at the Canadian Bible Society’s translation office in Kitchener, Ontario, in 2001.Sue Careless/Canadian Bible Society/Supplied
The Lord's Prayer in both Inuktitut and English.Glenn Lowson/The Globe and Mail
Canon Allooloo told this story to illustrate the differences in regional dialects: “When the Inukjuak people were being taken up to the High Arctic [in a forced relocation by the Canadian government during the 1950s], the ship stopped in Pond Inlet, where I was living. One of the elders went down to the ship to greet the Inuit who came from Quebec. When he came back he told everyone, ‘There’s Inuit on that boat, but when they speak, they sound like birds!’ They spoke a Northern Quebec dialect that he had trouble understanding.”
The process of beginning a new translation formally began in 1978, when Bishop John Sperry invited all bilingual clergy in the Diocese of the Arctic to Pangnirtung for a workshop.
Bishop Sperry lived in the Western Arctic, and had been using a New Testament in the Copper dialect. It was a very old translation made by early missionaries to that region. Because of the lack of any modern translation in the North, the bishop felt that the time was ripe for a new translation.
Both Inuit and Qallunaat (white people) attended the workshop. There were 17 participants, including Canon Allooloo and Rev. Atagotaaluk, who by this time had been parish priests for several years. The workshop was led by Dr. Eugene Nida, an Oklahoma linguist who was known as the father of modern Bible translation. Bishop Sperry had given Dr. Nida the job of selecting the team who would translate the Bible into Inuktitut.
“While we were there, we had to translate the Book of Ruth from English into Inuktitut,” said Canon Allooloo. “We then had to show Dr. Nida our translations and explain the reasons we translated it as we did.”
In an interview with the Washington Post, Canon Allooloo recalled Dr. Nida’s message to non-Indigenous translators: “You may have learned the language well … but you’ll never learn to think the way these people do.”
Jonas Allooloo (left) with fellow translator, Bishop Andrew Atagotaaluk.Supplied
Dr. Nida chose Canon Allooloo and Canon Atagotaaluk as well as Rev. Benjamin Arreak, who was made project coordinator. His younger brother Rev. Joshua Arreak joined the team later.
Since all four were busy parish priests, they didn’t have time to do the translation work while they were in their communities. Instead, they got together twice a year for a six-week session. Each session would be held in a different community, so they could be sensitive to the different regional dialects as they translated.
There was something of a revival whenever the Bible translators arrived. “People in the communities were always excited to have us come,” Canon Allooloo recalled. “The week before we arrived, they would announce on the radio that the Bible translators are coming. So when we got there we would preach and lead worship services.”
The team followed a procedure set out by the Canadian Bible Society (CBS). Each priest would translate one book of the Bible, and then the others would critique it. CBS consultants who knew Hebrew and Greek would then check their revised translations.
One huge challenge was how to describe biblical civilizations that existed in scorching deserts in a way that could be comprehended by those living in frozen terrain above the tree line. There are no words in Inuktitut for “goat,” “sheep” or “camel,” so the team borrowed the English words and wrote them phonetically.
Certain biblical concepts like grace were difficult to translate. Eventually they used two Inuktitut words, which roughly translate as “God’s kindness that enables us.”
Thirteen years later, in 1991, the team had completed the New Testament.
Yet almost immediately people began asking them to translate the Old Testament, too. Because their funding was limited, the team had only planned to translate key portions of the Old Testament, but they quickly realized their people wanted the whole thing.
Jonas Allooloo.Supplied
The team found the Old Testament easier to translate than the New because both Jewish and Indigenous traditions stress oral storytelling and history. And the Hebrews were a nomadic people living close to the land as were the Inuit. “We often found that Hebrew thinking was very close to Inuit thinking,” Canon Allooloo said.
The team met only three weeks at a time to translate the Old Testament, but they still met twice a year. In 2002, Andrew Atagotaaluk was elected the diocesan bishop of the Arctic and Benjamin Arreak a suffragan, but they continued nevertheless with the translation work. When he retired in 2010, Bishop Arreak worked full-time on the project.
After 21 years, the team completed the Old Testament.
The enormous $1.7-million task was sponsored jointly by the Anglican Church of Canada and the Canadian Bible Society.
“No book has contributed more to language maintenance and literacy than the Bible,” said Hart Wiens, the CBS’s director of scripture translations, who had been working with the team since 1993.
The Inuktitut Bible was dedicated on June 3, 2012, the same day the new igloo-shaped St. Jude’s Cathedral in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, was consecrated. (The original cathedral built in 1970 had been destroyed by arson in 2005.) It was a day of double rejoicing.
Five thousand copies of the Inuktitut Bible were printed and circulated across the North. A year later the entire Bible became available free online.
Nor did the team rest on their laurels. In 2016 they began revising their translation. Canon Allooloo also worked on a children’s Bible in Inuktitut featuring simplified versions of Bible stories.
“Jonas’s ministry was marked by love for God, his people, and the rich culture of the Arctic,” the Diocese of the Arctic said in an obituary. “He faced challenges with humility, grace, and a hearty laugh and bright smile. His work in obedience to his calling from Almighty God will continue to strengthen generations of parishioners and clergy, and his contributions to Indigenous ministry and biblical translation leave a lasting legacy.”
Jonas Allooloo leaves Meena Nookiguak Alloloo, his wife of nearly 45 years; five of their six children; 13 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren; and the three remaining members of the Inuit translation team. He was predeceased by one of his two sons.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct Jonas Allooloo's death date. He died Feb. 24.
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