Around the world, indigenous cultures are disappearing at an ever-increasing rate, and projects for recording—and sharing—their oral traditions carry a sense of urgency. When storyteller Kira Van Deusen and documentary filmmaker John Houston travelled to 10 communities in the Canadian Arctic in the fall of 2004 to hear different versions of the Inuit epic of the hero Kiviuq, the people who could still tell it were already old. With their deaths, a tale of immense richness would be forever lost.

“The oldest was 104 at the time we recorded her,” says Van Deusen, interviewed in East Vancouver. “They’d heard this story when they were children and in some cases hadn’t heard or told it since. They had amazing memory banks.”¦Some of them would go on for as long as seven hours—with an interpreter and lots of cups of tea involved.”

The tale of Kiviuq, a hunter with extraordinary powers, works on many levels for listeners. “You can learn about being a good hunter, relationships with animals, and many aspects of life in the Arctic, and on a deep spiritual plane you can learn about the shamanic world, because this guy was a great shaman. But he made mistakes, too—that’s one of the things I find so interesting about it and different from other hero tales. He’s a very human figure. And he has several wives, both human and from the animal kingdom. He marries an arctic fox–woman and a Canada goose–woman.”

Houston launched his film Kiviuq in Calgary on January 23. Van Deusen will present the entire Kiviuq story cycle at the Vancouver Storytelling Festival, which runs next Thursday till Sunday (February 1 to 4) at the VanDusen Botanical Garden. She performs on the final day of the event, from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. For a non-Inuit audience Van Deusen says she’ll need to provide some cultural context, and though as a result there will be some small additions to the epic, she won’t cut out enriching, if sometimes baffling, details—the kind of details she could only have acquired through her travels to the Far North.

Take the significance of sandpipers: “When Kiviuq is lost in a storm at sea and some of these birds appear to guide him, that could stand by itself, but it’s so much richer if you know that when Kiviuq was born, his grandmother used the skin of a sandpiper to wipe the baby, and whispered in his ear, ”˜You will always be able to come home, no matter what the obstacles.’ Later, the padding at the tip of Kiviuq’s kayak is made from sandpiper skins, so the bird is his helping spirit that he can call on.”

Such details will weave themselves into the fabric of Van Deusen’s Inuit epic and the tales of other artists from the rich international roster at this year’s 15th annual festival.