For a people isolated not only by geography, social custom and economic development but also by language, the Inuit have had a remarkable amount of patience with the world changing around them. Unlike the other groups of Native Americans, who lashed out in retaliation at the invasive Europeans, the Inuit have always shrugged off the presence of the white men who visit their icelocked worlds. After all, they usually left.But over time, that had to change at the hands of abuse. Melanie McGrath has documented one of the straws that broke the camel’s back. With meticulous research and loving detail on each of the characters, she has composed a human struggle from court documents and vague letters, throwing a little more light on the long road these people have walked to be recognized by the government that grew up beneath them.The story follows a group of Inuit from the Ungava peninsula on the eastern shore of the Hudson Bay from the early 19th century through their relocation to barren Ellesmere Island in 1954 up through the struggle for official state recognition at the end of the century. At the time, few people knew the Inuit from anything except a box-office hit called Nanook of the North, filmed on Ungava by an American named Robert Flaherty, in the years after World War I. Even the Canadian government had few rules and regulations that worked with Inuit customs; it merely worked around them if it needed to involve them at all.By the 1950s, the outside world had found the furs in the wilds around Inuit settlements useful and had set up trading camps on the coasts of the Hudson Bay. Inuit began using guns to hunt instead of the traditional spears and traps, which drastically reduced the animal population to the point of endangerment. Inuit men and women partook in excessive amounts of alcohol and had illegitimate children, breaking families and impoverishing individuals to the point of destroying what was left of the traditional culture. And still there was no social uprising against the presence of the traders.But when the Canadian government decided to move a group of ten families to remote Ellesmere Island to allow them to live a more traditional lifestyle, the outside approach and destruction of ingrained Inuit values became apparent. Families were broken, siblings were separated for hunting convenience and communication was sparse. For a culture whose very roots depended on family bonds and close village community, moving families without any tie to their former lives was completely against nature.McGrath begins strongly but fades into historical blur as she cities incident after incident, date after date, name after name in a rolling list of wrongs done to this people group. In truth, they have been gravely wronged and she has uncovered an incredible story that ended in the formation of the semi-autonomous territory of Nunavut, but she changes tone halfway through from literary fiction to nonfiction journalism. It’s a shame to lose that, because the opening is so human and powerful that it echoes through the rest of the book.McGrath shows a keen eye for detail, but the book could have used an editor. Some tracks are tangential and we get away from the main thrust of the story. Paring down to just the essentials with the beautiful writing added to the most poignant moments would have slimmed the book to its most important, lasting elements.However, with its faults, the book is still thought-provoking. For the Inuit, healthcare, social welfare, economics and education were all systematic failures, breaking family units into pieces. A culture knitted together by family bonds in an inhospitable frozen desert does not last when it must forget them to be accepted by a government that barely applies to it. Perhaps the most important takeaway from the story of the Ungava Inuit, who were unwittingly famous worldwide for Nanook and carvings brought back to major museums, is that we must forsake the most systematic efficiencies when human suffering is at stake. Governments should not do the most efficient thing when it damages the people it was originally meant to serve.
A really good book. It deals with an aspect of Canadian history which I'm sure we all would rather not exist. What I like about the book is that it introduces all the persons involved in the relocation of Inuit in the early 1950s. From the film-maker who fathered one of the men who relocated, to the officials in Ottawa, to the new RCMP officer given the job of finding "volunteers," and of course to those who moved. It shares the extremely mismanaged execution of the move. It shares the physical and emotional ramifications of the move on those who were relocated.
Do You like book The Long Exile (2007)?
This is an excellent book about a terrible topic. McGrath takes the first half of the book to set the scene in Inukjuak in the early 20th century, how the Inuit traditionally lived and how they had adapted to the incursion of the whites. The second section deals with the forced relocation of Inujuak families to the inhospitable and nearly uninhabitable Ellesmere Island in the 1950s, the lies told to the Inuit by the RCMP and the Arctic government, the near starvation conditions they lived in, and the eventual human rights hearing they received in the 1990s. The descriptions of how they were forced to live on Ellesmere Island were terrifying, but McGrath clearly held back, allowing the chapter about the hearing to express the full horror of the abuses. Also throughout the book were moments of terrible irony, such as when Nanook of the North was playing to packed houses and the star was starving to death in a blizzard, or when there was a European exhibit of Inuit art and the most esteemed carver was starving to death on Ellesmere. This book was beautifully, and the sections on living in the Arctic were very informative, but it was too painful to call it a truly enjoyable read.
—Pancha
Beleaguering details slow the pace and bog down the essential story of survival and betrayal. I think the book would have been more successful as a series of short stories, à la Hemingway's Nick stories. The overarching connection of the Flaherty family to the relocation of the Inuit could then have been more clearly established without having to provide intervening history to tie the chronology together. The language was sometimes so unique that whole sentences were undecodable. One such sentence was from the opening chapters: "The tops of what were once hills have been reduced to naked rock but" (ok so far) "but you find none of the horns, corries, U-shaped valleys or fiorded coasts that there are further north..." Horns? Corries? Is she describing ice? Rock? Banks? Bays? Yet at the same time this mysterious language reflects the unique environment of the High Arctic and the complex language of the Inuit. It puts us in their place when lacking the words to describe their land and culture to "Southerners" in English.
—Sarah
I loved this book! Before reading this book I had just learned that the Inuit people are the same as the Eskimo. I felt pretty clueless about these people and also intrigued by them. This book is about the relocation of Inuit families by Canadian law enforcement to the high Artic where the environment is essentially uninhabitable. Four months out of the year, there is complete and utter darkness. This was done to supposedly allow the Inuit to live their traditional lifestyle of living off then land, when fur trading was not providing them with enough income. This a heartbreaking true story that is simply unforgettable!
—Christine
