High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey [Paperback]

Farley Mowat (Author), Margaret Atwood (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2003

In High Latitudes Farley Mowat chronicles for the first time a sometimes hazardous journey he took across northern Canada in 1966. He hoped to write a book that would let northern people speak for themselves and that would expose the speciousness of the political idea that the North was “a bloody great wasteland” with no people in it, and therefore resource developers could exploit it however they chose. For reasons Mowat describes that book did not get written then. But here it is now, with the original conversations recorded by Mowat during that epic journey. In vintage Mowat fashion the legendary writer delivers a sweeping narrative brimming with breathtaking nature writing, suspenseful storytelling, larger-than-life characters, ferocious humor, pitiless rage, iconoclastic insights, and compassionate concern.
In her foreword Margaret Atwood writes: “High Latitudes gives us, with passion and insight, a vertical section of time past — the time that preceded our present. The choices that were made then affect our now, just as the choices we make now will determine the future. . . . It’s both depressing and cheering to note the changes that have taken place since 1966. On the one hand, more damage and devastation, both natural and social, with global warming as a contributing factor. On the other hand, an increased optimism. . . But as Farley Mowat has always known, and as more and more people have come to agree, it’s a race against time, and time — not just for the North, but for the planet — is running out.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After having written more than 35 books, most of them dealing in some fashion with the vastness of Canada's northern regions, it seems at first implausible that Mowat (Never Cry Wolf; The Farfarers; Walking on the Land; etc.) could have anything left to say on the subject. This splendid effort proves how wrong such an assumption would be. In 1966, Mowat's publisher, Jack McClelland, sent Mowat into northern Canada to research an illustrated volume on the region. This book is the tale of that journey. Hopscotching by creaky plane from one isolated settlement to another, Mowat witnesses the devastation being wrought on the native peoples by encroaching white men, lured by a mirage of the north's supposedly limitless minerals and the raw beauty of the land and its people. A cavalcade of vivid, fiction-worthy characters fills these pages: brusque missionaries, embittered native elders, soldiers drunk with cabin fever, and the tragic ghosts of the natives and early Viking explorers who once traversed these bracingly gorgeous lands. Voiced with a passionate sense of justice, this work is stirring reading from the bard of the Canadian north.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In his books, Mowat championed the Inuit against the encroachments of the kablunait, the whites, and as a result, Canadian officialdom was never his biggest fan. In 1966, it was promoting a development scheme for the Arctic advertised as the "Northern Vision" when the famous gadfly traveled by float plane to see the vision firsthand. Mowat laid in sufficient rum for himself and his flying companions, and this medicinal aid allayed taut nerves in many a harrowing flight, recounted here in gallows humor as the author describes mountains flashing by, weather closing in, or gas running out. Clearly life in the north, even with planes and tawdry prefab housing, is precarious, and Mowat's quest asked whether their introduction as part of the vision did the Inuit any favors. Answers depended upon whom he asked, and Mowat builds his narrative around responses from Hudson's Bay Company managers, Christian missionaries, and when the kablunait were out of earshot, the Inuit themselves. Though a 36-year-old event, Mowat's trip touches on continuing environmental and cultural themes. The same great readership he built from his passion for nature and the Inuit will also be thrilled by the new biography Farley by James King (see review on p.834). Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth; 1 edition (February 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586420615
• ISBN-13: 978-1586420611
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #725,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A tragic topic, an impressive writer, September 7, 2003

By 

C. Bordman "chuckbordman" (Bridgewater, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey (Paperback)

A sad book. High Latitudes focuses on the disintegrating culture of North Canadian Natives. Much of the book is transcription of the natives in their own words and gives excellent insight into their plight. An overriding theme of the book is the devastating effect bureaucratic decisions of government and big business has had on these Inuits (Eskimos) and others.

This wasn't the adventure story I was expecting from Farley Mowat like "People of the Deer" in which he lived with an arctic community. This trip, taken in 1966, he travels by plane. Still none the less an adventure, he keenly describes a variety of northern communities including: Churchill ("a ...collection of mostly wooden structures between taiga and open tundra"), Povungnituk (the place that stinks), Old Crow (where "people catch lots of rats, won't let you go hungry there"), and many others. In typical fashion, Farley Mowat creates a gripping pathos about past cultures and events never to return, and often includes rich historical background for places he explores.

If you're a Farley Mowat fan, I would rate this as important but not as engaging as some of his other books (I've read four others: "People of the Deer", "And No Birds Sang", "Never Cry Wolf", and "The Boat Who Wouldn't Float"). The book ends somewhat abruptly but he saves a great anecdote from the Yukon Territory for the end. A frustrating aspect about the events you read about in this book is that they took place in the sixties. I'd like to know how these settlements he visited have done since then. I'll probably never know.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not seals, not whales, and not wolves... this time Mowat is an advocate for the "Eskimo", January 18, 2010

By 

R Schmidt (Honolulu, HI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey (Paperback)

In 1966, writer Farley Mowat was sent east to west to explore the people and places of the Canadian Arctic. In 1993, he put this trip, and his tape recordings of the people he met, into this book.

It is haunting. Sobering. Maddening. Saddening.

It is a face of Canada's Far North that may never be recorded again. Mowat continues being the voice of the voiceless, the recorder of the unrecordable. I still need to read People of the Deer, which apparently has a similar theme.

And Mowat pulls no punches... he picks on missionaries, government workers, and even native people that work to destroy a complicated, self-sustaining society. In addition, he tells the personal stories - sad, endearing, heroic - of many Inuit, in their own words.

A few passages I want to remember:

"The transmutation of beluga into gold was to be Whale Cove's first great industrial achievement" (p. 17).

"He's a social anthropologist from some big university studying our habits. Those guys are everywhere in the north now, asking personal questions and busy taking notes like we was bugs for them to study. They crawl over us worse than lice" (p. 240; comments by Mary Carpenter).

"You want to know what I got out of my twelve years' schooling? I lost my Eskimo language. I lost contact with my parents, with most of my brothers and sisters, with the old people who were my relatives. When I left Aklavik mission school they sent me to Yellowknife. That was even farther from home. After Grade 12 they finally let me go home to Sachs at last. That was the first time since I was five. I didn't know the place. I didn't know what to say or what to do. I didn't know my parents. I couldn't talk Eskimo no better than one of the white missionaries! But you know what was the worst thing of all? I didn't know who I was any more..." (p. 242; comments by Mary Carpenter).

And the story of "Soosie E5-22" (chapters 18-21)... ah, the tragedy!

Who else tells these stories? Farley Mowat is the Lorax... "I speak for the trees."

This book has a short but enthusiastic introduction written by well-known writer Margaret Atwood: "High Latitudes gives us, with passion and insight, a vertical section of time past - the time that preceded our present. The choices that were made then affect our now, just as the choices we make now will determine the future. I'm sure Farley Mowat hopes that politicians today will be smarter than they were then, though he probably isn't betting on it" (p. xi).