Customer Reviews

Nunaga: 10 Years Among the Eskimos

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

NUNAGA is a poetic account of the Scotsman Duncan Pryde's ten year stay with the Inuit peoples of the Canadian Arctic. He, like John Muir ninety years earlier, grew to understand them and be one with them, having the right to say "Nunaga," my country. Pryde gives us lush descriptions of the Arctic: "Heather, a blanket of fragrant whiteness spread low over the ground and climbing part way up the hills behind the harbour--bright red, brilliant yellow, gay little Arctic poppies nodding in the breeze, a blue blossom of some sort, the masses of white cotton flowers, fine blossoms smaller than a man's little fingernail, but in great profusion. The Arctic in summer bloom is exceedingly colorful." Of nighttime, Pryde writes, "There are a few more beautiful sights in the world than a full moon shining down on a little camp on a small island beset by shimmering ice floes." But the most significant aspect of the book is its concern for contemporary social problems of the Inuit people brought on by contact with the Europeans. He suggests that instead of welfare and alcoholism as inevitables, we must pressure government for enlightened changes. Schools must be brought to Inuit villages and not Inuit children to schools hundreds of miles away. We must encourage the Inuit's re-involvement with the land by herding of caribou as a meat source for the South, by developing fisheries in the North, by utilizing musk oxen fur by shearing in sheep fashion. Inuits must not be forced to exist as technicians, grease monkies, and department store clerks, but as viable hunters, trappers, fishermen and musk oxen shepherds. Their languages and folkways should be emphasized in Arctic schools (Dick Lamm aside) and not just English and Anglo history. Pryde fell in love with the Arctic and so do we when we read this engaging book.