The Centre of the World: Robert McGhee's Inter-Connected Arctic

As those who have researched in the far North will know, the Polar Continental Shelf Project (PCSP), from its base in the resettled community of Resolute Bay (Qaussittuq) on Cornwallis Island, provides much of the ground and air support for field work in the Canadian High Arctic. The PCSP control room can be a high-stress and high-stakes place, where Twin Otters and helicopters are deployed across thousands of kilometres of formidable terrain under fickle and often treacherous conditions. One afternoon a few years ago I was at PCSP, checking the weather on Ellesmere Island, waiting to fly out to Alexandra Fiord, and as I waited I couldn't help but overhear the station's chief operator who, in between firing off directions and co-ordinates to far-off pilots and ground crews into his headset-umbilicus, busily moving people and fuel and gear across the Arctic archipelago, was humming the old Janis Joplin tune, "Me and Bobby McGee." Robert McGhee was out there somewhere, he told me, digging through a pile of old bones. It was not a slight but an homage, one that should serve as introduction enough for an eminent Canadian archaeologist, the curator of Arctic Archeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and for his latest book-length work, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (2004). If they are singing about you at PCSP, then this is good enough for me.

The Last Imaginary Place is a book that is truly circumpolar in scope and articulation. A compendium of some 35 years of thinking and travelling and working in the Arctic, it has the feel of a summarizing effort, one that treats the deep patterns of climate and language and the flows of goods and people across the top of the world. Its structure is episodic, with each of 12 chapters treating a specific region and time (the first two more generally than the rest), such that the entire Arctic region is covered. The chapters are only loosely linked into an overall thesis, which slowly emerges as the evidence accumulates, that the Inuit are not a timeless, isolated, primeval people, but are our contemporaries, alive in this same historical time. Along with other northern peoples, asserts McGhee, the Inuit are active participants in globalized flows of resources and economy, and are well prepared and equally willing today to manage their relationships with the modern world, as indeed they always have been: "The small nations of the north have histories as long and as complex as those of more southerly peoples, a fact that archaeologists are continually and surprisingly demonstrating" (McGhee 2004, 41).

To establish a baseline for his argument, McGhee reaches back to the beginnings of Homo erectus in Africa, and moves forward through the warming and cooling events that have impacted human and animal migrations throughout time. He traces Western perceptions of the Arctic in ancient Greek thought, the apocryphal escapades of the Irish monk St. Brendan, the Norse and their societies in Iceland and Greenland, Basque whalers and French fur traders, and the English and the vanity of their follies in a frozen world. Inuit shamanism and the "beauty, security and comfort" (35) of Arctic life for hunting peoples are considered, as are European voyagers such as Thomas Hearne (who wins some respect travelling overland with the Dene) and Martin Frobisher (who, mining for gold on a bleak Arctic island, gains little). Peary and Cook and their race to the pole are taken up, with emphasis on the support of the Inughuit, the local Inuit of northwestern Greenland, the unsung Sherpas of the north. McGhee is clear in his conclusion that the Arctic has largely served as a foil, a blank screen for the West to project its fears of death and imaginings of paradise: "To most southerners," says McGhee, "the Arctic remains what it was...