Apostle to the Inuit: The Journals and Ethnographic Notes of Edmund James Peck; The Baffin Years, 1894–1905 (review)

This work is a valuable collection of primary sources about Inuit and outsiders in Cumberland Sound at the turn of the twentieth century. The material was written and collected by Anglican missionary Edmund James Peck, who was instrumental in spreading Christianity and syllabic writing to the Inuit of South Baffin Island. He also assembled ethnographic texts at the request of Franz Boas. Most of Peck’s papers are published here for the first time.

This collection is divided into two parts. The first section reproduces Peck’s extant journals from the Blacklead Island mission. Intended to be read by members of the Church Missionary Society, these diaries record Peck’s personal daily activities as well as services, baptisms, reading classes, celebrations, informal interactions, and anecdotes about local people. The second section consists of ethnographic texts: stories, songs, statements of faith, and descriptions of seasonal activities and shamanic practices. Peck’s identified Inuit informants –Eve Nooeyout, Oosotapik, and Qoojessie – authored several of these documents, which appear here in Inuktitut alongside Peck’s English translations, and which offer particulars not found in other ethnographies. The book concludes with Peck’s utterly absorbing compiled descriptions of 347 local tuurngait (helping spirits); this same list was recently published in both Inuktitut and English in a collaborative volume by Nunavut Arctic College. Interspersed throughout both sections of Apostle to the Inuit are photographs of mission life, as well as several drawings – largely portraits and hunting scenes – sketched for Peck by local Inuit.

Every chapter of this book is detailed and compelling. It is, however, important to consider the limitations of the Peck material. At times, these writings say more about Peck’s own outsider status than about how local people imbued their surroundings with joy and meaning. Mission journals were used to promote the society’s work, and Peck wrote them with the knowledge that they would become public documents. Many shamanistic practices were hidden from him, and his informants were mostly limited to female Christian converts. Furthermore, life in Cumberland Sound seemed hard and desolate to Peck, and his sense of God’s presence there was constrained to European conventions of the sublime. In 1897, Peck concluded that the Inuits’ ‘isolated position . . . shut out from their mental vision many of those bright and vivid pictures which appeal so forcibly and touchingly to our minds’ (90). The same could be said of Peck, who, despite learning Inuktitut and precipitating lasting changes in Cumberland Sound, always remained a homesick foreigner in an alien landscape.

The editors of Apostle to the Inuit, all northern anthropologists, ably introduce the texts. They summarize the contents, incorporate information from local elders and Inuktitut sources, fit Peck’s ethnographic documents into the existing literature, and provide basic historical context for late nineteenth-century Cumberland Sound. Information is lacking, however, on how Peck’s work fit within the Church Missionary Society, and how his journals fit within their genre. The papers of Peck’s fellow missionaries are used to fill in gaps in the record, not as a basis of comparison. While the book includes a basic map of Cumberland Sound, many of the places Peck mentions are not on it. As this book is surely a starting point for future studies, I also wished for a more thorough index, and an annotated bibliography of available sources on Peck and the Blacklead Island mission.

These omissions are minor ones. Scholars of this period of mission history, Inuit history, or arctic history should read these texts, which contain plenty of information about religious practices, Inuit reactions to Christianity, gender in Inuit society, the compounded effects of disease and malnutrition, the daily lives of both missionaries and Inuit, and the declining whaling economy. Sections of this compendium – particularly the documents based on Inuit testimony – could be assigned in classes...