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334 THE FAR NORTH V. THE FAR NORTH I. T. Wilson The books included in this section properly belong to the preceding one, but since the Canadian northland is proving a more popular subject as its importance to the country's economy and security is more clearly realized, it was thought better on this occasion to treat them as a separate group. The following reviews have been written jointly by Professor and Mrs. J. T. Wilson. Ayorama (Oxford University Press, xii, 316 pp., $4.00), by Father Raymond Coccola, S.J., and Paul King, is a remarkable book. Travellers ' tales have occupied a prominent place in literature since classical times. But as the sophistication of the reading public increased and the last unicorn was dismissed as a myth and the Valley of the Two-Headed Men lost forever, the personality of the traveller has come to occupy an increasingly large place in the literature that deals with far-away places. The National Geographic has succeeded in making even the most remote of outposts pretty old hat, so that travellers of this day are more and more inclined to dwell on their reactions to a strange environment rather than on the environmentitself. Ayorama is remarkable in that Father Coccola, with his collaborator Paul King, has succeeded in painting a portrait of the Eskimos of the central Canadian Arctic, based on the twelve years this Corsican priest spent with the tribes around Bathurst Inlet, without ever setting himself between the reader and the People Beyond. Ouly occasionally does he speak of his own cold and misery and always it is to give emphasis to some characteristic of these Eskimos. He has taken his title from the Eskimo word meaning "It can't be helped," which he believes to be the sum of their philosophy: their cheerful acceptance of hardship, their patience, their indifference to suffering and death. Apparently Father Coccola spent these years in the Arctic rather to gather facts about the Eskimos than to attempt to christianize them. He would live with one tribe for a year or two, and then move on to another, hunting with them and travelling with them and ouly rarely returning to his headquarters, the Roman Catholic Mission at Burnside Harbour. As a priest he was preoccupied with their spiritual life but he admits he could learn little; whether because they did not care to discu~s their beliefs, or whether because they found abstract thought so difficult that they were incapable of expressing them, he could not decide. However, he does say that he thinks it will be very difficult for an Eskimo, even though he accepts Christianity, to give up. his belief in malign spirits. He remarks wryly that it is comparatively 335 simple to believe in a loving God on the warm shores of the Mediterranean , and also very simple indeed to believe in a horde of evil spirits in the howling wind and cold of the central Arctic. Ayorama is a horrifying book in many respects but a very fine one. The Oxford University Press has paid it the respect that is its due and has mounted it very handsomely. It is illustrated with line drawings by James Houston. It is most interesting to read Land of the Long Day by Doug Wilkinson (Clarke Irwin, viii, 261 pp., $5.00) in conjunction with Ayoraina; in the former the same scene is viewed 'from a different angle. Both Father Coccola and Doug Wilkinson lived the life of an Eskimo in order to better understand the Eskimo, but the goal each was trying to attain through this increased understanding was not the same. One gathers, in reading Ayorama, that Father Coccola was looking for a way to bring to the Eskimo a stronger spiritual armament against the hardships of his life than his present patient fatalism; Mr. Wilkinson on the other hand was looking for some method of protecting the Eskimo and his culture from the disruptive effects of the present rapid expansion in the North. There are other differences. Father Coccola we~t to 'the Arctic from a sense of duty, Mr. Wilkinson because he liked it. As a consequence the more primitive...

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