The Northern Copper Inuit: A History by Richard G. Condon (review)

590 The Canadian Historical Review ography, most of it published in the last twenty years! Yet it all demonstrates how much more work needs to be done. Throughout, one is struck again by the centrality of Native issues and narratives. In all but the 'Near Norths,' and a few urban 'islands,' our huge provincial Norths have Aboriginal majorities which, with population explosions, are becoming very large indeed. We have come a long way, but our historiography must take this reality much more seriously. We especially need more published work by Cree, Dene, Metis, Inuit, and Native Pacific scholars. The lack of consistency in scholarly form is mildly disconcerting. Essays on Labrador, Quebec, Manitoba, and Alberta have endnotes (Alberta with 297); the Ontario chapter has massive and classic footnotes , the Saskatchewan one uses mainly internal references, while the BC essay has nineteen endnotes and a fourteen-page formal bibliography . A final thought: On page one of the Introduction, this reviewer is linked to Morris Zaslow and described as 'redoubtable,' for his passion 'in both his life and his writing' for northern Ontario. He perhaps naively takes this comment as a compliment. BRUCE w. HODGINS Trent University The Northern Copper Inuit: A History. RICHARD G. CONDON with fULIA OGINA and the HOLMAN ELDERS. Toronto/Norman: University ofToronto Press/University of Oklahoma Press 1996. Pp. xxii, 216, illus. $45.00 Richard Condon, who made major contributions to the field of Inuit developmental psychology, died in a boating accident off the coast of Siberia in 1995, before this book went to press. The unfinished quality of the work hints that he may not have completed his revisions and editing ofthe text. Although the subtitle promises an Inuit history, half the book, the sections covering the pre-1945 years, is neither history nor Inuit. It is, rather, a summary of white men's activities in the Arctic and their comments about the Inuit, accepted at face value. Historical treatment of'the material - identification of trends and patterns of change over time, and analysis and explanation of events and processes - is almost entirely absent. A brief discussion of evidence and methodology in the preface indicates that the book grew out of an oral history project (xviii, xxi-xxii) and is therefore, by definition, mainly limited to the period of living memory. The 'extensive archival research' referred to on the book jacket is not apparent in the in-text references or in the list of sources. The author consulted the journals oftwo Hudson's Bay Company posts for periods of one year each, and Book Reviews 591 RCMP reports for the years 1931~52. Examination of others, the HBC Read Island journals for 1931-7 for instance, may have yielded additional data about the northern Copper Inuit in a transitional period. Chapter l, covering the period from 3000 BCE to the mid-nineteenth century, is essentially a historiographical summary of arctic archaeology , rather than a narrative of Inuit activities and their roles in the events and processes ofthe period. Historical explanation and analysis are missing, and readers are left with a sense that Paleoeskimos, Dorset, Thule, and historic Inuit were not agents in their own history. Chapter 2, 'Early Contact History in the Holman Region,' is also a chronicle of European activity in the Arctic rather than a history of the indigenous people. It begins by summarizing accounts of the British Admiralty's search for the lost Franklin Expedition in 1850-2. Explorers' comments on the indigenous peoples they encountered are included without explanation or analysis. McClure's story ofthe woman who offered her baby in exchange for a red shawl is a case in point. McClure no doubt recorded the event accurately, but just as clearly he and his officers thoroughly misunderstood what they were seeing. A comment by the author putting the incident into the context of crosscultural misunderstanding would have been appropriate. The stories of white men continue with the activities of the Danish trader Christian 'Charlie' Klengenberg, between 1893 and 1916, and move on to a brief account of Vilhjalmur Stefansson's various expeditions between 1906 and 1918. As in the early part of the chapter, Inuit history is limited to summaries of...