The Restless Nomad

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

This charming book is the author’s second autobiographical work. In
the first, My Name Is Masak, she described her life as a young Inuit
woman at boarding school in Aklavik. This second book picks up her story
as her father comes to collect her from school and introduce her to her
stepmother and new family. We see the world through her eyes as she
grows from awkward teenager to young wife and mother; we follow her
through the break-up of her marriage and then through the adventures she
experienced on her first trip to southern Canada.

For the Mackenzie Delta Inuit, the 1940s and 1950s were decades of
rapid change. The author successfully communicates the dilemmas and
anxieties faced by her generation as it tried to come to terms with
those changes, but she never portrays herself as a victim. The joy and
delight that she takes in an appreciation of the beauties of the land
around her are infectious. The reader is drawn into her pleasant world
of keeping house, trapping, managing unruly dogs, dancing and
game-playing in town, and listening to the all-important radio station.
But she also takes time to gently criticize government social-welfare
programs and outsiders’ ideas of suitable education for northern
children. She celebrates changes like the arrival of Christianity and
the end to arranged marriages, but she also is very clear that cultural
values such as willingness to share with and take care of others are
central to her sense of who she is.

The book is suffused with a refreshing openness and honesty. The
author’s delightful sense of humor also shines through, particularly
when she describes her encounters with novelty—everything from a
grasshopper to a sale in the ladies’-wear department at the Edmonton
Hudson’s Bay store. For those who would like to read an insider’s
perspective on a period of crucial change in the Canadian North and
those who would just like to read a good story, this book is recommended
reading.