Midnight Sun

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta. He is co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, author of The Salvation Army and
the Public, and editor of “Improved by Cult

What a tangled web is woven when one mixes Native rituals and Christian
religion, modern ideas and old ways, government patronage and personal
greed, private politics and community welfare.

That is what Osgood has done in his first novel. Set mainly in a
fictional northern town called Poniktuk, a small Inuit village just
coming into the present (though still very much influenced by the past),
he presents us with a not altogether pleasant microcosm of Native
lifestyle, of people caught between traditional values and modern
pressures, only vaguely understanding the complex jurisdictions of both
territorial and federal governments (“bread and butter, and jam” to
the bureaucrats), who’d rather be hunting (and making love) than
wrestling with official policies.

Into that picture Osgood introduces a white woman, found nearly dead on
the hillside after surviving a canoeing disaster, whose presence forces
into the open certain underlying tensions in the community. It is, both
as a fictional portrayal of Inuit life and (so one must believe) as a
commentary on the government’s inept handling of their affairs, a
poignant and instructive story.

There are, I would suggest, some extraneous elements (certain
characters, for example) that do not seem to serve the plot very well,
and sometimes the novel reads too much like a disquisition. But on the
whole, it is a very powerful one, deserving of a wide readership.