Apostle to the Inuit: The Journals and Ethnographic Notes of Edmund James Peck

Jonathan Anuik is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and
president of the HGSC at the University of Saskatchewan.

When scholars publish the primary documents they use in their works,
they enable readers to access the resources they used. The editors,
anthropologists Frédéric Laugrand, Jarich Oosten, and Franзois
Trudel, lodge their primary resources—the journals and ethnographies
of the Anglican missionary Edmund James Peck—in the contemporary
scholastic terrain composed of Western ethnographers and Indigenous
peoples working to restore Indigenous spirituality and to transform
contemporary education, health care, and justice.

The personal papers of Peck, the “Apostle to the Inuit” and founder
of the Anglican missions on Baffin Island in contemporary Nunavut,
present “a good overview of the gradual progress of the mission and
the everyday life of the missionaries.” In tandem with the memories of
the Nunavut Elders and old people, they illuminate the tales of contact,
settlement, and competing spiritualities. Peck’s journals and
ethnographies set up turn-of-the-20th-century Arctic society with its
whaling stations, love affairs, alcohol consumption, Inuit spiritual
traditions, and growing Anglican Church presence. Peck’s memories, his
studies, and the voices of the Inuit recorded in his papers and in the
stories of living Elders and old people broaden our understanding of
religious and medicinal change at a time of non-Aboriginal settlement
and exploration.

Peck’s interest in Inuit shamanism resulted in the writing of several
texts full of extensive description of traditions used to heal people.
The editors that believe their collection will contribute to the history
of spirituality and religion in the Far North. Apostle to the Inuit will
also provide novice and senior scholars with a social and medical
history of the region.