In Order to Live Untroubled: Inuit of the Central Arctic, 1550-1940

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.

In spite of Canadian fascination with Inuit culture, there has been
surprisingly little scholarly interest in Inuit history. Historian
Renée Fossett attributes this gap in the literature to a shortage of
documentary source material. In this ambitious study, she proposes to
demonstrate that it is, indeed, possible to reconstruct a history with
only limited traditional archival sources and thereby provide us with a
comprehensive survey of the Inuit of the Central Arctic, defined roughly
as the Keewatin coast of Hudson Bay and its hinterland. The result is an
interesting hybrid of history and anthropology that delivers both more
and less than it promises.

Fossett’s basic argument is that Inuit history is best understood as
the story of human response to changing climate, although she devotes
considerable effort to explaining why this approach does not constitute
geographic determinism. She traces the environmental impact of climate
fluctuation and the Inuit response in adaptive strategies. In one
interesting but somewhat undeveloped chapter, Fossett proposes that
these adaptive strategies could also require human modification of the
environment in both a physical and a metaphysical sense. The main
emphasis of the book, however, lies in what might be loosely called
economic history. Climate change affects the resource base, and the
Inuit response is to find, maintain, and protect useful resources.

Actually only about one-third of the book focuses on the Central
Arctic; the early history in particular takes us to Greenland, Labrador,
and Ungava, and points west. There is even an intriguing examination of
oral history from both sides of the Atlantic about possible 17th-century
Inuit trips to Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The argument is most
effective in the chapters that cover the 19th and early 20th centuries
in the Central Arctic, where the source material (oral and otherwise) is
clearly richer. Using anthropological reports, Hudson’s Bay Company
records, oral tradition, and contemporary social science theory, Fossett
has done a valuable service in providing readers with an entrée into a
complex and fascinating history. Undoubtedly the book will provide
fodder for many university seminar discussions, as much for its
methodology as for its interpretations.