Kuujjuaq: Memories and Musings

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.

Since the 1930s, life for the people of Kuujjuaq on the Hudson Bay coast
of northern Quebec has brought many changes—some superficial and
others profound.

Dorothy Mesher, the daughter of an Inuk mother and a Norwegian father,
was raised by another “mixed” couple and spent her childhood in this
ethnically mixed community that comprised Hudson’s Bay Company men and
their families. This volume of Mesher’s reminiscences—which were
taped by Ray Woollam and successfully transcribed into print without
losing any of the freshness and personality of the original
conversations—chronicles her childhood in Kuujjuaq during the 1930s
and 1940s, and then moves ahead 40 years to record her comments on the
changes in the community. She focuses her story on domestic details and
personal relationships, providing a rare glimpse into family life.

Today, Mesher works as a translator—and in a sense, this book is
another exercise in translation, explaining the past to the younger
generation and explaining the Inuit to outsiders. This book will prove
useful for northern teachers, social workers, young people, and anyone
else interested in northern community life.