Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory

John Steckley teaches in the Human Studies Program at Humber College in
Toronto. He is the author of Beyond Their Years: Five Native Women's
Stories.

This work is a reprint of Lucien Turner’s early report on the Inuit
and Innu of Labrador, first published by the Smithsonian Institute in
1894. Making significant contributions to the original are
contextualizing statements by Robert Watt, president of the Avataq
Cultural Institute, who in the foreword connects the work to the
subsequent lives of the Inuit of the area; and Stephen Loring of the
Smithsonian Institute, who links the report to the Institute’s early
anthropological research in the North and presents a crucial background
on Turner himself.

Turner collected ethnographic materials and data while stationed at
Fort Chimo (the community of Kuujjuaq today) from 1882 to 1884.
Turner’s training, talent, and intellectual fascination were primarily
those of a field naturalist. Being provided this information by Loring
helps the reader to understand the basic strengths of Turner’s work.
The best developed and most useful features of this book are the
detailed descriptions and well-drawn illustrations of the material
culture of the people, focused especially on their means of
transportation (primarily their boats), clothing, hunting gear and other
tools, artwork, and religious artifacts.

Interesting, and somewhat surprising given his background, is
Turner’s linguistic ability, which enabled him to record names of
different groups in ways that could prove useful to the ethnohistorian.
His weaknesses come from his being almost completely confined to his
base of operations, and his resulting lack of opportunity to observe the
cultures in action. He therefore makes frequent statements of
“usual” and “seldom” that were not derived from or supported by
observation. He also perpetuates some destructive stereotypes of social
relationships among the Inuit—particularly regarding their treatment
of elders—and the roles of women. Concerning the former, Turner is a
significant contributor to the development of the myth that general
Inuit practice was to abandon or otherwise euthanize elders when times
were tough.

Still, for scholars of the North, particularly those interested in the
material culture of the Inuit and Innu of Labrador, this is an
indispensable work.