The Howling Arctic: The Remarkable People who Made Canada Sovereign in the Farthest North.

A curious mix of stories about the eastern Arctic, with a certain sympathy for the native but as much or more for the officials who had to deal with their ways in establishing Canadian law.

p. 3, apropos the religious murders in the Belchers in the 1940s: Copies of the New Testament in syllabic script had been circulated among the Belcher Islands’ Eskimos for years. Although no Anglican priest had been resident here, some had visited and two of the oldest Anglican Mission stations in the Territories were just across the water at Great Whale and Little Whale River…. It was at Great Whale River that some of the earliest work had been done on the syllabic script of the New Testament by the Reverend E.J. Peck.

p. 44, The Belcher islands had an HBC post and two white men in 1940: Every book in the post had been read several times and all the magazines were in tatters.

p. 68, on feuds between Catholic and Protestant missionaries and the problem they presented to Eskimos: Old native men and women in these Arctic wastes, by nature given to hospitality, friendly and happy, have found themselves threatened with eternal punishment if they entertain a Protestant missionary. New Testaments and Prayer Books have been confiscated and burned by the servants of Rome. [Quoted from Operation Canon by Maurice Flint, 1949]

p. 215, a medical book used to diagnose cancer in a man at Cape Dorset.