Living Arctic
Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr; Reprint edition (Aug. 1 1990)
London: Faber & Faber, 1987
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1990.
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0295970022
ISBN-13: 978-0295970028
Living Arctic: Hunters of the Canadian North
In the 1980s campaigns against the fur trade had undermined the economic lives of very large numbers of First Nation and Inuit families across the Canadian north. Sales of sealskins and white fox pelts had long been the one dependable source of money or credit at trading posts. Similarly, Subarctic hunting peoples depended on the trapping of beaver, marten, otter, lynx and other fine-fur species. The fur trade had been the very heart of the colonial project in the north, motivating colonial policy and the movement of Europeans ever farther and deeper into indigenous peoples’ lands. Creating dependence on this trade was a conscious policy of traders - and it worked: everywhere in the north, the trapping, preparation and sale of furs became integral to the life known as “traditional”. The collapse of the value of these furs, therefore, was an economic disaster.
In 1985, a small delegation of First Nation leaders came to London looking for ways in which the campaigners against fur trading could be helped to understand that they were, in effect, urging economic ruin on indigenous peoples. As a result of meeting with this delegation, I suggested that the British Museum might be interested in creating a large exhibition that celebrated and revealed northern cultural and historical realities - including the place of the fur trade. This led to the Museum’s Living Arctic exhibition, which opened in 1987. The British Museum asked me to prepare a form of catalogue to go along with the opening. I proposed that, instead of the usual kind of catalogue, I should put together a series of answers to the questions that those coming the exhibition were likely to find themselves asking. And I suggested, also, that in anticipating questions and providing answers, this be done as much as possible with the voices and images of the people themselves.
Living Arctic was the result. The voices, in the form of multiple quotes from hunters and trappers across the Arctic and Subarctic, were juxtaposed with photographs made by photographers with long-term and intimate relationships to the north. The book owes a huge debt to their work.
