Saqiyuq

Saqiyuq is the name the Inuit give to a strong wind that suddenly shifts direction; Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women is a vivid portrait of the changing nature of life in the Arctic during the twentieth century. Through their life stories a grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter take us on a remarkable journey in which the cycles of life -- childhood, adolescence, marriage, birthing and child rearing - are presented against the contrasting experiences of three successive generations. Their memories and reflections give us poignant insight into the history of the people of the new territory of Nunavut. Apphia Awa, who was born in 1931, experienced the traditional life on the land while Rhoda Katsak, Apphia's daughter, was part of the transitional generation who were sent to government schools. In contrast to both, Sandra Katsak, Rhoda's daughter, has grown up in the settlement of Pond Inlet among the conveniences and tensions of contemporary northern communities - video games and coffee shops but also drugs and alcohol. During the last years of Apphia's life Rhoda and Sandra began working to reconnect to their traditional culture and learn the art of making traditional skin clothing. Through the storytelling in Saqiyuq, Apphia, Rhoda, and Sandra explore the transformations that have taken place in the lives of the Inuit and chart the struggle of the Inuit to reclaim their traditional practices and integrate them into their lives. Nancy Wachowich became friends with Rhoda Katsak and her family during the early 1990s and was able to record their stories before Apphia's death in 1996. Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women will appeal to everyone interested in the Inuit, the North, family bonds, and a good story.

From sentimental stories about polio to the latest cherub in hospital commercials, sick children tug at the public’s heartstrings. However sick children have not always had adequate medical care or protection. The essays in Children’s Issues in Historical Perspective investigate the identification, prevention, and treatment of childhood diseases from the 1800s onwards, in areas ranging from French-colonial Vietnam to nineteenth-century northern British Columbia, from New Zealand fresh air camps to American health fairs. Themes include: the role of government and/or the private sector in initiating and underwriting child public health programs; the growth of the profession of pediatrics and its views on “proper” mothering techniques; the role of nationalism, as well as ethnic and racial dimensions in child-saving movements; normative behaviour, social control, and the treatment of “deviant” children and adolescents; poverty, wealth, and child health measures; and the development of the modern children’s hospital. This liberally illustrated collection reflects the growing academic interest in all aspects of childhood, especially child health, and originates from health care professionals and scholars across the disciplines. An introduction by the editors places the historical themes in context and offers an overview of the contemporary study of children’s health.

The problems of knowing and representing the other are acute every time we encounter a text as writers or readers. Ethical Encounters engages with the representation of encounters with alterity in the writings of the Canadian author Rudy Wiebe. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy on the ethics of encountering the other, the book argues that Wiebe’s writings show that the self’s knowledge offers an inadequate basis for ethically valid representations of those encounters. In the search for ethical ways of engaging with alterity, Wiebe’s writings offer new ways of employing silence and the presence of the unknowable as means to explore encounters with alterity. Ethical Encounters shows that dividing Wiebe’s work into two sharply distinct categories of ‘Mennonite’ and ‘First Nations’ writings overlooks important connections between the author’s central works and may seriously hinder the interrogation of narrative engagement with alterity. While such human encounters resonate against ethical strategies of representation, the greatest challenge for the ethics of encounter in Wiebe’s texts arises in encounters with the alterity of space. Ethical Encounters engages with both physical and narrative spaces which are not permanently fixed in landscape or geography, or in human perceptions of place, arguing that the most radical expressions of alterity in Wiebe’s writings emerge in encounters with the spaces of the Canadian North. The study raises questions about the relationship between the self and the other as they concern knowing: what does the self know when it claims to know another person or space? How does the narrating self negotiate the seeming collapse of its own knowledge when it encounters others whose stories cannot be known? Ethical Encounters casts new light not just on Wiebe’s writings but also on how we as authors and readers engage with expressions of alterity which refuse to be transformed into familiar, knowable forms. Janne Korkka is post-doctoral researcher and coordinator of the North American Studies programme in the Department of English, University of Turku, Finland. His main research interests lie in the problems of representing space and encountering alterity in Canadian writing. He is co-editor of Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (2008). He teaches Canadian and postcolonial literatures and North American Studies, and publishes mainly on Canadian writing.

This wide-ranging treatment of daily life in the contemporary Inuit communities of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland reveals the very modern ways of being Inuit. Daily Life of the Inuit is the first serious study of contemporary Inuit culture and communities from the post-World War II period to the present. Beginning with an introductory essay surveying Inuit prehistory, geography, and contemporary regional diversity, this exhaustive treatment explores the daily life of the Inuit throughout the North American Arctic—in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Twelve thematic chapters acquaint the reader with the daily life of the contemporary Inuit, examining family, intellectual culture, economy, community, politics, technology, religion, popular culture, art, sports and recreation, health, and international engagement. Each chapter begins with a discussion of the historical and cultural underpinnings of Inuit life in the North American Arctic and describes the issues and events relevant to the contemporary Inuit experience. Leading sources are quoted to provide analysis and perspective on the facts presented.

Bounty and Benevolence draws on a wide range of documentary sources to provide a rich and complex interpretation of the process that led to these historic agreements. The authors explain the changing economic and political realities of western Canada during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and show how the Saskatchewan treaties were shaped by long-standing diplomatic and economic understandings between First Nations and the Hudson's Bay Company. Bounty and Benevolence also illustrates how these same forces created some of the misunderstandings and disputes that arose between the First Nations and government officials regarding the interpretation and implementation of the accords.

Polar Winds traces a century of northern flight from balloonatics to bush pilots and beyond. "They were all gamblers and fortune seekers. They did things on their own — were independent people who wanted to be free to roam. They were good people, but, of course, some were loners or escapists. They all depended strictly on their wits." Joe McBryan, pilot and owner of Yellowknife-based Buffalo Airways, was talking about gold prospectors in the 1940s when he said this, but he could just as easily have been describing the aviators who have flown northern skies for over a hundred years. They were adventurers and pioneers, but also just men and women doing what was required to make a living north of the sixtieth parallel. Polar Winds uses the stories of these pilots and others to explore the greater history of air travel in the North, from the Klondike Gold Rush through to the end of the twentieth century. It encompasses everything from exploration flights to the North Pole in airships to passenger travel in jet liners; flying school buses for residential schools to indigenous pilots performing mercy flights; and from the harrowing crashes to the routine supply runs that make up daily life in the North. Above all, it is a unique history told through the experiences of northerners on the ground and in the sky.

The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions is a landmark collection drawing together the history of the Arctic and Antarctica from the earliest times to the present. Structured as a series of thematic chapters, an international team of scholars offer a range of perspectives from environmental history, the history of science and exploration, cultural history, and the more traditional approaches of political, social, economic, and imperial history. The volume considers the centrality of Indigenous experience and the urgent need to build action in the present on a thorough understanding of the past. Using historical research based on methods ranging from archives and print culture to archaeology and oral histories, these essays provide fresh analyses of the discovery of Antarctica, the disappearance of Sir John Franklin, the fate of the Norse colony in Greenland, the origins of the Antarctic Treaty, and much more. This is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of our planet.