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Confessions of an Igloo Dweller
By James Houston
McClelland & Stewart Toronto, 1995. 320 pp. $30
Review by MICHAEL PEAKE --
Che-Mun Editor
Canoelit Home Page
The name James Houston has floated around the North for decades long after his departure in 1960. The author/artist has done several books on the north, mainly adult and juvenile fiction, derived from his early experiences there. His novel, White Dawn, became a successful motion picture. Now, finally, he tells us his life story in the north and it's a fascinating tale.
Young James Houston took an adventurous jump as a 27-year-old in 1948 when he hopped a medical flight north to Great Whale River on the east side of Hudson Bay. He fell in love with the place, the people and especially the Inuit carving which he had never heard of before. Recently returned from World War II, the young artist wanted to get away from it all and began to look to Ungava.
Houston went on to promote that now-famous Inuit art when he started the first Inuit art co-op which has subsequently grown to become world famous. I recall the first time I heard Houston speak. It was on CBC's Morningside and he was using the word Eskimo, now considered something of a pejorative. He defended it's use saying it was a southern Indian word meaning 'eaters of raw flesh', a completely accurate description. He uses Inuk and Inuit in this book, he says in his forward, bowing to modern convention and noting they were never used in his day.
Houston stayed 12 years in the north. Living as an Inuk, learning the language, wearing the skin clothes and living off the land. He eventually raised a family up there and his wife went on some hair-raising adventures with him.
The book consists of 100 short chapters that take us through those dozen years. It was the beginning of an era of rapid change for the Inuit. When Houston first arrived at Kuujjuarapik (Great Whale River) in 1948 there were only two buildings; the Anglican church and the Hudson's Bay store. In an amusing story he tells how the only two white men living there, the minister and the crusty Scottish Bay man, would not even speak to one another. He also runs into the ghost of the Robert Flaherty and talks to people who knew him. Flaherty's "wee piano" still stood in the trader's house.
Though much of the action Houston describes takes place just four decades ago, it could easily have been 100 years. Travel was by dog sled with sealskin traces. You slept in igloos where possible and ate what the land would give you. Most of the story takes place in Ungava and some on Baffin Island. Houston's easy style and eye of detail make for evocative reading. One recalls those creamy black and white photos of the north and the warm Kodachromes of the era.
James Houston was a critical force at a crucial time in the fast-disappearing traditional life of the Inuit. This book is a valuable document to those of us who retrace the past in the present. We can never recreate what went before but we can, as Houston does, celebrate it.
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