High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey
by Farley Mowat
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Book Summary Information
Author: Farley MowatForeword: Margaret Atwood
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-02-10
ISBN: 1586420615
Number of pages: 350
Publisher: Steerforth
Book Reviews of High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey
Book Review: Not seals, not whales, and not wolves... this time Mowat is an advocate for the "Eskimo"
Summary: 5 Stars
In 1966, writer Farley Mowat was sent east to west to explore the people and places of the Canadian Arctic. In 1993, he put this trip, and his tape recordings of the people he met, into this book.
It is haunting. Sobering. Maddening. Saddening.
It is a face of Canada's Far North that may never be recorded again. Mowat continues being the voice of the voiceless, the recorder of the unrecordable. I still need to read People of the Deer, which apparently has a similar theme.
And Mowat pulls no punches... he picks on missionaries, government workers, and even native people that work to destroy a complicated, self-sustaining society. In addition, he tells the personal stories - sad, endearing, heroic - of many Inuit, in their own words.
A few passages I want to remember:
"The transmutation of beluga into gold was to be Whale Cove's first great industrial achievement" (p. 17).
"He's a social anthropologist from some big university studying our habits. Those guys are everywhere in the north now, asking personal questions and busy taking notes like we was bugs for them to study. They crawl over us worse than lice" (p. 240; comments by Mary Carpenter).
"You want to know what I got out of my twelve years' schooling? I lost my Eskimo language. I lost contact with my parents, with most of my brothers and sisters, with the old people who were my relatives. When I left Aklavik mission school they sent me to Yellowknife. That was even farther from home. After Grade 12 they finally let me go home to Sachs at last. That was the first time since I was five. I didn't know the place. I didn't know what to say or what to do. I didn't know my parents. I couldn't talk Eskimo no better than one of the white missionaries! But you know what was the worst thing of all? I didn't know who I was any more..." (p. 242; comments by Mary Carpenter).
And the story of "Soosie E5-22" (chapters 18-21)... ah, the tragedy!
Who else tells these stories? Farley Mowat is the Lorax... "I speak for the trees."
This book has a short but enthusiastic introduction written by well-known writer Margaret Atwood: "High Latitudes gives us, with passion and insight, a vertical section of time past - the time that preceded our present. The choices that were made then affect our now, just as the choices we make now will determine the future. I'm sure Farley Mowat hopes that politicians today will be smarter than they were then, though he probably isn't betting on it" (p. xi).
Summary of High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey
In High Latitudes Farley Mowat chronicles for the first time a sometimes hazardous journey he took across northern Canada in 1966. He hoped to write a book that would let northern people speak for themselves and that would expose the speciousness of the political idea that the North was ?a bloody great wasteland? with no people in it, and therefore resource developers could exploit it however they chose. For reasons Mowat describes that book did not get written then. But here it is now, with the original conversations recorded by Mowat during that epic journey. In vintage Mowat fashion the legendary writer delivers a sweeping narrative brimming with breathtaking nature writing, suspenseful storytelling, larger-than-life characters, ferocious humor, pitiless rage, iconoclastic insights, and compassionate concern.In her foreword Margaret Atwood writes: ?High Latitudes gives us, with passion and insight, a vertical section of time past ? the time that preceded our present. The choices that were made then affect our now, just as the choices we make now will determine the future. . . . It?s both depressing and cheering to note the changes that have taken place since 1966. On the one hand, more damage and devastation, both natural and social, with global warming as a contributing factor. On the other hand, an increased optimism. . . But as Farley Mowat has always known, and as more and more people have come to agree, it?s a race against time, and time ? not just for the North, but for the planet ? is running out.?
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