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Book Review
| Muskox Land: Ellesmere Island in the Age of Contact. By Lyle Dick. Calgary, Alta.: University of Calgary Press, 2001. xxv, 615 pp. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes. Paper $34.95.
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| Students of mountain flowers learn about Ellesmere Island early in their studies. One plant, the Star-like Saxifrage (Saxifraga foliolosa) caught my attention twenty-five years ago, and as I studied it atop a mountain in Maine, I dreamed about seeing it someday at its northern limit of its range—on Ellesmere. Dreams linger, and a decade later I was tromping up the Weasel River valley on Baffin Island in search of the Star-like Saxifrage. Near a monument marking the Arctic Circle, we struck up a conversation with two geologists on their way home from Discovery Bay twelve hundred miles to the north. As we parted, one said 0The only thing that stands between you and Ellesmere Island is money and a six-hour flight from Resolute. |
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Lyle Dick's remarkable book is good homework for anyone with northern inclinations. The author reveals the recent history of human culture on this remote landscape in the context of its geography and climate, beginning with the Inughuit culture of northwest Greenland in the nineteenth century. An early chapter describes the natural and human conditions that obtain in this Arctic desert, paying particular attention to oases like Lake Hazen and the string of polynyas along the northeast coast and Smith Sound, which separates Ellesmere from the Thule region of Greenland. Marine mammals, caribou, and musk ox are the foundation sources of energy and raw materials sought by all peoples in the north, followed by birds, fish, and berries. Lyle Dick uses artifacts and archaeological sites to retrace the travels of the Dorset and Thule peoples through these lands. We learn about the ephemeral nature of these northern cultures, of kayak-building skills gained and lost. Populations are so thin and so transient that material culture does not become as embedded as elsewhere on the planet—skills may die with the passing of one hunter. |
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Part I ends with a review of European travel to Ellesmere between 1818 and 1940, setting the stage for Part II: a history of events on Ellesmere Island between 1850 and 1940. The spirited competition between England and the United States to reach the North Pole is juxtaposed with the more subtle motivations of statesmen like Benjamin Disraeli to protect the rights of the British whaling industry in Baffin Bay. Throughout these chapters, the life and culture of the Inuit and Inughuit on this land is not lost. Nevertheless, some of the most compelling pages of this volume treat the early explorations of the British, led by George Nares in 1875–76, and of the Americans, led by Adolphus Greely between 1881–1884. The relative success of the former is contrasted with the grim disaster and near mutiny of the latter. Lyle Dick leaves us with a historical analysis that is neither quick nor judgmental. |
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Historian Lyle Dick has accomplished a monumental feat with Muskox Land, telling a complete and detailed history of this strange northern land. The tug between the Greenland and Baffin cultures and their European and American counterparts in this paradoxical land is the most compelling part of the book. Anyone who wants to understand the people on this land should turn to Muskox Land. There is no more complete cultural history of Ellesmere Island and the High Arctic. |
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If I never make that six-hour flight from Resolute, I will have this wonderful volume to fill in the spaces of a young man's dream. |
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Reviewed by W. Donald Hudson, Jr., President of the Chewonki Foundation in Wiscasset, Maine. When time allows, he follows his academic interest in the ecology and evolution of plants to points north. His sights are still set on Ellesmere Island. |
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