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DAVID DAMAS, Arctic Migrants/Arctic Villagers: The Transformation of Inuit Settlement in the Central Arctic, Native and Northern Series No. 32. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002, 336 p.
This book is an analysis of the 1950s and 1960s, during which the Inuit in Canada changed from relatively autonomous hunters and trappers moving to and from trading posts, to being a settled and mainly "unemployed" proletariat living in wooden houses in villages serviced by the Canadian federal government. This was the most momentous period of Inuit history since they first arrived to oust the Tunit some 700-800 years before. Damas looks at the 1950s, before concentrated settlements were allowed, through policy changes forced by needs for "relief," housing, education, health care and, in some areas, epidemic dog diseases. He then presents a detailed history of each area in the Northwest Territories, showing the emergence of large settlements by the 1970s.
Based on meticulous examination of the archives of the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Hudson's Bay Company and other historical and ethnographic...