The People's Land: Eskimos and Whites in the Eastern Arctic

by Hugh Brody

The People's Land is an expression of a particular moment in norhtern history -- the darkness, even, that preceded the light.For some years, Hugh Brody lived and studied among the Inuit, the people fo the Arctic. His book, The People's Land , describes their recent past with sympathy and indignation. He tells how the Whites came as fur traders and missionaries -- and stayed on as administrators, transferring their suburban world incongruously to the north.The predicament of the contemporary Inuit is deeply troubling, embodying as it does -- within a very short history -- the destructive processes and social deformations that colonialism everywhere entails. As the author writes in the Foreword, this book "is a way of expressing my solidarity with the people who have so tirelessly tried to help me understand what is happening to them now and what they fear might happen to them in the future."

Genres: Nonfiction, Indigenous

264 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1975

Reviews

[Bren | Wordwanderlust · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for my thesis and honestly slay he made several points that I havent seen in other common works on the Arctic

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-written. I had little difficulty staying interested in the author's descriptions. I read this in preparation for a trip to the eastern arctic of Canada in 1981. After nearly 2 months with local Inuit, some of the details of Brody's descriptions were either dated or just not true for the region I experienced. However, overall his text described conditions I observed. Good book (as I recall from more than 30 years ago).