ARCTIC MEMORIES

Description

In 1990, Fred Bruemmer visited an old Inuk friend with whom he had made a 1,200-mile (1900-km) dog team trip thirty years previously. The friend's five-year-old grandson listened, intrigued by their reminiscences of a life that to him was remote and strange. One aspect of living in igloos, for example, puzzled him. "Where did you plug in the TV?" he asked. For over thirty years, Fred Bruemmer has commuted between two worlds: the slowly vanishing world of the traditional Arctic hunter, and his home and family in Montreal. While in the Arctic, he lives with the Inuit, often in remote camps, and sometimes for as much as seven months at a time. He is known affectionately as the man from the south who "eats our food just like an Inuk." In Arctic Memories, Bruemmer fondly recalls in words and photographs his fascinating life among the northernmost people of the world. The book is centred around a series of visits to communities across the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland. They include a community of walrus hunters on Little Diomede Island in Bering Strait, a group of Polar Inuit in northwest Greenland, a fishing camp in Labrador, a seal hunters' camp in Bathurst Inlet, and a community of beluga hunters at the edge of the Mackenzie River estuary. On each visit, Bruemmer talked with members of the community about "the old ways." From the beginning of his life with the Inuit, he has admired their ability to survive in a land that for most of the year is deadly cold and lacking the metal and wood essential to most cultures. Yet the Inuit developed a cold-adapted culture with clothing, weapons, tools, homes and boats that made life in the Far North comfortable and enjoyable. In Arctic Memories, Bruemmer shares this fast disappearing way of life with the reader and contrasts it with the modern "town" life of most of today's Inuit. Arctic Memories is not only a wonderful memoir; it is also an important record of a people's past and present.

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