Eric Jamieson tracks The Longest Patrol, an 81-day, 2,800-kilometre dogsled trip in the eastern Arctic designed to strengthen Canada’s claim to the Arctic islands
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Arctic Patrol: Canada’s Fight for Arctic Sovereignty
Eric Jamieson | Caitlin Press
$28 | 276pp.
Jamieson has clearly turned nearly every page — within the constraints of COVID lockdowns, which made him depend on archival material he could access online, particularly Documents on Canadian External Relations: The Arctic, 1874-1949, compiled by Carleton University’s Janice Cavell. He has turned this archival treasure trove and the diary of one of the RCMP members involved into a fascinating story about the young officers and their Inuit companions.
This story of Arctic adventure is not the only one jostling for attention in Jamieson’s book, and to his credit the author makes room for other important information he uncovered in his research. Perhaps most troubling is the way that the Canadian explorers used the Inuit’s cold-weather expertise and knowledge of the terrain to advance agendas created far to the south, and eventually moved populations of Inuit around the Arctic to support Canadian sovereignty claims. On a related front, Jamieson discovered that one of the Mounties he studied, Taggart, fathered a child with an Inuk woman, Anna Atagutiaq, and abandoned them both when he was reassigned. While a poignant reunion between Taggart’s abandoned daughter, Elisapee, and his family in the south makes for a moving coda to the main action of the book, this instance of the colonialism and sexual predation that too often accompanied settler presence in the Arctic, as it did across the Americas, is disturbing.
Highly recommended.