McGill-Queen's University Press Hummocks: Journeys and Inquiries Among the Canadian Inuit

"At the margins of the floes, where their ragged edges have come into grinding contact, the ice is piled up into ridges. These are the hummocks," writes Jean Malaurie. More than simple knolls, the jutting ice that emerges over time is, for Jean Malaurie, a metaphor for the process of memory and recollection and Hummocks, the first English translation of the renowned anthropologist's memoir of his expeditions to the Canadian Arctic, is a detailed evocation of Malaurie's travels among the Inuit. Malaurie's exploration of the North spanned a half-century, with voyages to Greenland, the Arctic, Alaska, and Siberia. Hummocks focuses on his expeditions to Back River, Gjoa Haven, Rankin Inlet, and Kujjuaq in northern Quebec during the early 1950s and 1960s, a time when the North was still relatively isolated and the Inuit way of life was at a crucial crossroads. While recounting the many challenges and faced by the young anthropologist, Hummocks explores ideas of Inuit and "hyperborean" civilization, the quest for Inuit independence and self-government, and the "Inuitization" of Christian belief. Haunted by the North and its people, Hummocks is also a dialogue with the great explorers of the North - Amundsen, the Franklin expedition, Ross, and particularly Rasmussen.