Edith Iglauer

Inuit Journey
In April,1999, the Inuit dream of a self-governing territory in the Eastern Arctic - Nunavut (Our Land) - became a reality. In celebration, a new edition of Inuit Journey was published; a first-hand account of the establishment in the early 1960’s of member-owned Inuit co-operatives; a significant part of the record of the Inuit journey to independence.

In this new edition, the account of her journey in 1994, at the age seventy-seven, thirty-three years later, to revisit the Inuit in Kangiqsualujjuaq, the scene of the founding co-operative.

Denison’s Ice Road
John Denison built freight roads across the frozen lakes and portages of the Canadian Arctic, in savage sub-zero weather and blinding whiteouts. He and his crew made their way with a tracked Bombardier scout vehicle, heavy trucks and snow plows over a route that was ninety per cent treacherous lake ice, in sixty-below zero temperatures that rendered brakes useless and caused machine parts to break continuously. Engines never could be turned off, and truck drivers drove with one hand on the door handle, ready to jump.

Fishing With John
From book jacket copy written by William Shawn, late editor of The New Yorker

"It is also the story of John Daly, an impassioned and greatly talented fisherman who was convinced he could “think like a fish”; an amateur philosopher who followed an original set of principles; a mystic who, after forty years of fishing, felt himself to be at one with the sea and the mountains along the British Columbia coast; a scholarly-looking, high-spirited, full-blown eccentric who covered the white walls of his pilothouse with his favorite quotations in bold black letters (“Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke. O.W.Holmes), kept a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam under the mattress of his bunk, listened, between fish, to Mozart on the CBC radio, carried on polite conversations with his stove, and took hundreds of photographs of sunsets at sea, each of which was individually fixed, with place and circumstances in his memory; an outdoorsman who hated and avoided cities and went so far as to have an aversion to architects because they designed buildings; and a man who was known everywhere along the B.C. coast for his integrity and noble character.

Moreover, the book is a love story: an unlikely convergence of two people from different worlds who were able to make a rich and tender life together, and not only to endure each other’s company in alarmingly close quarters but to revel in it...Life aboard the MoreKelp was harsh, primitive, dangerous and exhilarating. All of it was new to Edith Iglauer, and her account is filled with her sense of surprise at what she was witnessing and at what she found herself doing...how she learned to make her way around the slippery deck without falling overboard, how to hang teacups up facing in the same direction so that when the boat rocked they would not collide and break...and everything she observed of what John did - and did with style - when he fished. Such are the minutiae we encounter as we read this lovely book..."