One of the best reads about culture, societies and technology. ( )

People of the Deer – Farley Mowatt
4****

From the Forward - On an evening when the sun hovered above the horizon’s lip, I sat beside a man who was not of my race, and watched a spectacle so overwhelming in its magnitude that I had no words for it.
Below us, on the undulating darkness of the barren plains, a tide of life flowed out of the dim south and engulfed the world, submerged it so that it sank beneath a living sea. The very air was heavy with the breath of life itself. There was a sound of breathing and of moving that was like a rising wind. It was as if the inanimate and brutal crust of rock had been imbued with the essential spark and had risen from its ageless rigidity to claim the rights of life.

Farley Mowatt went into the vast Barren Plains of North central Canada to study the caribou, and the Ihalmiut people who depended on “the deer” for their very existence. He lived among them in the late 1940s, when their tribe had dwindled from several thousand in about 1900 to less than 50 individuals in 1947. Mowatt examines the various factors that led to the demise of The People of the Deer in this fascinating book.

He spends a significant part of the book imparting some of the traditional stories of the Ihalmiut people, and when so doing, uses a completely different style and syntax. I felt as if I were sitting by a campfire, listening to an oral history; I was captivated and intrigued. But I still preferred those section when Mowatt was writing as himself. His writing about the landscape is poetic, and puts me smack dab in the middle of the Barrens with him. For example:

There was an absolute and tangible silence, broken only by the fluid dip of paddles and the gentle mutter of water underneath the bow of the canoe. The lake itself was frozen in the dead, unearthly grip of perfect calm.
Islands rose suddenly before us, like surfacing sea monsters. They appeared soundlessly, lifted clear of the horizon, then floated faintly in the sky as their mirage images dissolved. The shore drew away from us and twisted so that its low, uncertain progress gave us no clear conception of whether it was one mile or ten miles away. Angkuni lost all semblance of reality and of concrete form. Its shores and islands had an amorphous quality which defied the eye and left the mind with no clear memory of what has passed astern of the canoe.

The events described in the book occurred nearly 70 years ago, and I have little idea how things may have changed (or if they have changed at all) for the Ihalmiut and other native peoples. I could not help but think about global warming, the loss of habitat, the expansion of technology, etc. in the 21st century. The time of the People of the Deer must surely be past, and that saddens me. ( )

In the late 1940s, Farley Mowat spent a couple of years in Northern Canada (what would be part of Nunavut now). This recounts his time there, spent with the local Inuit. He tells the story of the people and also explains the habits of the “deer” (caribou).

I like Farley Mowat, but (no surprise) I definitely prefer his books when the focus is on animals. In this book, I really enjoyed the parts about the caribou, but the rest varied – some of it held my interest and other parts didn't. I was impressed with his suggestions to help the people at the end of the book, though (and it's sad to see some things still haven't changed). ( )

After serving in World War II and seeing firsthand how cruel humans can be to each other, Farley Mowat, a Canadian scientist, needed to escape from civilization for a while. He chose to travel to the Barrens, an area is Saskatchewan just south of the Arctic Circle and just east of Hudson Bay. He had heard that there might be an undiscovered Eskimo tribe living in an area that few white men had ever traveled to because it was thought to be unlivable. He found the tribe, the Ihalmiut or People of the Deer, and spent a significant amount of time living with them and learning their language, history, and culture.

Before white traders came to the border of Ihalmiut lands and set up trading posts, the natives were able to survive with no trouble by hunting the huge herds of caribou that passed through the area each spring and fall. The traders, however, could make a lot of money from white fox pelts, so they convinced the Ihalmiut to stop hunting for food and instead to hunt for pelts and trade them for food, guns, and ammunition. It only took a generation under these circumstances for the Ihalmiut to lose the keen caribou hunting skills they had honed for hundreds of years. When the traders abruptly left the area, the Ihalmiut entered a period of slow starvation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were around 2,000 Ihalmiut people living in the Barrens. By the time Mowat arrived in the late 1940s, there were less than 40 people left.

According to Wikipedia (if you want to call that a reliable source), there is some doubt about how much of Mowat's books are fact and how much are fiction. Regardless, I found this to be a fascinating read, although not as good as another of his books, Never Cry Wolf. The biggest problem I had with the book was that it could have been organized better in terms of the order of some of the chapters. It's not very pleasant to read about the demise of an entire race of people, but it's an important subject to address. While Mowat's books are definitely scientific in nature, they're also quite accessible to people who aren't that scientifically-minded. I recommend both this book and Never Cry Wolf. ( )

PEOPLE OF THE DEER, by Farley Mowat.

In Canada, Farley Mowat was something of a revered national treasure for close to sixty years, right up until his death last year. Although he authored forty books or more, here in the U.S. he is probably known mostly for his book NEVER CRY WOLF, which was also adapted into a cinematically beautiful film. I read that book probably thirty years ago and loved it. More recently I had read a couple of his other memoirs, BORN NAKED and AND NO BIRDS SANG, in which he wrote of his childhood in Saskatchewan and then of his wartime service in Italy and Europe. This book, originally published in 1952, has stayed in print in numerous editions ever since. In PEOPLE OF THE DEER, Mowat tells of his sojourn in the Canadian Barrens in 1947 and '48, not long after he returned from the war. He lived during that time with the nearly extinct Eskimo tribe the Ihalmuit, the 'other people.' An inland tribe, their culture differed most markedly from the coastal Inuits in that they depended on caribou - 'the deer' - for almost all of their needs. The intrusion of the white men, who urged them to trap furs to exchange at trading posts, which diverted them from their deer-centered culture, was the beginning of the end. Sickness and famine decimated the Ihalmuit people, and Mowat was there in their last days, to document their customs, language and stories, and bear witness to their tragic extinction. (By the 1950s the Ihalmuits were nearly gone.) The story is, of course, heartbreaking. But it is also a study in the gorgeous kind of writing that made Mowat famous. The photographs and Samuel Bryant's line drawings (in this 2005 reprint from Carroll & Graf Publishers) serve to further enhance Mowat's stirring narrative. A great book. Highly recommended. ( )