The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic (Vintage) | 
|  | | | Title: | The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic (Vintage) | | Author: | Melanie Mcgrath | | Publisher: | Vintage | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 08 April, 2008 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 1400032881 / 9781400032884 | | List Price: | $13.95 | | You Save: | $2.79 | | Amazon Price: | $11.16 | |
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Product Description
In 1932, the Canadian government forcibly relocated three dozen Inuit from their flourishing home on the Hudson Bay to the barren, arctic landscape of Ellesmere Island, the most northerly landmass on the planet. Among this group was Josephie Flaherty, the unrecognized, half-Inuit son of filmmaker Robert Flaherty, director of Nanook of the North. In a narrative rich with human drama, Melanie McGrath follows three generations of the Flaherty family—Robert, Josephie, and Josephie's daughters—to bring this extraordinary tale of deception and harsh deprivation to life.
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Customer Reviews:
• A Must Read 13 April, 2008
I just finished this book which I took out of the library new book shelf without any prior knowledge of it. It is a wonderfully told story, both of Robert Flaherty, and of the Inuit. I had not known about Flaherty although I have quite a bit of connection to Upper Michigan where he grew up. The amount of research Ms McGrath has put into this work is very impressive. Now we just need more books like this about other so-called aboriginal peoples.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1D7P6ZWYXQRPB
• High Arctic Horror Story - On Two Levels 05 August, 2007
While all the reviews I have seen praise Melanie McGrath's The Long Exile for being fascinating, well documented, and different, none of them looked at the second level. At bottom, this is the story of how the government of Canada manipulated people through the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). While most of us in the west think of police as enforcing the law, the RCMP was used to implement social and political policy, deploy civil service directives, and herd people to where government departments thought they would more good for the political agenda. That this has never been the subject of investigation is a horror story in and of itself. The RCMP lied to the Inuit, they got them to give up their homes on false pretenses, treated them like dirt on their awful journey, did nothing to help them in the dire straits the RCMP placed them in, lied again about going home, trapped them into a hopeless, miserable life, and of course, denied all of it.
Yes, it's fascinating that the high arctic is actually a desert where the Inuit can't find enough snow to build a winter home. Yes, it's fascinating that this whole fifty year story has a common thread through Robert Flaherty and his Nanook of the North, Yes, it's astonishing that anyone can live in these conditions - and how they do it is both spellbinding and heartrending. But the political aspects are at least as horrifying, especially in seemingly peaceloving, friendly Canada.
This is an excellent book for more reasons than a snowy cover would indicate.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A7HXF84CCR1XD
• A Nightmare In Muted Tones 30 September, 2007
The Long Exile could easily have leant itself to melodrama. It's a harsh story, well told, and definitely worth reading.
The arc of the Inuit history - their millennium-long adaptation to their environment, the cultural ripples caused by the earliest European arrivals, the eventual idealized view of their hard but "simple" and "happy" existence romanticized accidentally by Robert Flaherty in "Nanook of the North", and the Hudson Bay Company's and Canadian government's determination (after two hundred years of trying to make the Inuit dependent upon the HBC) to enforce an about-face and compel the Inuit to live solely off the land - all of that encompasses countless individual tragedies that could have been played out at full volume. But Melanie McGrath chooses a different approach.
Writing with calm and control, she lays out the story of the creator of Nanook. Without passing judgment she describes the child and Inuit mistress he left behind at the end of filming, and how different their daily lives became than the lifestyle memorialized in the film, even as the rest of the world began to take "Nanook" as the absolute Inuit reality. With occasional understated phrases of incredulity, McGrath describes Flaherty's son growing up in an environment where whites representing competing agendas (the fur trade, religion, the government, and the educational and medical establishments) all competed to decide what was best for Inuit peoples, without ever asking the Inuit themselves. And when it would have been possible for her to raise her narrative tone to an indignant screed as she describes the relocation of Inuit to the Arctic Dessert (as far from their native landscape as New York is from Cuba), if anything McGrath becomes even more understated.
The harshness of the landscape, the desperate determination of the Inuit to survive, and the psychological and physical toll unfold with careful pacing and calm demeanor, and are all the more powerful in the telling because of that. In fact, it is only as the book nears its conclusion and you begin to hear individual narratives from some of those actually involved in the forced relocations, that you realize the full stark horror of the experience. That McGrath ends the book on a note of triumph is indicative of her admiration for the Inuit, but also an even stronger testimony to her control in not romanticizing them throughout the book.
Ultimately, this is a human tragedy, and The Long Exile does a fantastic job at boiling this story - which could have been all politics and posturing - down to the intimate, human level. Which leaves us to draw the conclusions ourselves.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AVM48UYDWYE3N
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