Confessions of an Igloo Dweller

This autobiographical narrative uniquely evokes the old days in the Arctic, when mail came to Baffin Island only once a year, on the icebreaker. In 1948 James Houston, a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian army veteran and art student, got an unexpected plane ride to the distant North. There he felt instantly at home with the smiling, utterly confident native people, who quickly accepted him as their friend. He lived among Inuit from 1948 to 1962, serving for part of that time as the civil administrator for West Baffin Island, an area of 65,000 square miles. His major objective, though, was to encourage the natural abilities of Inuit artists and help them develop an Eskimo cooperative, which provided an essential connection to outlets in the South for their remarkable stone-block prints and stone sculptures.