Baffin Island is the physical and emotional centre of Leon Anawak’s return to Nunavut. Its frozen waterways, rugged shores and remembered places shape a journey that carries him from estrangement toward renewed belonging, while the island’s changing ice makes the Arctic not a static backdrop but a world that must be travelled on its own terms.

Geographic and Natural Setting

Baffin Island occupies the southeastern and southwestern edges of the landscapes described during Leon Anawak’s return. Frobisher Bay cuts into its southeastern tip, where his aircraft descends toward Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut. Later, on the flight north, the view opens across Foxe Basin and then toward the mountainous terrain and shoreline of Baffin Island. Snow lies in deep gorges and valleys; meltwater runs toward frozen lakes; beyond the shore, pack ice covers Eclipse Sound. The route makes the island legible not as a single destination but as a sequence of land, water and ice.

That sequence is also a practical constraint. Travelling from Pond Inlet, Leon Anawak, Ijitsoq Akesuk and Mary-Ann cross the frozen sea by snowmobile and sled, with Baffin Island receding behind them and the peaks of Bylot Island rising across the sound. The ice is not an uninterrupted road: a crack too wide for a sled forces the party to change course, exposing dark water in a blue-tinged chasm. Later, leads and piled pack ice require further detours. The expedition advances through attention to conditions rather than mastery over them.

The island’s seasonal landscape is equally specific. After two hours on the ice, the group turns toward the coast and climbs onto land, passing lichen-covered rocks into snow-free tundra. Crimson saxifrage and cinquefoil flower in waterlogged ground, while the guides point out Thule settlement remains and two plain crosses marking German whalers’ graves. Arctic ground squirrels dart across the plateau and vanish into their burrows. The route holds natural life and traces of human presence together: flowers, animal paths, old settlements and graves occupy the same terrain.

A Landscape of Memory

For Leon Anawak, the island is inseparable from the home he left. Flying across Hudson Strait marks a symbolic threshold: beyond it lies a world he had vowed never to revisit. The plane brings him to Iqaluit, where Inuit artworks and a large figure holding a drum meet him inside the airport. From there he continues by air to Cape Dorset, on Baffin Island’s southwestern extremity. Even before he steps off the plane, the place has become a repository of names and remembered scenes.

Mallikjuaq Island, a small island near Cape Dorset and a nature reserve, brings those memories into focus. Leon Anawak recalls nineteenth-century fox traps, ruins of ancient Thule culture, burial places surrounded by legends, and a lake where he and others once camped. He also remembers stone kayak stands and the affection he felt for the area. These details give the homecoming more than geographic precision: the landscape returns as a layered record of childhood, community and departure.

The reunion with Ijitsoq Akesuk makes that past present. Nineteen years earlier, when Leon Anawak left, Nunavut was still part of the Northwest Territories and had not yet acquired its own name. No one had said farewell to him, including the older man left alone at the airfield. Now Ijitsoq Akesuk approaches him with open arms. The island is therefore not simply the place Leon Anawak abandoned; it is the setting in which an old separation can be met again, even if the years between them cannot be undone.

The Island as a Route into the High Arctic

From Cape Dorset, the journey continues north by turboprop, with Ijitsoq Akesuk arranging a detour over the Great Plain of Koukdjuak. The aircraft crosses into the Arctic Circle and follows the fractured surface of Foxe Basin before the mountains and cliffs appear. Leon Anawak watches icebergs, ivory gulls and two polar bears moving over the ice, then sees Bylot Island’s glaciers and cliffs as the plane approaches Pond Inlet. The flight turns the island and its neighbouring waters into a connected passage through the High Arctic rather than a set of isolated landmarks.

At Pond Inlet, the persistent northern daylight unsettles ordinary measures of time. The plane arrives at nine in the evening, although the sun will barely dip to the horizon before returning to the sky. Leon Anawak has lost his sense of time, but looking at scenes from childhood lifts a weight from his chest. The expedition then leaves the settlement and crosses the frozen ocean; beneath the sled’s runners, fish still swim. A wide break in the ice interrupts the route, and the party must bend around it. The journey’s intimacy with the landscape depends on recognizing its limits.

Narrative Significance

Baffin Island binds together two scales of return. At the personal scale, its remembered sites and the reunion with Ijitsoq Akesuk bring Leon Anawak face to face with the history behind his departure. At the environmental scale, the island’s coast, tundra, wildlife and unstable sea ice demand close attention from everyone travelling across them. His movement from airport and settlement to open ice gives physical form to a changed relation with home: belonging is not restored by arrival alone, but begins through looking, remembering and travelling with the land rather than treating it as empty space.