Hudson Strait marks the turning point in Leon Anawak’s journey back to Nunavut: as the Arctic coast and water pass beneath his aircraft, a geographical crossing becomes a personal threshold. The strait frames his return not as a simple arrival, but as a passage into memories and histories he has tried to leave behind.

Setting and Passage

On the flight north, the cloud cover parts as the plane approaches Hudson Strait, revealing the dark, mountainous tundra, snowfields and ice floes below. Anawak recognizes the crossing as a frontier. In practical terms, the point of no return had already come when he left Montreal; symbolically, it is here, over the water, as he enters the world to which he had sworn never to return.

The route continues toward Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital, at the southeastern end of Baffin Island. After reaching the airport, Anawak boards a small Piper with only six seats. The plane flies west over glacier-carved mountains and snowfields, with Hudson Strait to the left and sunlight shining on Lake Amadjuak to the right. The familiar name of the lake returns to him with the landscape: he and others had sometimes gone there.

A Threshold into Memory

The crossing changes the emotional register of Anawak’s journey. After hours of travel, Hudson Strait’s appearance sweeps away his torpor and brings the return into focus. The place is not presented as a destination in itself so much as the boundary between the life he has been living away from home and the homeland he is about to re-enter.

Beyond the crossing, remembered places begin to draw him into the past. As the Piper flies over the mountains, memories gather with dizzying speed, appearing to him like silhouettes in a snowstorm. The landscape therefore works in two directions: it carries him toward home while opening a past he would rather not revisit.

Historical and Narrative Significance

The history recounted around Anawak’s return gives that threshold a larger weight. His uncle describes Inuit displacement from traditional territory, including government relocation farther north, and the loss of a way of life tied to movement across the land. He also speaks of efforts to revive traditions and of the continuing trauma of that history. These accounts inform the meaning of Anawak’s return, though the novel does not place those historical events specifically at Hudson Strait.

The strait’s significance rests on this meeting of physical route and personal history. It is a crossing that can be seen from an aircraft, but its decisive consequence is inward: Anawak recognizes that he is entering a place he had renounced, and the journey begins to restore memories that distance had not erased.