Nunavut is the Arctic homeland to which Leon Anawak returns after years away, and its landscapes and history make that return more than a homecoming. The novel presents it as a place where life is measured by the land’s changing conditions, while family memory carries the consequences of displacement and the persistence of cultural knowledge.

Arctic Setting and Land-Based Life

Anawak’s journey to Nunavut brings him across Hudson Strait, a symbolic threshold into the world he had sworn not to revisit. The flight reveals the tundra, mountains, snowfields, and ice scattered across lakes before reaching Frobisher Bay and Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital. The landscape is not merely a view from the plane: crossing the strait marks Anawak’s return to his birthplace and to a history he has tried to leave behind.

The novel describes going out on the land as a defining Inuit way of life. In summer, people leave settlements to camp in tents on beaches or near the floe edge, fishing and hunting walrus, seal, or narwhal for their own consumption. Clothes, equipment, and hunting tools travel with them by ATV, sledge, or boat. Beyond settled areas, the territory is presented as a vast country people have roamed for thousands of years, where practical knowledge matters more than fixed schedules.

On the land, distances are reckoned in travel time rather than kilometres. A destination fifty kilometres away may be difficult to reach if pack ice or crevasses obstruct the route; plans remain subject to conditions no traveller can control. This account contrasts the regular timetables and measured distances of cities with a way of life organized around the land’s own rhythms. Nomadic experience, the narrative suggests, involved adapting to those rhythms rather than expecting nature to accommodate human plans.

Displacement and Cultural Disruption

Nunavut’s present is inseparable from the history of state-directed relocation described by Ijitsoq Akesuk. During the Cold War, Canadian authorities moved Inuit from their traditional territories in the southern Arctic to Resolute Bay and Grise Fjord, claiming the northern hunting grounds would offer better prospects. The account counters that justification: the new settlements were far from caribou trails and summer breeding grounds, and those relocated were sent without tents, kayaks, canoes, or sleds. Military radar installations had been established on traditional hunting territory, and the Inuit who lived there were treated as an obstacle to those plans.

Akesuk connects that displacement to earlier changes in the region. In the 1920s, white trappers arrived with guns; seal and caribou populations were depleted by both newcomers and Inuit hunters who had exchanged bows and arrows for firearms. The resulting poverty was followed by outbreaks of polio, tuberculosis, measles, and diphtheria. People left the land for settlements, and by the end of the 1950s Inuit communities faced starvation and infectious disease while, Akesuk says, the government did nothing. The account describes not a single rupture but a chain of material and social changes that made land-based life harder to sustain.

Relocation also altered family and community life. Akesuk recalls that he was moved as a young man, as were Anawak’s parents. The public image of Inuit life on an old Canadian two-dollar note, he explains, concealed an expulsion by presenting it as a benign relocation. Numbered dog tags imposed on relocated Inuit made the coercive nature of the policy tangible. For Anawak, this history is personal: the community’s displacement and his father’s experience are part of the inheritance that shaped his distance from Cape Dorset and from his own origins.

Community, Continuity, and Change

Pond Inlet, where Akesuk takes Anawak, is described as comparable in size to Cape Dorset but distinct in its stronger attachment to tradition. The region had been settled for more than four thousand years. Akesuk says some residents still practised shamanism while also identifying as Christians, a detail that presents cultural continuity not as the absence of change but as the coexistence of different traditions.

Akesuk and other Inuit had campaigned for compensation and rights for thirty years and pursued their claims through the courts. Anawak’s father took part in that campaign, but the struggle broke his spirit. Since 1999, Nunavut has had its own government, and Akesuk describes Inuit governing themselves rather than being subject to another forced removal. Yet political self-government has not restored the former nomadic way of life. The community’s political gains and the loss of a way of life remain distinct facts in his account: recognition and greater control cannot return what has disappeared.

The narrative also shows traditions being revived. People are using dog sleds again, and young people are learning to build igloos and kindle fires with flints. At the same time, Inuit are expected to hold regular jobs and take part in industrial society; contemporary life combines those expectations with older practices. Akesuk compares modern movement through online networks to a new kind of nomadism: young people can travel across data highways, speak with friends in other countries, and tell them about Nunavut. The comparison acknowledges adaptation without suggesting that digital mobility replaces the land-based knowledge and freedom lost through relocation.

Anawak’s Return and the Meaning of Home

Anawak arrives in Nunavut after nineteen years without contact with his family. Akesuk had reached out because Anawak ought to know what had happened, but neither man expected them to meet again. Anawak says nothing in Vancouver had been drawing him back; his uncle’s insistence that he come home therefore becomes the immediate cause of a return he had not planned. After arriving in Iqaluit, he travels with Akesuk to Pond Inlet. The uncle’s act of bringing him home is a change in their relationship as well as a change in place: Nunavut becomes a setting in which Anawak can address the family history he had avoided.

His feelings remain complicated. Anawak had associated Cape Dorset with painful memories of his father and had once rejected the community in anger. The return does not erase that history, nor does it resolve the broader trauma Akesuk describes. Instead, their conversation gives Anawak a different account of his father: he had joined the campaign for Inuit rights, even though the struggle damaged him. Akesuk acknowledges continuing hardship, including suicide among Inuit, and argues that the living need time to face a profound collective trauma rather than remain bound entirely to the past.

The novel makes Nunavut central to Anawak’s changing sense of belonging. Its history challenges any simple division between a damaged past and a fully repaired present: traditions are being recovered, political authority has changed, and the effects of relocation endure. The land’s unpredictable rhythms also offer a contrast to the systems of control and measurement that dominate modern life. In returning to Nunavut and entrusting Akesuk with the scientific team’s suspicions about intelligent life in the sea, Anawak breaks his silence with the family member he has left. The place thus connects personal reconciliation with a wider recognition that human life is bound up with environments and histories that cannot be treated as disposable.