Thou Shalt Do No Murder
Thou Shalt Do No Murder by Kenn Harper Iqaluit, NU: Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2017. ISBN 978-1-879568-49-1 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore For more than thirty years Kenn Harper has been writing historical books and journalism that skilfully combine the archival sources available in southern Canada with the rich oral histories of the Inuit, among whom he has lived for half a century. In doing so he’s shown the journalist’s unerring instinct for finding compelling human stories that are emblematic of the cultural exchange, and often cultural collision, between the two. But he’s also shown the historian’s ability to step back from his immediate subject, seeking its roots in the longer term and the broader view, with an impressively unpartisan sympathy for all the characters, Inuit and European, who fall within his view. In 1986 he first told the story of Minik, the Inuit boy swept along in the wake of Robert Peary’s polar monomania ( Give Me My Father’s Body, republished in a new and much...
