Abstract
Emilie Cameron’s Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic is a beautifully written, critical account of how stories shape our relations to people, things and places – understanding stories as ‘relational and material ordering practices, as practices that are not merely representative but also constitutive of our relations with one another and with the land’ (p. 12). It is an evocative contribution to a growing field of relational and affective geographies set in dialogue with geographies of colonialism and power; it is itself a story of the making of realities both within and beyond the Canadian North.
The specific story around which the book centres is the 18th-century ‘Bloody Falls massacre’ in the Canadian Arctic: an account by Samuel Hearne of how First Nation Denes travelling in his company slaughtered a group of Inuit during his imperial quest for copper. While the story’s accuracy is contested, Cameron is instead interested in how it matters – How it has come to shape ideas of race, indigeneity, imperial violence and historical truth, and how it still morphs and resurfaces in new guises in non-Inuit relations with the North.
Cameron skilfully traces a single story from the past through materials and relations into the present. Remaining anchored in Hearne’s tale, she weaves in alternative stories, and perhaps most importantly, the story of her own non-Indigenous encounter with truths that are neither hers to understand nor re-tell in writing. It is a humble acceptance of not knowing and a hopeful adoption of the task of learning to learn in order to ‘relate differently’ (p. 191). Cameron draws on poststructuralism and Foucauldian insights to show that stories told or untold, performed actions or inactions by Inuit themselves illustrate counter-conduct that does not fit a transcendent storyline of good and evil. Instead, Cameron calls for attention to the complexities of human relations – relations that are never static, right or wrong, but forever becoming through the re-telling of stories.
As is made clear from the outset, this is a book written both by and for Qablunaat: non-Inuit, non-Indigenous, non-Northern people, about ‘how we relate to the North and Inuit, and the consequences of these relations’ (p. xiv). However, the multifaceted, fragmented and individual ways in which stories are received are left in the background of broader connections of North and South, which is the one aspect that may have been developed further if space had allowed.
Overall, Cameron’s book is a thoroughly enjoyable read and highly recommendable for those interested in colonialism, power, resistance and how geographical imaginations construct territories and ‘truths’. Placed between the theoretical and the intimately personal, it contributes to both academic and popular debates about the Arctic. Our relationships with ourselves, each other and places are never completed; even after closing Far Off Metal River, what remains is the echo of this story of a story, guiding future self-identified Qablunaat towards the challenging task of knowing and relating differently.