Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic

Abstract

This book’s main title, Barren Lands, does not reveal its principal content. The subtitle, An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic, comes closer, but still is not very specific. A page-scanning survey disclosed countries are well represented, however, as are Canada, the United States, Germany, and Russia. The Canadian and Russian papers in particular address conflicts involving the dominance and exploitation of indigenous peoples by powerful outsiders. The ethnically diverse Karelian region with its fluid borders received special scrutiny at the conference, in no fewer than ten papers. This is not objectionable in itself, but the information is needlessly repetitive, and some of the papers are essentially commentaries on Soviet and post-Soviet politics. Susan Barr argues persuasively (p. 583–592) for the value of photographs in Arctic history, and with “Early Swedish Military Maps of the Polar Region,” Bjorn Gafvert stresses the importance of maps as primary historical sources. He is the only participant to do so, although cartography from the Middle Ages onwards is crucial to our understanding of “how the North was won.” In this connection, it needs observing that while several contributors illustrate their articles with maps, the publishers did not include a map or maps of the book’s target regions, which some readers may consider a problem. Maps and other illustrations accompanying individual articles are well reproduced, and the book has a number of other attractive features. It is sewn, not glued; there are ample margins on all sides of the medium-glossy pages; and the clean type makes even the footnotes easy to read. Anyone looking for recent information on research concerned with the Far North will find this a stimulating volume within the areas it addresses. How the Russians experienced Lend-Lease in World War II has as little to do with my own field as does an account of a 1923 murder trial at Pond Inlet (Baffin Island) involving two Inuit. But I was so riveted by these and similar excursions into other scholarly worlds that they made up for occasional simpleminded statements about the Norse Greenlanders. You may well find yourself pursuing fishing and agriculture in medieval Iceland even if you sat down to this literary buffet just to find out what the Canadians hope to accomplish in the future.