Laugrand, Frédéric, Jarich Oosten and François Trudel (eds), 2006 Apostle to the Inuit: the journals and ethnographic notes of Edmund James Peck, the Baffin years, 1894-1905, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 498 pages.

The Reverend Edmund James Peck was an Anglican priest with the British Church Missionary Society. He was sent to work as the first Christian missionary in the South Baffin region in 1894. The journals and ethnographic notes of Reverend Peck, Uqammaq by his Inuit name, make the reader witness a period of dynamic and drastic changes in Inuit religious, social, and economic ways of life—developments that reach far into today’s southern Baffin Island Inuit community life and the place of Christianity therein (e.g., Stuckenberger 2005). Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Inuit of Cumberland Sound came into increasingly intensive and continual contact with (usually) men of European ancestry, such as whalers, traders, and missionaries. These newcomers provided access to the market economy and income to participate in it, new materials, health care, and education as well as catastrophic epidemics, alcohol and other destructive elements. These agents presented conflicting images of western life to the Inuit. Peck, for example, repeatedly mentioned his annoyance with the morals of the whalers who tempted Inuit women into sexual relationships. North American and European archives contain rich holdings of manuscripts that emanated from Baffin Island between the 18th and early 20th centuries. Materials, such as whaling logbooks, private journals, travel accounts, and early ethnographic notes and reports, notably those by Franz Boas who travelled the area in the 1880s, reflect various European approaches to the northern lands. Few of these documents are published and easily accessible to the public. Boas’ diaries are one of the notable exceptions (Müller-Wille 1998). The archival and published resources provide a solid resource on Inuit culture during the period of early and later intensified contact that need to be read critically and with reference to their historic and cultural settings. These materials also provide insights into the complexities of the relationships between Inuit and the outsiders. The publication of the journals and the rich ethnographic notes of Peck is a most important addition to the published, contextualized, and annotated manuscript material available for that region and time. The documents cover Peck’s years in southern Baffin Island from 1894 until 1905. Peck started his mission work in the eastern Hudson Bay region in 1876 and came to Uumanarjuaq/Blacklead Island, Cumberland Sound in 1894. Uumanarjuaq became the centre of the Anglican mission on Baffin Island and the Kivalliq. An important part of his “Native Church Policy” was to become fluent in the local language to communicate the Gospel in the vernacular, spoken and written, and to educate selected Inuit to become catechists. He introduced literacy in a syllabic writing system developed by the Anglican missionaries to deal economically with the often long phrases typical for agglutinative languages, such as Inuktitut. Within the next 11 years, Peck, fellow missionaries, and more importantly Inuit catechists themselves spread the Gospel by travelling and by distributing the legendary “red books” containing biblical texts in Inuktitut. Peck’s competence in Inuktitut, his long-term presence in the area, and success in making converts that were particularly knowledgeable in the shamanic beliefs and practices gradually gave him privileged access to data on many aspects of Inuit daily life and on shamanic beliefs and practices. Peck noted down his observations and the stories told to him in journals and specifically in his ethnographic notes. The journals were intended to be read by the Church Missionary Society and some to be used for publication. He prepared the ethnographic notes with Inuit working with him. These were mostly in response to a request by Franz Boas to supply him with Inuit stories, translations of stories that Boas had collected, …