Critical forces of culture and nature collide in this comprehensive history of Ellesmere Island in the age of contact. Surveying the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lyle Dick presents an impressive treatment of European-Inuit contact in the High Arctic (the area of what is now the Quttinirpaaq National Park) while considering the roles of the natural environment and cultures as factors in human history. As he charts the dynamic interplay between change and continuity in this forbidden land, Dick unravels the complexities of cultural exchange and human relationships to the Arctic landscape.

Muskox Land provides a meticulously researched and richly illustrated treatment of Canada's High Arctic as it interweaves insights from historiography, Native studies, ecology, anthropology, and polar exploration. Winner of the Harold Adams Innis Prize for Best English Language Book in the Social Sciences, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Lyle Dick is the West Coast Historian with Parks Canada in Vancouver, B.C. He has authored sixty-five publications in the fields of Arctic, Canadian, and American history and historiography. His Muskox Land: Ellesmere Island in the Age of Contact was awarded the Harold Adams Innis Prize by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2003 for the best English-language book in the social sciences.

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• Winner, Harold Adams Innis Prize for Best English Language Book in the Social Sciences, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

The broad sweep of this book is most impressive, and the scholarship is outstanding . . . [it] is a treasure trove of information, and it is strongly recommended that it should be read—and read again—by all interested in the Canadian Arctic in general and in its Native people.

—G. Hattersley-Smith, Arctic

A significant contribution to Arctic history and anthropology . . . The inclusion of aboriginal voices to the pre-eminent Euro / American / Canadian histories is a welcome reprieve

—Chris Paci, Études/Inuit/Studies

Muskox Land is a sprawling, impressive contribution to the understanding of northern Canadian history. Prepared with a sharp eye for contemporary historiographical trends and abundant narrative detail, this study of Ellesmere Island provides an unusually rich and complex description of the evolution of human activity in a part of the country that few Canadians give more than a passing thought

—Ken Coates, The Canadian Historical Review