Especially notable for Lucien Turner's descriptions of nineteenth-century Native material culture, Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory was originally published in 1894 as part of the Smithsonian's Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology series - publications that are often considered to mark the beginning of American anthropological studies.
Lucien Turner arrived at the community known today as Kuujjuaq, on the northern Quebec-Labrador peninsula, in 1882. As with his earlier long-term appointments in Alaska, he was there primarily to conduct meteorological, atmospheric, and tidal observations for the U.S. Army's Signal Corps. But he also developed a meaningful rapport with the Innu and Inuit, spending his free time studying and recording not only their material culture - including clothing, dwellings, weapons, and tools - but also their lifeways, language, and stories. His images of the peoples' camps and formal portraits of individuals are among the earliest examples of photography in the Arctic.
This reissue permits Turner's work to continue to be a classic introduction to the culture of the Innu and Inuit people of northern Quebec and Labrador.
Review quotes
"With few exceptions ' Inuit shamanistic paraphernalia and Innu hunting charms - the majority of the materials Turner collected were artifacts and clothing used in day-to-day activities. The passage of time and the miracle of conservation have transformed these ethnographic minutiae, these objects and materials of relatively minor significance in the past, into treasured cultural icons." Stephen Loring, from the introduction.
Lucien M. Turner (1848-1906) contributed significantly to the collections of the Smithsonian Institution and authored a number of books, including Contributions to the Natural History of Alaska (1886). Stephen Loring is an anthropologist at the Arctic Studies Center of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
