Brutally hungover, Jacques Panache wakes up with a bagel-eating weasel on his lap and two women, who were promised an after-party, at his kitchen table. He needs them to leave — stat. He has repairs to complete and rooms to tidy before his landlord visits, likely to tell him that his decrepit shack is unlivable. Among its problems: a sunken foundation and a sink that empties straight into a…
David Venn
David Venn was previously an associate editor with the magazine.
Articles by
David Venn
In the mid-1950s, on the southwestern coast of Baffin Island, the artist and filmmaker James Houston saw Kenojuak Ashevak, a young Inuit artisan, walking along the beach with a sealskin bag on her shoulder. “It was not unlike other bags I had seen Inuit carrying,” Houston later wrote in Confessions of an Igloo Dweller…
In the 1950s, the United Church minister and journalist Enos T. Montour began a somewhat fictionalized account of his experience at Mount Elgin Residential School, in Muncey, Ontario. Some twenty years later, as commercial interest in Indigenous literature increased, he started shopping his manuscript around — unsuccessfully. One Toronto publisher, J. M. Dent and Sons, called it “too innocent,” and the United Church’s communication…
In September 1921, the ethnographer Knud Rasmussen left Nuuk, Greenland, and sailed west across the Davis and Hudson Straits aboard the Søkongen. He and six Inughuit (Inuit from the island’s northwest), four Danes, and one Kalaaleq (West Greenlander) made up the Fifth Thule Expedition, out to prove that Inuit had come from inland and later developed a marine…
Lytton, British Columbia, like many villages, is rich with lore and spirited characters. In 1858, a Nlaka’pamux chief named Cexpen’nthlEm negotiated a treaty with invading American gold miners. Not long after, the ranchers Joe and Catherine Watkinson had the first of their eleven children, whose many descendants still call the place home. After the Second World…
Whit Fraser opens True North Rising with the 1970 trial of an Inuk man. Adam Tootalik, the accused, listened — confused, maybe terrified — as lawyers debated in a foreign language whether he had broken a law he never knew existed. The seasoned hunter had been party to the killing of three polar…
How surely, in some future day, when the memory of it shall have lost its vividness, shall we half believe we have seen it in a wonderful dream, but never with waking eyes!— Mark Twain
Rain and fog were still there that Saturday morning not long ago; they had arrived two weeks…
I smelled fuel in my tap water eight days after a few people posted on the Iqaluit PSA Facebook page that something was wrong. It was a Sunday afternoon in early October, and I was getting ready for a two-hour hike along the Apex Trail. As I filled my Nalgene bottle, I caught a distinct, nauseating…