Ice Corps

I was almost forty when I realized my dream of visiting the Canadian Arctic. The lands north of the treeline had beckoned to me since childhood, so when my family and I took a year off to travel, that was where we headed first. For two months, we drove across Yukon and the Northwest Territories in our aging Chevy van. As we turned south again, away from that vast, remote world, I knew I would return someday. It didn’t take long: two years later, as a late-blooming PhD student, I found myself ensconced in the Inuit village of Inukjuak, along the eastern coast of Hudson Bay. I was there to study environmental contaminants with local women and to learn more about the Nunavik region in Quebec.

One evening, as I lost myself in a stack of books, I came across the name Louise Arner Boyd. I had never heard of her before, but I was intrigued enough by her story to find out more. Born in 1887...