Books: The Leap into Today

THE NEW PEOPLE by Edith Iglauer. 205 pages. Doubleday. $4.50.

Before 1953, as far as the Canadian government was concerned, the dominion's 12,000 Eskimos ranked about with caribou for concern and polar bears for utility. Strewn across millions of square miles of permafrost, they were a depleted and dying culture, helplessly locked in old patterns, too weak to accommodate new. That year Canada's conscience underwrote a radical new experiment to save the Eskimos by making them self-sufficient. Edith Iglauer's book tells of the leap, "literally for their lives," into the modern world.

Qikartissivik. The...

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