Word: inuit
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...powerful, brooding novel sets up camp in the mid-19th century and forages for the bones of fiction. She picks an obsession--the search in the high Arctic for a northwest passage to the Pacific--that now seems bizarre. Ships were crushed. Men died of scurvy, watched by healthy Inuit tribesmen who were scorned as beasts. Ill-fated expeditions followed, intent on rescue, science or glory. One of these is Barrett's stage, on which two sharply opposed men, a bookish naturalist and a flamboyant expedition chief, struggle for the right to tell, or embellish, shabby truths. The chief ships...
...Leaf did not spend all her time in Montreal. For instance, her first film for the Film Board, the "Owl Who Married a Goose," was an adaptation of an Inuit legend...
...Strait at different times to settle in America. The Amerind, who predominate in most of North and South America, possess only type O blood; among the Na-Dene, who cluster in Alaska, Canada and the U.S. Southwest, O prevails but A makes an appearance; in the Alaskan and Canadian Inuit (Eskimo), A, B, AB and O blood groups show the pattern seen in the rest of the world...
...John Franklin and all the members of his British navy Arctic expedition, sent to find the Northwest Passage. Vollmann relates that event to a glum romance in present time between one of the author's fictional alter egos, whom he calls Captain Subzero, and a young, deaf Inuit woman named Reepah. Vollmann insists at length that Subzero, an & Arctic tourist who, as Vollmann himself did, makes a two-week trek to the north magnetic pole, is a modern counterpart of Franklin. Further and sillier, he imagines that Reepah bears some resemblance (or shows some useful contrast) to Franklin's wife...
...juxtaposition is absurd: Franklin and his wife fascinate historians because they embody so perfectly the courage and blind arrogance of 19th century Britain, but Subzero and Reepah are simply dreary. And Subzero, picking moodily at the scab of his 20th century conscience, fretting that the Inuit find him contemptible, giving tips on Arctic trekking (down sleeping bags collect moisture and freeze; masturbation at very low temperatures isn't worth the trouble) is just not as interesting to Vollmann's readers as to the author himself...