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 instrument of self-help was the cooperative, chosen because it would belong to the Eskimo and because it was the most simple and therefore the most comprehensible of marketing systems. Even so, the concepts often boggled minds whose exercises in community action had never gone much beyond the equitable dissection of a harpooned seal. Introduced to the unfathomable mysteries of a credit union, for example, the Eskimos called it qikartissivik, "The place where the money is stopped."

Intersettlement conferences induced agonies of self-consciousness among delegates attuned to the lonely life. When stage fright paralyzed the first Eskimo speaker at a meeting in Frobisher Bay, Donald Snowden, the government man, eased his chair close to block the view of the crowd. "Tell me about the co-op at the George River," he said gently, "and forget about the other people here." Slowly, with the help of men like Snowden, the Eskimos developed the tools they needed: self-assurance, a sense of achievement, pride. "We built this hall to last forever!" said Willi Imudlik of the substantial wooden meeting place that he helped to erect. "Whose store is this?" asked a visitor to the co-op trading post in Whale Cove. "Uvaguk!" shouted everyone in it proudly. "Ours!"

Oneekatualeeotae. By 1963, Eskimos were running 18 coops, shipping as far south as New York such marketable commodities as frozen char (a delicious fish that tastes like salmon), waterproof sealskin boots, Eskimo handicraft and art. In the Eskimos' own stores, delicacies that they canned themselves--muk-tuk (whale skin), corned and roasted seal meat, sweet-and-sour whale, walrus flippers vinaigrette--now move as briskly as canned ham loaf.

Author Iglauer, the wife of The New Yorker Writer Philip Hamburger, flew to Northern Canada, attended the conferences as an observer, learned how to walk in deep snow (bend the knees to exert a forward rather than downward thrust) and got an Eskimo name: Oneekatualeeotae, "The woman who tells the story." She tells it deliberately and unemotionally, but she provides plenty for the reader to feel emotional about.

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