David first travelled north of sixty as a canoeist in 1977, with little awareness of Inuit culture and no notion that the Arctic would become his home and the scene of his professional career as a writer and researcher, historian and ethnographer. All that changed within weeks of a subsequent canoe trip’s arrival in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake) near the mouth of the Kazan and Thelon Rivers. In the more than 40 years since then, David has written ten books and scores of magazine articles about the North and its people, much of that writing based on the oral testimonies shared by Inuit elders and inevitably his own experiences on the land. In 2012, he was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for “for dedication to the preservation of Inuit oral history and traditional knowledge.” David has been a member of the WCA since the mid-late 1970s. www.davidpelly.com