“Writing the Arctic: Two Stories. Whose stories?”

HARPER, KENN – is a historian, writer, linguist, and former businessman, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, a former member of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, and a recipient of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee Medal. He was a member of the Nunavut Implementation Commission in the 1990s, and served on the council of the City of Iqaluit. He served as Honourary Danish Consul for Nunavut for twelve years until 2017, and is a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog (Denmark). He lived in the Arctic for fifty years, in the Baffin region communities of Qikiqtarjuaq, Padloping (Paallarvik), Pangnirtung, Arctic Bay, and Iqaluit, and in Qaanaaq, Greenland. He speaks Inuktitut, the Inuit language of the eastern Arctic. Kenn has written extensively on northern history and Inuit language. He is the author of Minik, The New York Eskimo, published in September 2017, a re-issue and update of his best-selling Give Me My Father’s Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo; and Thou Shalt Do No Murder: Inuit, Injustice, and the Canadian Arctic, also published in September 2017. He wrote a history column, Taissumani¸ for ten years for Nunatsiaq News. Some of these columns have been collected and published thematically in a series, In Those Days: Collected Writings on Arctic History. Book One in the series is Inuit Lives. Book Two is Arctic Crime and Punishment. Book 3, Tales from Arctic Whaling, will appear in the spring of 2018.