Whit Fraser - True North Rising: My Fifty-Year Journey with the Inuit and Dene Leaders Who Transformed Canadas North

Beginning as a reporter with CBC Northern Service in 1967, and more through luck than good management, my travels over fifty years have taken me across the North, to every town and village from Labrador to Alaska, to the oil and gas exploration and mining sites, and across traplines and waterways too numerous to mention. My northern perceptions were later sharpened as chair of the Canadian Polar Commission and as executive director of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Canadas national Inuit organization.

Some of the coldest places I encountered and some of my warmest friendships emerged while I covered the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry under Justice Thomas Berger. Over four pivotal years in the mid-1970s, the inquiry became much more about overcoming racism and building a better society than it was about laying a steel pipe through the permafrost.

It is more than time for me to tell the stories of the remarkable Indigenous-language broadcasters who provided the daily radio and TV coverage of the hearings. They were more than just gifted communicators. Their knowledge of their language and their people inspired a generation of young Indigenous leaders and profoundly changed the future of northern broadcasting.

I watched and reported as bright young men and women, including Mary Simonmy future wife and Canadas future governor generalfought for cultural survival and identity for First Nations, Inuit, and Mtis. More often than not, my favourite stories are the ones that didnt make the news, or the stories that I wish hadnt made the newslike the time, after listening to unbearably racist testimony, I threw down my CBC reporters notebook and asked to be sworn in as a witness at the Berger Inquiry. People not only demanded that I be fired as a result, but that I be banished, along with my whole family, from the Northwest Territories.

Over the years many of my colleagues have described me as a natural storyteller. This memoir puts that flattering judgment to the test.

Yet I want to do more than tell colourful stories. I also want to bring what I can to the discussion of the critical issues we are facing today: reconciliation and climate change. And I want to pay tribute to the remarkable men and women who have shaped the North over the past fifty years, among them Stephen Kakfwi, who was sexually abused as a child at a Catholic residential school but brought the Pope to the Northwest Territoriestwice. And John Amagoalik. In the 1950s, the government of Canada, attempting to assert Arctic sovereignty, forcibly relocated young John and his family, along with other Inuit, from their home in northern Quebec to Resolute Bay, 1,400 kilometres north in the High Arctic. In 1999, John led the movement that changed the map of Canada with the creation of the new territory of Nunavut.

My hope is that this book will allow people who have never been fortunate enough to go north to feel a little closer to knowing its people and their culture and history. For those who have travelled the North and those who live there, I hope this book does justice to your experiences and your place in history.

This is my way of saying thanks for sharing so much of it with me.