Beyond Her Horizons: Listening to the women of Tallurutik – Canadian Geographic

Dec 20, 2024

In the summer of 2023, three women set out on the 16-metre sailboat Que Sera on an expedition aimed at writing Inuit women into the exploration history of the North

Centuries before it was drawn on a map, Canada’s Northwest Passage was a place of desire and empire. Hoping for a western route between Europe and Asia, England sent John Cabot to search for it in 1497. Following in his wake went explorers the likes of Martin Frobisher, William Edward Parry and John Franklin, who was declared missing, along with his two ships Erebus and Terror and his crew of 129 men, in 1848. Norwegian Roald Amundsen finally navigated the Northwest Passage over three winters on his ship Gjøa, arriving in Nome, Alaska, in 1906, five years before becoming the first to stand on Antarctica’s South Pole.

But the Northwest Passage existed long before its boundaries were declared by European explorers. Every expedition attempting its channels encountered Inuit. The more successful ones relied upon the knowledge and work of Inuit women, who sewed clothing, cooked food and provided advice on how to survive conditions unimaginable to Europeans. Their stories have gone largely unrecorded in the official histories of the Northwest Passage.

Read More: https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/beyond-her-horizons-listening-to-the-women-of-tallurutik/