Alumni Travel Reading 2018-2019: Polar Bears & Beluga Whales

A history of the world's most famous trading company based on Peter Newman's history. In 1838 Sir George Simpson, the governor of the HBC, was toasted at a dinner as the "Head of the most extended dominion in the known world - the Emperor of Russia, the Queen of England and the President of the United States excepted". It was an astonishing but appropriate tribute to a commercial enterprise of unique scope and character, with trading houses that once stretched from the Arctic Ocean to Hawaii.

For over 1500 years, the Sayisi Dene, 'The Dene from the East', led an independent life, following the caribou herds and having little contact with white society. In 1956, an arbitrary government decision to relocate them catapulted the Sayisi Dene into the 20th century. It replaced their traditional nomadic life of hunting and fishing with a slum settlement on the outskirts of Churchill, Manitoba. Inadequately housed, without jobs, unfamiliar with the language or the culture, their independence and self-determination deteriorated into a tragic cycle of discrimination, poverty, alcoholism and violent death. By the early 1970s, the band realized they had to take their future into their own hands again. They set up a new community at Tadoule Lake, 250 miles north of Churchill. Today they run their own health, education and community programs.

In this heartfelt and quirky true adventure story, animal communication expert Jim Nollmanin and two artist friends set out for Canada's vast Mackenzie Delta, electric guitar and underwater sound equipment in tow, to make music with belugas--the elusive white whales of the Arctic.

The 216-page, hard-cover, full-color book highlights 297 images o from the Whaling Museum collection, along with interesting texts and stories. The book covers the full breadth of whaling, regional history, and art.

In 1927, the young Peter Duvett has accepted a job as an assistant to the portraitist Vienna Linn in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba. Here he becomes obsessed with "spirit-pictures," photographs in which the faces of the long-dead or forgotten mysteriously appear.

Polar bears have been feared by explorers, revered by the Inuit, and beloved by zoo goers everywhere, they are a symbol for the beauty and grace of the Arctic. However, as global warming threatens the ice caps, the polar bear has come to symbolize the environmental peril that has arisen due to harmful human practices. In the past twenty years alone, the world population of polar bears has shrunk by half. Today they number just 22,000.