My Life With the Eskimo

When Vilhjalmur Stefansson ventured into the Canadian Arctic in 1906, he was searching for an isolated people living beyond the reach of Western contact — and he found them. My Life With the Eskimo is his vivid, firsthand account of three years spent among the Inuit of the Mackenzie Delta and Victoria Island, learning their language, hunting alongside them on the sea ice, and documenting a way of life that had remained largely unchanged for centuries.

Part exploration narrative, part ethnographic record, Stefansson's account is rich with detail — from igloo construction and caribou drives to the social customs and oral traditions of the people he came to know intimately. His encounters with the so-called "Blond Eskimos" of Coronation Gulf sparked international debate and cemented his reputation as one of the great Arctic explorers of his age. Engrossing and at times astonishing, My Life With the Eskimo remains an essential document of a vanishing world, told by a man who lived it.