The Great Betrayal: Arctic Canada Now

by Farley Mowat

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316586943
• ISBN13: 9780316586948
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 191 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Old edition...always actual

It is an old edition, but always actual. It contains a chapter about extraction of natural resources in the Arctic with an effect of pollution that is certainly not old-fashioned, but the truth they (these communities) are confronted with, almost actual, created by what we know now about extraction in a few communities around the Arctic world...

A quarter century old, but still well worth the read.

This book is apparently a revised edition of Canada North which was published nine years earlier in 1967. I have yet to read Canada North, but from what I can gather is that Mowat set out to inform southern Canadians about a vast region of Canada which they had heretofore been ignoring: the vast, supposedly barren tiaga, tundra and arctic lands of the North. Up until this time, Canada was only asserting nominal control, and has essentially allowed missionaries, trappers and the HBC to impose themselves on the native peple of this region. Nine years later, things had changed significantly, and recognizing the new threat to the North, Mowat evidently reworked his original text in order to address these main concerns. Essentially what had happened was that the government of Canada found new reason to take an interest in the North because it was proving to be abundant in natural resources. This new-found interest in the North was clealry going to have detrimental consequences on both the people and environment of this region. In typical fashion, Mowat goes on the attack, lambasting the government and the multinational corporations fixing to exploit the North. Drawing on historical events both far in the distant past and only a few years old, Mowat shows how white interference and exploitation of the North and its people has had and will clealry have lasting consequences, consequences that will bring about the end of already serious disrupted traditional lifestyles of the various native peoples inhabiting this region. Mowat, an avid naturalist, also takes time to debunk the commonly held notion that the North is virtually devoid of flora and fauna. All in all, a very fascinating book by a man who has done much to expose the disgusting manner in which Canada has governed the North.