Cold Comforts: Women Making Inuit and Qallunaat Homes in the Eastern Arctic and North American Cultures of Exploration, 1890-1940

Abstract

This thesis explores the experiences of white and Inuit women who were involved with American expeditions in North America’s Eastern Arctic between 1890 and 1940. In studying the intersecting histories of women who were participant in and affected by Arctic exploration, it considers how their movements prompted them to think about the different meanings of “home.” A concept encompassing familial, racial, gender, and age relations, "home" functioned as a primary discursive field through which women experienced Inuit and Qallunaat spaces and cultures. At a public level, within Britain, America, and Canada’s transatlantic cultures of Arctic exploration, prevalent ideologies of domesticity provided an impetus for settler women’s social and geographical mobility, as they revised understandings of home through their popular Arctic narratives. Efforts to transform Arctic environments imaginatively into plausible homescapes shaped dominant perspectives of the Arctic in Canada, Britain, and the United States. This thesis also brings needed complexity to historical understandings of home relative to Arctic space by examining the lives of two Inuit women who entered the period’s exploratory culture by making well-publicized trips to the United States. Looking at white and Inuit women’s entangled experiences of home in America as well as in the Arctic demonstrates that Qallunaat spaces were no more “natural homes” than were Inuit birthplaces in the Eastern Arctic.