The Life and Times of Augustine TataneuckRenee FossettLabel: University of Regina PressDescription: One of the few biographies of an Inuk man from the 19th Centuryseparated from his family community and languagefinding his place in history. Augustine Tataneuck was an Inuk man born near the beginning of the 19th century on the northwestern coast of Hudson Bay. Between 1812 and 1834 his family sent him to Churchill Manitoba to live and work among strangers where he could escape the harsh Arctic climate and earn a living in the burgeoning fur trade. He was perhaps the first Inuk man employed by the Hudson's Bay Company as a labourer and he also worked as an interpreter on John Franklin's two overland expeditions in search of the northwest passage. Tataneuck's life was shaped by the inescapable harsh environments he lived within and he was an important but not widely recognized player in the struggle for the possession of northwest North America waged by Britain Russia and the United States. He left no diaries or letters. Using the Hudson's Bay Company's journals and historical archives historian Renee Fossett has pieced together a compelling biography of Augustine and the historical times he lived through: climate disasters lethal disease episodes and political upheavals on an international scale. While The Life and Times of Augustine Tataneuck is a captivating portrait of an Inuk man who lived an extraordinary life it also is an arresting unique glimpse into the North as it was in the 19th century and into the lives of trappers translators and labourers who are seldom written about and often absent in the historical record.
