Description
Especially notable for Lucien Turner's descriptions of nineteenth-century Native material culture, Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory was originally published in 1894 as part of the Smithsonian's Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology series -- often considered to mark the beginning of American anthropological studies. Lucien Turner arrived at the present-day community of Kuujjuaq on the northern Quebec-Labrador peninsula in 1882, primarily to conduct meteorological, atmospheric, and tidal observations for the U.S. Army's Signal Corps. But he also developed a meaningful rapport with the Innu and Inuit, spending his free time studying and recording not only their material culture -- including clothing, dwellings, weapons, and tools -- but also their lifeways, language, and stories. His images of the peoples' camps as well as their formal portraits are among the earliest examples of photography in the Arctic.
