Laugrand, Frédéric B., Jarich G. Oosten. Inuit, Oblate Missionaries, and Grey Nuns in the Keewatin, 1865-1965. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019, 520 pages

A short time spent in the Kivalliq (formerly Keewatin) region of Nunavut is all one needs to realize that Christianity is important to many people’s lives. The presence of Roman Catholicism is very much in evidence in the small community of Chesterfield Inlet. The town’s old mission house and its church, featuring a statue of Jesus, his welcoming arms outstretched, are prominent fixtures on a main road. Several town residents regularly attend church services during the week. Nearby, another eye-catching structure is the abandoned three-storey building that was Ste. Thérèse’s Hospital. The walls and shelves of many people’s homes are adorned with images, figurines, and crucifixes of Jesus as well as prayer cards, relics, votives, and other Catholic memorabilia. These exist next to old black and white photographs of Inuit families taken by missionaries or nuns, often with the church or hospital in the background. Building on their previous and extensive work on the introduction and metamorphosis of Christianity in the eastern Arctic, Frédéric B. Laugrand and Jarich G. Oosten’s book Inuit, Oblate Missionaries, and Grey Nuns in the Keewatin, 1865-1965 aims to—and succeeds at—providing a comprehensive history of how Catholicism became such an intricate part of people’s lives in Chesterfield Inlet, and more broadly, how Christianity, including Anglicanism and Evangelism, expanded in the Keewatin. The book is divided into four parts focusing on: (1) the beginnings of Christianity in the Keewatin and the competition for souls between denominations; (2) health services provided by Roman Catholics at the hospital in Chesterfield; (3) formal education and the residential school at Chesterfield; and (4) the attempt to recruit Inuit individuals as nuns and priests. Overall, the narrative is engaging and informative. There is a lot of history to cover, and the choice to highlight four main foci generally works well. In each part, the authors enrich the history by profiling prominent Inuit who were influential in the adoption of Christianity, including Tirisikuluk Niaqulluk, Etienne Qimuksiraaq, Armand Tagoona, Jean Ayaruaq, Pelagie Puvaliraq Inuk, and several others. Providing the life stories of these Inuit personalizes the history. The presentation of black and white archival photographs throughout the book adds to the richness of these stories. One drawback is that the profiles of those who worked as missionaries and nuns are somewhat thin. The background context in which they pursued their callings is not explained in great detail, so it is difficult to understand how the institutions of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Grey Nuns of Nicolette guided and influenced their orders. Laugrand and Oosten use a multivocality method to tell the story of Christianity in the Keewatin. They draw on interviews with Inuit and Grey Nuns as well as archival material from Anglican, Catholic, government, and Inuit repositories. For the most part, this approach is compelling. For example, first reading priests’ and nuns’ interpretations of Pelagie Inuk’s vocation and path towards becoming a nun and then reading her own personal thoughts on the process reveals that Inuit were not separating from shamanism in the way that non-Inuit Christians may have thought. In general, the authors do an excellent job, as they do in their previous book, Inuit Shamanism and Christianity (Laugrand and Oosten 2010), of showing that the conversion to Christianity was not a full break from past religious traditions and that conversion is a culturally-informed process. There are issues with the use of multivocality though, particularly in the third part of the book. Specifically, the chapter that addresses the physical and sexual abuse of students at the Turquetil Hall residential school is problematic. At the beginning of the section that …