Further to what I said about Rae: I would never argue that members of any group were interchangeable units, not individuals. But Rae did share some characteristics with other nineteenth-century imperialists. Here’s what he wrote about Melville Peninsula in 1891:

“I found the Eskimo tracing ... over seventy miles wrong in Latitude at its southern end, and at another part a degree and a half of Longitude in error, yet it was on this incorrect tracing that Ravenstein [the mapmaker whose work had upset Rae] founded a claim to deprive me of three hundred miles of my survey, to remove my name from Melville Peninsula”.

So because the Inuit map drawn from memory wasn’t perfectly accurate about latitude and longitude, Rae dismissed Indigenous knowledge and thought of Inuit land as something he could put his name on.

Janice Cavell