Canada's angriest young man is Farley Mowat, who writes out of a desperate concern for the vanishing Eskimo….

Mr. Mowat has told some of [the Ihalmiut's story] in his earlier book "People of the Deer." Last year, with military penetration and bureaucratic muddle added to their woes, the People of the Deer, the proto-Eskimo, were no longer a dying tribe. Only a handful were left. Soon they will have vanished.

Mr. Mowat's anger is honest; it is understandable. In rich words, whose poetry only rarely spills over to become rhetoric, he has built a solid emotional case. The Deer People, who breed leaders and rivalries worthy of a great empire, were fascinating and a writer's understanding made them lovable. Their lives and deaths were tragic, because they were heroic. They were never degraded into pathos.

When the author takes off to indict the whole Canadian approach to the...