["People of the Deer"] is a book about the inland Eskimos of the Barrens—the half-million square miles of plains, lakes, and low hills west of Hudson Bay. It is a record of two years the author spent among one tribe of these people—the Ihalmiut—in the late nineteen-forties, and in that sense is a travel book. But it is more, too, because Mr. Mowat is something of a fanatic about the tribe—or what is left of it after twenty years of slow starvation. His book is another contribution to the growing literature that employs a new approach in evaluating primitive men and cultures, one that quite properly avoids judging aboriginal societies by standards and ethical codes of higher—or at least different—civilizations. (p. 138)

"People of the Deer" is a complete amateur anthropology. It is probably a definitive one, too, for the Ihalmiut are at...