The Last Kings of Thule
(By Jean Malaurie)
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| Author | Jean Malaurie |
The men of Thule were a race apart. Through geographical isolation and the social planning of Greenlandic Eskimo explorer Knud Rasmussen, they had managed for decades to maintain an advanced, self-sufficient Inuit culture independent of their colonial masters, the Danes. They were truly kings: strong individualists, heroic hunters. Yet they continued to maintain a form of pure communalism, sharing food, property, labor — even offspring and sexual mates. Thievery was practically unknown among them. In all of Greenland there was no jail.
This is the society into which Jean Malaurie was granted intimate entry for one historic year. His experience was the last of a kind for at the end of that year the U.S. government built a huge military base in the middle of Thule Eskimo territory. The isolation was over: the modern world had won,
Rarely has a book come to the English-speaking public with such advance status: translated into sixteen languages, with encomiums from adventurers, naturalists, and scholars alike, with worldwide sales in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Some readers have hailed the anecdotal side of Eskimo life depicted here; others the harrowing adventures such as the crossing to Canada by dogsled; still others the profound understanding of the Inuit character or the stirring account of Eskimo regeneration in the seventies and eighties.
Like the great Eskimo adventure books from decades past—by Elisha Kent Kane, Frederick Cook, Robert Peary — The last Kings of Thule continues the saga of man’s triumph in the Arctic. More than those works, it paints for us the exemplary life of the polar Eskimos as they were—and are becoming again. Jean Malaurie’s portrait is not only a lesson and inspiration for the 100,000 Eskimos in the United States, Canada, Greenland, and the USSR, but a human model for all mankind.”
