Until Europeans came north, the lnuit and their forebears had lived in the Arctic in the traditional way for about 4,500 years. For all those years hunting was the ultimate skill. There was no such thing as the accumulation of wealth, rules were made by the family, and, as one middle–aged man told me, "You weren't anxious about your retirement plan." Remnants of this life remain, preserved at what the lnuit call outpost camps, where people live almost all year round, far from the established villages. They lead a difficult but satisfying existence. But below the surface, life is not so simple. The other part of the reality of this land is change: the people have travelled so swiftly in time that for most lnuit only the basic pieces of their older life – ice and sea and the short thaw of summer – remain. As both jails and hospitals show, the past century and a half has brought increasing complexity – and trouble – to the Arctic. Southern habits and technology started to percolate north with explorers and whalers from about 1820 on, and the lnuit found much of it useful – firearms, the fur trade, canvas. Then, in the middle of the 20th century, the white presence grew with missionaries and the military. Famine, always a danger in the north, combined with tuberculosis, hit the lnuit hard.