DAVELUY, Michelle, 2009 Roundtrip: The Inuit Crew of the Jean Revillon, Edmonton, CCI Press, 120 pages.

Chapter one presents the genesis of Roundtrip. In 1998, Peter Irniq—who was visiting St. Mary’s University as one of four delegates of the Nunavut Department of Culture, Languages, Elders and Youth (CLEY)—told the author that his father, Athanasie Angutitaq, had visited Nova Scotia in 1925. Curious, he wondered whether there was a way to document his voyage. The author agreed to help him and embarked on a decade-long adventure that took her to Shelburne (Nova Scotia), Baker Lake (Nunavut), and Paris (France), where Revillon Frères kept its archives until recently. Chapter two chronicles the four-month voyage of the Jean Revillon from Baker Lake to Shelburne. The chapter also pays attention to the six-day stay by the four Inuit in Shelburne and attempts to describe their journey back to the Arctic the next summer, an almost impossible task considering the lack of written and oral records. This chapter also introduces the story of Revillon Frères and its precarious financial situation in 1925 (a year later, the company would sell 51% of its shares to its rival, the Hudson’s Bay Company). Chapter three returns to Peter Irniq’s initial visit to St. Mary’s in 1998. Among the four Inuit he was travelling with was David Owingayak, the son of Savikataaq, another Inuit crew member of the Jean Revillon. The chapter depicts how both Irniq and Owingayak travelled to Shelburne, went to the local museum and were met there by the curator, who had organised an exhibit in town about their fathers’ visit. They also met Mary Archibald, the daughter of John Alfred Weingart, who had built the Jean Revillon in 1923. Chapter four describes the outcomes of the joint endeavour between the author and the Inuit. To illustrate the importance of this collaboration, the author uses the example of NunaScotia, a summer program based at St. Mary’s University and designed to help Inuit high school students to graduate and get ready for higher education. The author explains how, in 1998 and 1999, the story of the Jean Revillon was used in NunaScotia’s curriculum. Students had to complete some research activities in newspapers published during the visit of the Inuit to Shelburne in 1925. “For the students,” Daveluy writes, “it provided a very practical research opportunity on a topic to which they could relate” (p. 73). More importantly, the students’ “involvement gave a completely different meaning to Roundtrip. For a long time, our work had been about places when it needed to be about people” (p. 76). The last chapter relates how the author assumed, at the beginning of the project, that this story was one of exploitation. She thought that Lionel Angutinguaq, Athanasie Angutitaq, Louis Taapatai, and Savikataaq had been coerced into sailing the ship and that they had suffered during their voyage. She realised along the way that this was unlikely and that the four of them might have been eager to meet the challenge of sailing a 125-ton supply ship during four months to its southern hauling station to expand their own economic base and increase their influence in their respective communities. Ironically, this success is problematic because Roundtrip’s main objective is to reconstruct the accurate story of what happened to Lionel Angutinguaq, Athanasie Angutitaq, Louis Taapatai, and Savikataaq. The book itself is not so much about the voyage they undertook in 1925 as it is about the process of documenting what took place. There is nothing wrong with wanting to emphasise the collaborative research (quite the contrary, actually). At times, however, Roundtrip feels like its main objective and its title are at odds with its actual …