In Caribou Country: The Adventures of W.B. Cabot

2015

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Summary

"Recommended. Pictures of the Naskapi people and the harsh landscape are strikingly detailed. The faces and expressions are vivid and clear." -EMRO Review "Some of the artifacts Cabot gathered, including a drum, a bow and arrow, caribou-skin mittens and a pouch, and moccasins, are on display at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. His journals and photographs form an invaluable anthropological record of the region's native people before they lost much of their traditional culture." -Harvard Magazine William Brooks Cabot (1858-1949) was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, of a prosperous banking family, and lived primarily around Boston, where he was an eminent engineer. He is remembered for having designed a number some of the most technologically advanced projects of his day, including bridges over the Charles River in Boston. Massachusets, and others in Connecticut, miles of the Catskill aqueduct in upper New York that brought water to New York City, and subway tunnels under Times Square in Manhattan. Yet Cabot also had another love; for years he would escape city life and the demands of engineering to explore the wild waterways and native lands of northern Canada. He made annual trips from 1903 - 1910 to Labrador, Canada, to meet the Innu, then known as the Naskapi, native people - an almost mythical band of caribou hunters who had minimal contact with the outside world. He mapped their routes, visited their hunting camps, kept a journal, which eventually became his book, In Northern Labrador, which was published in 1912, and photographed what he could of the native people's life that changed dramatically when the caribou disappeared. This fascinating documentary is an account of that stunning record of Innu life at that time.