True North Rising
My fifty-year journey with the Inuit and Dene leaders who transformed Canada's North
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
In this captivating memoir, Whit Fraser weaves scenes from more than fifty years of reporting and living in the North with fascinating portraits of the Dene and Inuit activists who successfully overturned the colonial order and politically reshaped Canada—including his wife, Mary Simon, Canada's first Indigenous governor general.
"This is a huge embrace of a book, irresistible on every level. . . . I couldn't put it down." —Elizabeth Hay, Scotiabank Giller prize-winning author of Late Nights on Air
In True North Rising, Whit Fraser delivers a smart, touching and astute living history of five decades that transformed the North, a span he witnessed first as a longtime CBC reporter and then through his friendships and his work with Dene and…
WHIT FRASER went north to Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit, Nunavut) in 1967 to work for CBC's northern service. For the next 32 years he travelled to every community in Canada's three northern territories, reporting on the historic events that shaped today's North, including the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, the negotiations that enshrined Indigenous rights in the Canadian constitution, and the progress of land claims from the initial demands of Dene and Inuit leaders through to the ceremony that inaugurated the new territory of Nunavut in 1999, which he co-hosted as his last broadcast for the CBC. Fraser has also served as the first chairman of the Canadian Polar Commission and as the executive director of the national Inuit organization, the…