This is a review of the Greenland (Second Ed.) Board Game, from Sierra Madre Games.

A bowhead whale is a majestic and intimidating creature—up to 60 feet in length, weighing up to 100 tons, with a triangular hunk of bone for a skull, which the bowhead uses to smash through Arctic ice on its way to the ocean surface. Yet amazingly, the Indigenous peoples of northern Europe and North America found a way to kill and harvest these massive creatures without modern ships or weapons. Their hunts, conducted by small kin groups operating out of coastal hunting camps, could be extraordinarily risky. Even the job of butchering the giant beasts and hauling the proceeds back home was exhausting and dangerous. But the enterprise was worthwhile, because a single Bowhead might provide enough food and fuel to keep the hunters and their families alive for a whole year. Any visitor to the far north can only marvel at how any community could not only survive, but at times even flourish, in a region where almost any modern human would quickly die of exposure or starvation.

The fact that the Inuit were up to this challenge year after year, generation after generation, is testament not only to their discipline and ingenuity as hunters, but also as inventors and field engineers—notwithstanding the sentimental noble-savage stereotypes that still persist. One of the ancient frustrations of whalers everywhere, for instance, was the tendency of spears to detach from a whale (or seal, or walrus) as it tried to submerge or otherwise escape. The Thule (the proto-Inuit ancestors of modern Inuit) solved this problem with an ingenious device known as a toggling harpoon. The weapon featured a spearpoint divided in two parts, connected by sinew. When a beast was impaled, the spear’s forward portion would detach from the main shaft and penetrate the beast’s blubber and muscle—rotating as it traveled, so that when the hunter pulled the spear back toward his boat, the tip would hold fast within the whale, like a corkscrew in the neck of a wine bottle, allowing the carcass to be pulled back to shore.

No one ever taught me such things when I was a boy growing up in Canada—largely because no one ever taught me much of anything about Indigenous peoples. Before the 1990s, which brought with it a revolution in the way First Nations, Inuit, Innu and Métis people fought for their political rights and raised awareness about their history, Indigenous peoples were largely invisible to most non-Indigenous Canadians. Thankfully, all that has changed, as the extensive coverage of Indigenous themes on my daughters’ public-school curricula clearly shows.