In the early 1960s the Canadian government conducted an experiment in social engineering. Three 12-year-old Inuit boys, Peter Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak and Eric Tagoona, were sent to live with White families in Ottawa, to be educated in White schools. The consequences for the boys, their families, their identity, and their culture were brushed aside.

The bureaucrats who brought the boys South did not anticipate the outcome of their experiment. The boys grew up to become leaders of their people, and lifelong thorns in the side of the government. The battles they fought and won were instrumental in the establishment of indigenous rights in Canada, and led to the creation of Nunavut, the world’s largest self-governing indigenous territory. But it all came at enormous personal cost.

The Experimental Eskimos is the untold story of how an experiment in assimilation, not only changed three boys, but changed a nation.  Eskimo is an offensive term used by colonizers and it was still in use at the time when the Canadian government conducted this social experiment in the 1960’s. By the early 1970s, the endonym Inuit (“the people” in Inuktitut) was adopted as a more respectful, accurate term.