Quick Red Fox Press is a Canadian book publishing company specializing in Canadian history, culture, and nostalgia.
In 2025, Quick Red Fox Press will publish three works of Canadian heritage significance in the areas of Canadian folklore, Canadian aviation, and Canadian music. We will also add a literary fiction imprint. Details to be announced.
Arctic Fox Books, an imprint of Quick Red Fox Press, is honoured to have been chosen by Nunavut Arctic College to co-produce The Arctic Sky: Exploring the Inuit Universe, previously co-produced with the Royal Ontario Museum.
In 2025, Quick Red Fox Press will publish three works of Canadian heritage significance in the areas of Canadian folklore, Canadian aviation, and Canadian music. We will also add a literary fiction imprint. Details to be announced.
Arctic Fox Books, an imprint of Quick Red Fox Press, is honoured to have been chosen by Nunavut Arctic College to co-produce The Arctic Sky: Exploring the Inuit Universe, previously co-produced with the Royal Ontario Museum.
Revised and updated edition of the original volumes published in 1998 and 2000. Pictorially augmented with new Inuit art, most of it created since 2000, and enhanced Inuit constellation graphics. The work also showcases Inuit art and artifacts from the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum.
Available from Nunavut Arctic College Media:
https://nacmedia.ca/product/the-arctic-sky
Fine edition, sewn hardcover with dustjacket, linen case material, deep indigo endpapers, 314 pages, C$45.00. ISBN: 9781897568729
“The Arctic Sky takes us deep into the Inuit world and to the vast encyclopaedia that is their knowledge of it. A beautifully written book of wisdom, scholarship, and great importance."
Hugh Brody, writer, filmmaker, author of The People’s Land and Living Arctic
More Praise for The Arctic Sky:
“I worked closely with John during the many years we collaborated with Amitturmiut elders on the Igloolik Oral History Project. We recorded and preserved crucial information about my heritage that otherwise would have been lost. This included our knowledge of the stars and their unique significance in our practical and social lives. The first edition of The Arctic Sky brought wide attention to the distinctiveness and cultural importance of Inuit astronomy. This new edition carries the work forward, ensuring that the knowledge of the skies above our homelands continues to be accessible through Inuit perspectives.”
Louis Tapardjuk, Igloolik Oral History Project
“Nunavut Arctic College Media is to be congratulated for publishing this long-awaited new edition of The Arctic Sky. Solidly based on numerous interviews over many years with Iglulingmiut elders, this work emphasizes the depth and complexity⸺as well as the necessity⸺of my ancestors’ knowledge of the environment on which they depended. There is much here to learn about our culture, including how our legends and songs were used to instruct us about the physical and spiritual world and the need to live in harmony with nature. The Arctic Sky includes a selection of these legends in Inuktut⸺our language⸺from the elders’ own words, and carefully translated into English, bringing to the printed page their lively storytelling. This is an exceptional book for anyone seeking to know more about Inuit culture and traditions, viewed uniquely through our deep understanding of the Arctic environment.”
Eva Aariak, Commissioner of Nunavut
“John MacDonald brings to this wonderful book a lifetime of experience and insight, immersion in the Arctic, and, above all, a deep appreciation of Inuit knowledge. He takes us to aspects and depths of Inuit understanding of their world that are astonishing⸺and this is so because just about everything here comes from the Inuit themselves. Here is a book that reveals in yet one more dimension the extent to which Inuit, like all people who have lived on and known their lands for centuries, can both describe and explain all that they depend on⸺including the sky itself.”
Hugh Brody, writer, filmmaker, author of The People’s Land and Living Arctic
“John MacDonald’s work, arising from his many years of in-depth, respectful research is truly remarkable. The Arctic Sky is not just about its central theme of astronomy but, importantly, how that touches on all aspects of the natural world, and how it so seamlessly and so essentially is integrated into the Inuit way of being, both intellectually and in every practical way."
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, author of The Right to Be Cold
“A testament to what can result when a dedicated and sensitive researcher collaborates with Inuit elders who still retain the traditional beliefs and knowledge that supported them in their life on the land before the move to modern communities. This volume preserves for future generations knowledge that would surely have been lost otherwise."
Kenn Harper, author Thou Shalt Do No Murder: Inuit, Injustice, and the Canadian Arctic
“In a brief summary I cannot do justice to the scope of this volume or to its visual beauty, let alone assess the impact it might have on the ideas of North among southern Canadians who do not see the same sky. MacDonald’s text is scrupulously documented with respect to sources, orthography, and cultural context."
Sherrill E. Grace, Author of Canada and the Idea of North
“A beautiful book that does justice to Inuit celestial knowledge, practical experience, and mythological traditions. A model for how to present the traditional knowledge of First Peoples with respect and intelligence."
Robin Riddington, The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology
“A wealth of information on Inuit astronomy and the best exposition of which I am aware of Inuit navigational skills. A valuable model for future studies combining indigenous and western science."
Carol Brice-Bennett, The Polar Record
“The Arctic Sky fills a long-neglected niche-the exceedingly rich star lore and astronomical folklore of the Arctic peoples, the deep connection between these peoples and the cosmos."
K. Larsen, Choice, American Library Association
The Woman Who Lives in the Sun, by Kenojuak Ashevak.
Stone-cut in red on laid Japan paper. Dorset Fine Arts.
Stone-cut in red on laid Japan paper. Dorset Fine Arts.
Through the lens of Inuit astronomical knowledge and traditions, The Arctic Sky underscores the complexities of the Inuit worldview, where nature’s realm is intrinsically one with human society. In essence, this work asserts another way of knowing the universe.
For Inuit, the celestial and atmospheric spheres were of primary concern. Time, seasonal and diurnal, was measured by the ever-changing positions of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky, while the whims of weather were the principal determinants of daily activity and fortune. Beyond this⸺as revealed through the creation legends at the heart of the book⸺the sky and its contents were mirrored in the inventive parables shaped by the Inuit intellect to explain and uphold cosmic and social order.
The impact of climate change and globalization on Arctic regions, along with a surging interest in Indigenous knowledge, makes this new edition of The Arctic Sky especially timely. Based on the memories and experiences of the last generation of Inuit whose lives were lived autonomously on the land, largely following their ancestral traditions, the Arctic they evoke is now a very different place in many of its social and environmental dimensions.
About the author:
John MacDonald spent most of his working life in the Canadian Arctic, including twenty-five years as co-ordinator of the Igloolik Research Centre in Igloolik, Nunavut, where he worked closely with Inuit elders participating in the community’s oral history project. The Arctic Sky largely grew out of this collaboration. He is co-editor of The Hands’ Measure (Nunavut Arctic College Media), a work highlighting the urgency of recording and documenting Indigenous oral histories and traditional knowledge.
Foreword:
Sheila Watt-Cloutier is a Canadian Inuk activist. She has been a political representative for Inuit at the regional, national, and international levels, most recently as International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council.
John MacDonald spent most of his working life in the Canadian Arctic, including twenty-five years as co-ordinator of the Igloolik Research Centre in Igloolik, Nunavut, where he worked closely with Inuit elders participating in the community’s oral history project. The Arctic Sky largely grew out of this collaboration. He is co-editor of The Hands’ Measure (Nunavut Arctic College Media), a work highlighting the urgency of recording and documenting Indigenous oral histories and traditional knowledge.
Foreword:
Sheila Watt-Cloutier is a Canadian Inuk activist. She has been a political representative for Inuit at the regional, national, and international levels, most recently as International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council.