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THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2002

"By chance, I was in Canada in March of last year, when a shooting in [the Inuit community of] Cape Dorset made the front page of the national newspapers. Shootings are still rare in Canada, which has much stricter gun controls than we do, but this shooting captured the country's imagination because the victim was a Mountie, an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Police shootings are rarer still.

A Toronto Globe and Mail reporter who visited Cape Dorset after the shooting noted that the ''world-renowned village'' of 1,000 inhabitants had four full-time RCMP officers who fielded 900 calls a year, far above the national average. The newspaper quoted 37-year-old Peter Tunnillie, a hunter who makes thousands of dollars of additional income as an artist, as saying, ''Sometimes I don't know what's going on here any more. ... People have lost their way.''"

Get the Story:
Alex Beam: For Inuit, modernity's cost (The Boston Globe 7/18)