Iliarjuk is a first-hand account of contemporary life in a small Inuit community on Baffin Island and it paints a picture that is vastly different from what one might expect. It is a raw, painful, disturbing, hilarious, lyrical, provocative and eye-opening testimony to the courage and sheer determination of its author – a must-read for anyone interested in the Inuit or the Arctic. It is also a tale of astonishing hardship and hope.

Dracc Dreque is the pen name of Gideon Enutsia Etorolopiaq who was born on January 14, 1964 in Iqaluit, Baffin Island, Nunavut, to a large extended family with numerous brothers, sisters, stepbrothers and stepsisters. He was orphaned at an early age when both his parents died after eating spoiled seal meat and he left school after grade four. Although he spent time in prison as an adolescent and young adult, he has not been incarcerated since 1983 when he was released from Stony Mountain Penitentiary. Dracc began writing his autobiography in 1998 and he now lives in Winnipeg where he works at a variety of jobs, reads books and adds to his memoirs.

Dracc Dreque's profile page

Having traversed most of the Arctic in my travels, including Nunavut and the western Arctic (Coppermine and Holman Island, Minto Inlet on Victoria Island, the other territories and Alaska) and having worked a very long time in maximum-security and super-maximum security corrections, I can report that Iliarjuk is one of the most authentic records of Inuit experience – and of aboriginal experience generally – I have read.
I once wrote, "The experience of prison is tragic. But not serious." Dracc Dreque shows us why. The glue-sniffing, gasoline sniffing, abuse with and without assault, suicides, murders and crimes in every far northern village I know of are poignant social issues. The data on death and injury aren't nice, and we should think of this nonsense before we go to war (that larger tragic but not serious experience). I would go so far as to say this book is the funniest, most tragic, least serious book ever to come out of the high Arctic.
I thank Dracc Dreque for the lessons in mortality and rolling-on-the-floor entertainment. I'm glad he is still alive.

J. Michael Yates