Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

IQALUIT (Apr 12/99) - American writer and filmmaker Robert Perkins was in Iqaluit to cover Nunavut Day on April 1. He was covering it for his hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe.

This trip north from the New England area is but one of many Perkins has taken. He has been travelling solo on the rivers of the North -- Back River is a favourite -- and northern Labrador for 20 years.

Perkins pitched the Nunavut story to the Boston Globe because he believed the people of New England should be better informed of what was taking place with the Inuit.

"The map of North America doesn't change very often," says Perkins, in an interview at the Yellowknife Book Cellar where he was the guest of honour at an informal wine and cheese affair.

Perkins wrote his piece as an April Fool's story.

"I didn't see anybody else doing that," he says.

It begins:

"April 1 is a day for telling and hearing fantastic stories, one you can't quite believe are true," he wrote.

The element of the fantastic, according to Perkins, lies in the fact that this is an unprecedented event, one that the entire world is watching.

"For Native groups this is a keystone -- in one sense, this is a keystone -- to the civil rights movement which has been what our century has been focused on."

"To return that much land and that much power to a Native group -- it's a beautiful thing."

Perkins believes Canada and the Inuit people have the opportunity to be an example to the rest of the world. It's encouraging and inspiring to aboriginal people all over the world, if not necessarily the governments in power.

According to Perkins, there are two sides to the April Fool's angle.

"Is it really the Canadian government that's handing off something that's a real problem...to say April Fools...or maybe a few years later will it turn around? And Native people can look up on April 1 and say April Fools!"

Perkins has made six films and written five books, which can be categorized as travel pieces. Pieces that often delve into the Eastern Arctic.

"The work that I do as a writer and filmmaker is...very personal," explains Perkins.

"It has often involved the journeying that I've done outside. That started in '79 when I started my first long solo canoe trip in northern Labrador for six weeks. It opened up to me -- which has been a little bit of the keynote for me -- being able to convey to others what it's like to travel by yourself in a wilderness situation for months at a time."

Perkins' wilderness isn't easily defined. While he may speak specifically of wilderness, his books -- and his conversation -- seem to use wilderness as a trope for the self's interior. His last published book, Talking to Angels: A Life Spent in High Latitudes, is as much about two other formative life experiences as it is about the canoe trip.

"The longest trip I've taken was 72 days, here, on the Back River (in Nunavut)," says Perkins.

"Starting at its head waters going all the way down to its mouth."

Into the Great Solitude, now out of print, is the book that resulted from that particular journey of 1987. A documentary film, with the same title, came out in '89 and complements it.

Asked to go into -- briefly -- what took a book and a film to describe, Perkins came back with a question:

"How many people do you know that spend a week by themselves? Without a radio, without a cabin, without other people. Not many people do. What I've done is find out how wonderful it is to spend time by yourself."

Getting to that point was a process.

"You deal with all your fears right away. All of them are present with you. You have to learn a lot of technical things to help you survive, when you're canoeing for that much time. But what happens is that you work your way through all the things that you've left from. As would happen on any vacation you'd take."

"But with the kind of travelling I've done you come into a point where you're actually present to yourself -- and to the landscape that you're in. And that's the beauty of it. And that's the addiction that I have."

According to Perkins, his motivation for such a trip was a series of questions -- "What would it be like to travel by yourself? Would you be lonely? Would you hurt yourself? What would happen? And you couldn't answer without doing it. And that's what I went out and answered. I make a stand for people spending some time by themselves."