Perry River

Don and Annie Magaknak were a young couple, not yet 20 years old, in the spring of 1967. “We had a small child and I was expecting another,” remembers Annie. Both their families lived in the general area of Perry River on the Queen Maud coast of the Arctic Ocean, where the Hudson’s Bay Company had established a trading post many years before in 1926. People in the area – roughly 75 in all, during the 1950s – travelled widely, inland toward the Back River in search of caribou and out onto the sea ice in search of seals. Like others of this era, they had become accustomed to the added security of supplies from the HBC, provided in return for white fox pelts.