Massey Medal

2000 Winner - Dr. Robert McGhee

Dr. Robert McGhee (Photo: David Trattles)

Arctic Time Traveller
IN THE SUMMER OF 1969, a young Canadian archeologist walked alone among the stony ruins of Kittigazuit, an ancient abandoned village at the mouth of the east channel of the Mackenzie River. Brought up on a diet of Farley Mowat and possessed of a writer’s imagination, Robert McGhee had arrived to excavate the ancient history of the Inuit people. He loved Canada’s Far North. As he gazed out to the great bay beyond, he listened to the squeals of the beluga. In his mind’s eye, he imagined a line of 200 ancient hunters in their kayaks shouting and smacking the water to panic the whales for a hunt. ‘Kittigazuit,’ he wrote in Ancient Canada, one of his best-known books, ’was a magical place, full of history, on those hot green days.

Today, more than three decades later, the Ontario-born McGhee, curator of Arctic archeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, has earned The Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s 2000 Massey Medal. At 59, McGhee has led nearly two dozen major archeological expeditions to the Canadian Arctic. He has conducted groundbreaking research on nearly every important subject in Arctic archeology, from the earliest migrations into the Arctic by Paleo-Eskimo explorers to the expeditions to Baffin Island by Martin Frobisher.

Moreover, McGhee has generously shared his vast knowledge in 120 articles, 14 books, 4 videos and several award-winning museum exhibits. ‘His contribution has been outstanding,’ says Jeff Hunston, director of the Yukon Heritage Branch. ‘When I was a young student at the University of Calgary, we all wanted to emulate him.’

What places McGhee in a class of his own is his uncanny ability, working from the slenderest of evidence, such as a 2,000-year-old ivory carving, to imagine the ancient human inhabitants of the Arctic and to convey their lives to a popular audience. ‘He’s not so much interested in describing tools and things that people left on the ground,’ says Charles Arnold, director of the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, ‘as what they mean about the people who left the things on the ground.’

For McGhee, all his years of exploration and investigation have underlined both the important role the Arctic has played in world history and just how connected its inhabitants were to other cultures. ‘People in the Arctic have long been in touch with Asia or with Europeans across the North Atlantic,’ he says, sitting in his museum office. ‘The Arctic is not marginal, not something you should learn about as a curiosity’."

— Heather Pringle