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I, EMILE PETITOT - ARCTIC EXPLORER AND MISSIONARY
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I, EMILE PETITOT - ARCTIC EXPLORER AND MISSIONARY
Madman. Priest. Romantic. Artist. Radical. In short, a great spirit and brilliant intellectual comet that blazed through Arctic Canada, bringing much light and burning many conventional bridges.
"I, Emile Petitot, Arctic Explorer and Missionary," a one hour documentary, is the story of the remarkable Oblate Missionary, Emile Petitot, who arrived in Fort Good Hope in 1862 with a powerful ambition to live and work among the Eskimos. Canada was opened by these European missionaries, and their role while religious in intent, was perhaps much more important as teachers and scholars. Petitot is part of this tradition--his intellectual abilities made a significant mark on northern Alberta, the Northwest Territories and the Western Arctic.
He was a linguist who created the first dictionaries of Dene and Inuit, cartographer who's mapping of the western Arctic was not improved until ariel photography in the 1930s, ethnographer who recorded the anthropological details of the Dene around Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes, and the western Inuvaluit around the Coppermine River, field reporter for the Geological Survey of Canada and the Smithsonian Institute, artist who's drawings record the
landscape before photography, craftsman who got built the little Church at Fort Good Hope, 500 miles south of the Beaufort Sea on the bank of the Mackenzie River, which, because of his remarkable painting and decoration of the interior of the Church, is today a National Heritage Site.
Emile Petitot was the kind of renaissance man common to the late 19th century. His life was tumultuous in the Canadian wild, ending scandalously in a mental hospital in Montreal for marrying a native woman. Returning to France after 20 years, Petitot turned his notebooks into many major publications illustrated with his own excellent sketches and diagrams. Becoming a contented parish priest in a small town
outside of Paris until his death during WW I, he gained international recognition in many fields, especially for his maps.
COMPANY - Getaway Films
PRODUCER - Tom Shandel
COPYRIGHT - 2001
RUN TIME - 50 minutes
Available in the USA and Canada
Public Performance Rights included with purchase
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