"The author of My name is Masak continues the story of Alice/Masak from the moment she walks out the doors of an Anglican residential school in Aklavik for the last time. At age fourteen, barely able to speak Inupeak, Alice returns to live with her father, a fur trapper, and his new wife and family.

Although in 1946 the old ways of the Inuit are already changing in the MacKenzie River Delta, she must still learn the skills expected of a young Inuit woman, from driving a dog team to the sewing and trimming of parkas and mukluks. Skills and language are not the only challenges, as her traditional grandmother quickly tries to arrange her marriage.

While the pressure for change on the Inuit from the outside world is relentless, the change of the seasons is more welcome. The success of the winter and spring trapping, when small family groups disperse to scattered trapping and hunting grounds, is essential to the economic survival of the family in the year ahead. There Alice becomes close to her family and people again. She also gains the self-reliance to care for her new family when her stepmother must leave them for years of treatment for tuberculosis. The brief summer is when everyone gathers on the coast of the Arctic ocean for the annual whale hunt, as well as for visits, social events and marriages.

Marriage brings Alice further change, first her own children and then physical separation from the family she has so come to cherish. Eventually Alice and her husband divorce. At the age of thirty-one, she leaves the Arctic with her second husband, a member of the R.C.M.P., to begin a very different yet still nomadic life in a number of small Manitoba towns. Her journeys even include some years farming in Ireland.

Alice Masak French, a Nunatakmuit Inuk, lived for the first thirty-one years of her life at various locations in the Arctic, mainly Banks Island, Aklavik, Reindeer Station and Cambridge Bay. She writes for her children and grandchildren, to put into print "the changes I have seen in my lifetime." The author of My Name is Masak, she now lives in Pinawa, Manitoba"--back cover.