At the End of the World: Notes on a 1941 Murder Rampage in the Arctic and the Threat of Religious Extremism, Loss of Indigenous Culture, and Danger of Digital Life

By Lawrence Millman and Ryan Murdock

In a remote corner of the Arctic in 1941, a meteor shower flashed across the sky for an unusually long time. Taking this to be a sign, one of the local Inuit proclaimed himself Jesus Christ. Another proclaimed himself God. Anyone who didn’t believe in them was Satan. Violence ensued.

At the End of the World isn’t just the remarkable story of a series of murders that occurred on the Belcher Islands, a group of wind-blasted rocks in Canada’s Hudson Bay. It’s also a starting place for a deeper cultural exploration. Against the backdrop of the murders, which highlight the fact that senseless violence in the name of religion is not a contemporary phenomenon and that a even people as seemingly peaceful as the Inuit can turn to chaos at the hands of one person’s delusion, Millman addresses the burgeoning dawn of the digital era, following the murders’ trail to show how our obsession with screens is not unlike a cult and offering a warning cry against the erosion of humanity and the destruction of the environment. The story becomes a confluence of the consequences of generational trauma, outside religious evangelism, systemic racism against indigenous people, the perilous passage from the natural to the digital world, and what it means to be human in a time of technological dominance and climate disasters.

At the End of the World, available for the first time in paperback, is not a straightforward tale of true crime but an examination of many of the issues that have become dominant in the global conversation. In snippets of reflection, Millman asks us to look north for answers to many of the questions we all hold, literally, in our hands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terra Firma
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781595349996

Lawrence Millman

Lawrence Millman is a writer, Arctic explorer, and mycologist who has made more than forty expeditions to the Arctic and subarctic. He has taught at the University of Iceland, the University of New Hampshire, Tufts University, and the University of Minnesota. His eighteen books include The Last Speaker of Bear, Last Places, At the End of the World, Fungipedia, Our Like Will Not Be There Again, Hiking to Siberia, Northern Latitudes, and Goodbye, Ice. He has received a Guggenheim Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lowell Thomas Award. When not on the road or in the bush, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Book preview

1

In 2001, I wanted to investigate the murderous aftermath of a meteor shower, so I flew from Boston to Montreal, then to Kuujuarapik in northern Quebec, and then to the Belcher Islands, a helter-skelter of fifteen hundred rocks in the turbulent waters of eastern Hudson Bay.

I was afraid, I was so afraid, the old Inuit woman kept saying to me. Her hands were tightly clasped, and her eyes seemed to reach out and grab mine, as if she wanted me to see exactly what she had seen.

"You had to say, ‘Ee, ee, the world is coming to an end,’ or they would kill you," another Inuit elder in the Belchers told me.

The world—in fact, more than one world—was indeed coming to an