Arctic Predator
The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada's North
- Publisher
- Dundurn Press
- Initial publish date
- Feb 2025
- Category
- Sexual Assault, Educators
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781459754805
- Publish Date
- Feb 2025
- List Price
- $26.99
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781459754829
- Publish Date
- Feb 2025
- List Price
- $13.99
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Description
The shocking crimes of a trusted teacher wrought lasting damage on Inuit communities in Canada’s Arctic.
In the 1970s, a young schoolteacher from British Columbia was becoming the darling of the Northwest Territories education department with his dynamic teaching style. He was learning to speak the local language, Inuktitut, something few outsiders did. He also claimed to be Indigenous — a claim that would later prove to be false. In truth, Edward Horne was a pedophile who sexually abused his male students.
From 1971 to 1985 his predations on Inuit boys would disrupt life in the communities where he worked — towns of close-knit families that would suffer the intergenerational trauma created by his abuse.
Journalist Kathleen Lippa, after years of research, examines the devastating impact the crimes had on individuals, families, and entire communities. Her compelling work lifts the veil of silence surrounding the Horne story once and for all.
About the author
Kathleen Lippa grew up in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She has worked as a reporter at newspapers across Canada, and eventually served as Bureau Chief for Nunavut News/North in Iqaluit. She lives with her husband in Ottawa.
Excerpt: Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada's North (by (author) Kathleen Lippa)
Cape Dorset, January 23, 2003
A fire raged in the metal dump, yet no sirens blared. Townsfolk in sealskin boots and women in fur-lined parkas with babies on their backs made their way up the hill to where firefighters had purposely set one of the community’s old school buildings ablaze.
Four hundred people, roughly a third of the community’s population, huddled near the flames, a reprieve from the cold in the -20°C temperature. Some people in the crowd were crying. Others picked up rocks and hurled them into the flames, yelling at the disintegrating structure as if it were the living embodiment of the name they shouted — Ed Horne. Twenty years was a long time to live with the anger. Horne had left their community in 1983, but the emotions his name engendered were still raw.
As the schoolhouse and its secrets burned that night, a young reporter named Christine Kay was at her desk in Iqaluit working the phones. She called hamlet offices in the territory each week, hearing news and gossip that could be spun into features for her newspaper. This was the best a reporter with no travel budget could do. To actually visit a community beyond Iqaluit required an expensive plane ride. The phone was an economical way in. Christine was curious about the fire she was hearing about in Cape Dorset, but she could eke out only a small story for News/North, which appeared on February 3. The headline was “Piece of Past Up in Flames.” She reported that the burning was part of Cape Dorset’s settlement in a civil lawsuit against the governments of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. The small structure, one of two portable units — free-standing classrooms not attached to the main school — was no longer in use. A year before this symbolic act was carried out, a multimillion-dollar settlement had been made between the two territorial governments, who were the employers of Ed Horne, and dozens of young men — once boys — who had been sexually abused by the disgraced teacher.
Tuugaaq initially attended the burning but left before the building was razed to the ground.
“I did see people throwing rocks, but I wasn’t compelled to do anything because that wasn’t where I had the experience with Ed Horne. The older one where we first encountered him is still standing,” he said, many years later, explaining that a construction company was currently using that building. “There were two portable schools. The one that was burned down was from later, it was for the younger guys. To me it was like, Why don’t they burn the one where it all started?”
Editorial Reviews
Unbelievable, but it’s all true. It contains all that only a survivor knows. Inuit have been lied about for decades and this book will spell it out. The crazy, untrue world Ed Horne lived in still has impact on many men who were boys when it happened. I speak on behalf of my brothers who never had a chance to be something — they had hoped and dreamed of succeeding one day. Many Ed Horne victims have taken their lives, and some victims are incarcerated. Hope they won’t blame themselves anymore. Now I’m in the light. Invisible walls have fallen. There is now room to breathe. No more walls of shame, confusion, most of all, self-doubt.
Aksaqtunguaq Pitseolak Ashoona, Inuit Cultural Advocate
Arctic Predator achieves profound insight into one of the most disturbing and dismaying series of events in Canadian Arctic history. This is a work of great scholarship and extraordinary depth. It sets out and seeks to understand how terrible crimes were committed by one evil man against individual children and the communities where they lived, and how the damage has spread deep and wide. Kathleen Lippa has written a book that is of huge importance and, at the same time, as accessible as it is revelatory. It is compelling and anguished and humane.
Hugh Brody, anthropologist and author of Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic
Arctic Predator is impeccably researched, and although the subject matter is deeply disturbing, beautifully written. It is the story of one of the worst institutionalized, sexual abuse cases committed by a single pedophile in Canadian history. A must read for anyone who cares about justice and the protection of children.
Michael Harris, investigative journalist
Arctic Predator is the utterly gripping story of the dark side of colonialism... Through exhaustive research and first person interviews, Kathleen Lippa’s book painfully exposes the failings of those of us who were there in the education establishment. And she gives voice to the children who never had the courage to speak of the horrors inflicted on them by this cunning, duplicitous and twisted demon or who were dismissed and ignored if they did. This important book is a chilling must-read.
Dennis Patterson, retired Senator (Nunavut), former Premier of the Northwest Territories