Attached at http://www.scribd.com/doc/22999787 is a very early draft, still in a horrible state, of an article I'm writing on the visit of five Mackenzie Delta Inuit to Fort Simpson in 1859 where they met two Christian missionaries. I keep changing large sections, or putting in new ones, so much of it is still in no better shape than what an American author (speaking of her own work after a first writing) called "chicken scratchings." All that counts at this point is whether the story has a chance of being molded into something easy to read, and whether there are faulty reasonings and historiographic errors. So I'd be pleased with input from any of the many people who know far more about the North than I, whether on an academic or private basis. The harsher the criticism, the better the piece will eventually be, so do not shrink from getting out the whip. I'll keep posting new versions from day to day and hope those too will get a vicious going through by readers with better ideas. Then when the article gets formally published I'll make sure to give each critic proper credit. I would be most grateful if anyone could put me in contact with the descendants of Tiktik, ot Tiqtiq, the leading man in the 1859 delegation. His daughter Shookaiyuk, or Sugkajoq (also known as Laura), was born around 1885, lost her first husband to a stray bullet from a whaler's gun, married Sam Ivitkuna (Ivitkoona) and had a son, Roddie Kuiksak, sometime after 1900. The last person to mention them in northern literature is Knud Rasmussen, who met them in 1924 at Igdluk.

Tiqtiq had a namesake who was born around 1875-85, and it is this second Tiqtiq who was very active in the conversion process in 1909-1912 and in the Christian religious fervor of the time. If someone happens to know the fate of Attingarek, a ten year old girl left at Fort Simpson, it would help put "closure" to the essay, and tell her relatives, of which there are surely still some in the Delta, where we might find traces of her life after 1862 or so when she was married at age 13 and moved to a fur trade post far south of the treeline.