Book excerpt: Published in 1989, The Modern North examines the experience of the peoples of the Yukon and Northwest Territories from the Berger inquiry of 1975 and onwards. Untangling the varied strands that make up the Northern tapestry--its resourceful peoples, its awesome physical landscape, its political and economic agenda in the late 1980s--they portray in vivid colours a society struggling to cast off the chains of colonialism and define its own future. The Modern North offers a sensitive assessment of the people and forces shaping the Yukon and Northwest Territories in the 1980s.