Ottawa Islands
island group in Nunavut, Canada
The Ottawa Islands (Inuit: Arviliit or Arqvilliit in Inuktitut meaning "place where you see bowhead whales") are a group of currently uninhabited islands situated in the eastern edge of Canada's Hudson Bay. The group comprises 24 small islands, located at approximately 60°N 80°W. The main islands include Booth Island, Bronson Island, Eddy Island, Gilmour Island, J. Gordon Island, Pattee Island, and Perley Island. The highest point is on Gilmour Island, which rises to over 1,800 ft (550 m). Located a short distance off the northwest coast of Quebec's Ungava Peninsula, they, like the other coastal islands in Hudson Bay, were historically part of the Northwest Territories, and became Crown Land upon the creation of Nunavut in 1999. Nunavik Inuit have occupied these islands since time immemorial and gained constitutionally-protected harvest and access rights under the Nunavik Inuit Land Claim Agreement signed in 2007.
Geography
The Ottawa Islands are situated on the barren and rocky east coast of Hudson Bay. By 1610, Hudson Bay had been explored and named by Henry Hudson in his quest for a Northwest Passage. It was not until 1631 when Luke Foxe (or Fox) on a voyage from "Vltimum Vale" (Cape Henrietta Maria), near 57° 40' N, indicated that "Mr. Hudson calls those islands by the name of 'Lancaster's Iles.'" According to historian T.H. Manning, there is no other record of Henry Hudson naming islands in that region. A little further north, near 58° 5' N, Capt.
“Ottawa Islands” enters the record as island group in Nunavut, Canada. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ottawa, Islands and island can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Ottawa Islands” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Ottawa, Islands and island provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q376989. Authority coordinates are 59.750, -80.183. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2007, 1610 and 1631.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ottawa Islands” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.