Edmund James Peck (April 15, 1850 – September 10, 1924), known in Inuktitut as Uqammaq (one who talks well),[1] was an Anglican missionary in the Canadian North on the Quebec coast of Hudson Bay and on Baffin Island.

His diaries provide an account of the daily life and work of the early missionaries in Baffin Island.

In the Spring of the next year, John Horden, the Bishop of Moose Factory, recruited him for mission work in Hudson Bay.

From there he traveled to the Hudson Bay Company post at the mouth of the Little Whale River in what is now Northern Quebec.

[1] In the 1840s, Methodist missionary James Evans, located at Norway House, Manitoba, created a syllabic writing system for the Ojibwe and Cree.

Watkins' introduced the syllabic writing system to Inuit at Fort George and Little Whale River in 1855, and that same year Horden printed a small book of scripture verses in syllables on his press at Moose Factory.

[2] In 1865, Harden and Watkins met in conference in England and modified the syllabic system to allow a more precise rendering of both Inuktitut and Moose Cree.

Edmund Peck devoted his attention to the translation of scripture into Inuktitut using Horden and Watkins' orthography.

[3] In 1894 the whaling station on Blacklead Island, in Cumberland Sound, was purchased by Mr. C. Noble and offered to Peck as an Anglican mission.

Peck might very well have fallen into this camp too, had it not been for the invitation of the pioneer anthropologist, Franz Boas, to document for him the belief system of the Inuit, collect legends and write up shamanic rituals."

Edmund Peck did this for Boas, but his ethnographic notes of Inuit life have sat largely untouched and unrecognized for over a century in the General Synod Archives of the Anglican Church of Canada.