It offers relatively easy and inexpensive access to Ungava Bay, compared to other major rivers of this area, making it popular for canoe camping trips.

The George River originates about 175 kilometres (109 mi) east of Schefferville in Lake Jannière, between bogs and swamps.

They wrote in their diary: "We then proclaimed the name of the Kangertlualuksoak to be henceforth George River, upon which every man fired his piece three times, the vollies being answered from the boat".

[7] The Inuit of the area never settled around the post, preferring to live along the coast in summer and setting their camps about 50 km (30 mi) inland in winter.

In June 1839, McLean took a party up the George in his search for a convenient overland route between Ungava Bay and Fort Smith (present-day North West River) on Lake Melville.

The old fort at the mouth of the river was reopened by the Hudson's Bay Company in September 1876, mostly to capture the local indigenous peoples' trade which had been going to the Moravians.

The subsequent successful canoe expeditions of Mina Hubbard and Dillon Wallace in 1905 and Hesketh Prichard in 1910 also followed the George.

[17] The "George River herd which morphologically and genetically belong to the woodland caribou subspecies, at one time represented the largest caribou herd in the world and migrating thousands of kilometers from boreal forest to open tundra, where most females calve within a three-week period.

They argued that "understanding ecotype in relation to existing ecological constraints and releases may be more important than the taxonomic relationships between populations.

"[18] According to a National Geographic Daily News article, the George River Caribou Herd (GRCH) (Rivière-George) numbered only 3,500 animals in the late 1940s.

[15] The Government of Nunatsiavut recommended that the "George River caribou calving grounds by designating a 14,000 km2 protection zone under the Regional Land Use Plan for the Labrador Inuit Settlement Area."