Herschel Island is a remarkable place. For hundreds of years, it sustained aboriginal people who lived off the sea, and its shelter provided a base for the western Artic whaling fleet in the 1890s. It was namen by Joht Franklin during a voyage to establish sovereignty over arctic North America, and it was the location of the first police detachment in the Canadian Artic. Herschel Island was a logistical centre during the offshore oil boom of the 1970s and early 1980s, but it is now designated as a territorial park, a reserve established as a result of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement. As a wilderness park, it is a semi-contained ecosystem and presents land, ocean, and coastal environments.