In the Empire of Ice (17 page)

Clocks and calendars were brought in by the missionaries so that people would know to come to church on Sunday. But hours and minutes do not make sense in a place where the year is divided into dark and light, ice and open water, where going out to harpoon a walrus might take days, weeks, or months.

The societal rules of a colonial government were at odds with the naturally egalitarian one of the Inuit. “Any claim to land ownership is anathema to the Inuit culture,” John says. “Just the naming of land, giving it a single name like Baffin Island, did not make sense, since the land of Nunavut is known by thousands of seasonal place-names.”

Yet Igloolik, only one of many seasonal outposts that fanned across the top of the Melville Peninsula and Baffin Island, became a permanent town. John insists that the government was never malicious in moving people to the community. I look at him skeptically. “It was, I believe, well-intentioned,” he says. “When Carolyn and I came here in 1985, there were still six or eight outpost camps occupied year-round. There was no coercion to move. It was simply not possible to take medicine and education out to every camp, and if a government makes no attempt to provide education and medical care for each of its citizens, it is culpable. How can you deny one part of a population what the rest of us have? Other countries have exterminated indigenous populations. This is, at worst, a misplaced paternalism.”

John pours more coffee as the radio erupts in a fast-paced Inuktitut “Jingle Bells.” Tapping my foot to the music, I imagine Igloolik when it was first established as being tightened like a purse, its contents centralized to the point of being crushed, and laid over the scattered fragments of the old. But the “old” keeps seeping up through the bone layers and middens preserved in ice and now loosened by melting permafrost.

“Jingle Bells” turns to “Silent Night” as snowmobiles roar by. “The elders insist that it’s impossible to live a traditional life in town,” John tells me. “They call present-day Igloolik
Qalunaanit
—the place where one goes to shop for white man’s goods. No one ever intended to live together in one large group in a single hamlet.”

Theo Ikummeq stops by. He’s small and sharp eyed, wily and articulate, a hunter turned cultural spokesman who has traveled with the explorer Will Steger and teaches young locals how to hunt.

“We are a culture of walrus and moving ice,” he says. “In other places there are no words for these things. The environment governs language and culture. Social structures here are not like those at Baker Lake, because each is governed by a different environment. Ice here, barren lands there. Lichens and caribou there, walrus, seals, and ice here. Now, for young people, our worlds are not many; they are all blended. The elders have a tough time passing it on. Our children don’t need to speak Inuktitut to survive. That’s scary. We are executing our culture.”

Theo didn’t move into town until 1978. He has nothing good to say about the place, yet he is as caught up in it as everyone else. In earlier times at camp, hunters used to play a kind of dice game made with the small bones of a seal’s flippers. They’d throw them down on a flat stone. The bones that lay flat meant the hunter would get no prey; if any bones stood up, it meant they would bring home food. Now, in present-day Igloolik there are two gambling houses, teenage prostitutes, drugs, and drug dealers. “We went from the Stone Age to the Computer Age in 50 years,” he says, laughing. “When the hunters come back from camp, they say this is a white person’s town. It’s an unhealthy place. There was always a spring migration of families getting the hell out of here. Now only 30 percent or 40 percent go out. Sometimes there are 40 tents out there. It’s a good feeling when this town is out of sight. And you don’t have to go that far.”

Despite the wrenching social problems, Igloolik is the cultural capital of Nunavut. Inuktitut is spoken here. It is the home of Isuma, the Inuit film company that made the astonishing
Atanarjuat—The Fast Runner.
A separate women’s filmmaking cooperative is also producing films. There’s an Inuit circus troupe called Artcirq that recently performed in Le Festival au Desert in Mali, and a new aboriginal television station—Isuma TV—that streams Inuit-made documentaries online. It’s a Renaissance town enveloped in social collapse, a community whose underpinnings have grown as dark as these winter days.

AFTER BREAKFAST John leads me down snowy lanes between speeding snowmobiles. To the southwest are the low gravel ridges of Melville Peninsula and the northeastern corner of the Barren Grounds, home to thousands of caribou. To the northeast are the mountains and glaciers of Baffin Island. Between is Fury and Hecla Strait, named for the two ships that William Edward Parry sailed to this coast in the 1820s.

Igloolik Point and the coast of nearby Baffin Island have been inhabited continuously for 4,000 years. What we call the Northwest Passage is actually the traditional and much used migration route of Inuit people who traveled on ice from the northeast coast of Siberia to the Canadian high Arctic, eventually crossing Smith Sound to Greenland.

The oldest human sites here were built around 2000
B.C
. by the Tuniit, a paleo-Eskimo people identified with the Dorset culture. The ruins of their houses line the beach in front of the village. Each raised beach ridge represents a different era, with its signature houses, boats, decorations, lamps, and tools. Whalebones and a few human skulls can still be found there. Marine mammals were so abundant in the waters of Foxe Basin that there was no need to travel far. And there were plenty of caribou on the adjacent Melville Peninsula.

Around
A.D
. 1000, during the medieval warming period, Thule people pursued bowhead whales in open water with newly designed harpoons and hunted seals on ice. To the already ancient culture here, they introduced dogsleds.

Ice was the natural obstacle in the high Arctic, keeping out anyone who did not know how to live in the extreme cold. As a result, a single circumpolar strand of culture spans 6,000 miles, from the east coast of Siberia to the east coast of Greenland. The story told to a child in Siorapaluk, Greenland, is the same story told to youngsters in Point Hope, Alaska. The dialect may differ, but the language and material and intellectual culture are the same.

“There’s nothing else like it in the world,” John says. “Which makes me wonder why, of all entities, the Nunavut government doesn’t see the importance of the Oral History Project, of the preservation and the passing on of tradition.”

A WHITE HAZE covers the town. Houses and buildings are snow blasted. Rime ice etches windowpanes; mist coagulates into drifting sparkle. The sky is still dark. In the legends of the old days, before light had been brought to the world, it was said that inland dwellers lit their forefingers and used them as lanterns, and a nomadic hunter named Aqikhivik claimed that everything was alive. He said, “When a caribou had been eaten, the meat grew again on the bones. The houses were alive and could be moved with everything in them, and the people as well, from one place to another. They rose up with a rushing noise into the air and flew to the spot where the people wanted to go. In those days also, newly drifted snow would burn.”

Today, in Igloolik nothing burns except electricity. Christmas tree lights flash. When the haze parts, John points out the star Arcturus—Sivulliik in Inuktitut. It is associated with one of the circumpolar orphan stories told everywhere in the far north in which an orphan and his grandmother escape a tyrant and are lifted into the sky and become stars.

“From stars we tell time and location as well as legends,” John says. He learned celestial navigation when he was young and uses it still. His book
The Arctic Sky
is full of Inuit star stories. Between the Bering Strait and Greenland the constellation of Orion has 24 names—“the linked ones,” “travelers,” “runners,” “hunters,” “early risers,” “those who follow,” and “steps cut in ice”—the names suggestive of movement and travel.

Once there were two hunters who were trapped on moving ice. One followed the star Singuuriq and was never seen again; the other followed Kingullialuk and made it back to land-fast ice, “That’s how important it was to know the stars,” John says.

Today
qilak,
the sky, is a black dome. In earlier times it was thought of as a canopy of hard material that housed those escaping the hardships of life, as well as dead souls, and had an interior filled with feathers. Moon-man and Sun-woman lived there with the stars of dead spirits. The dome also had natural openings through which a shaman could make a journey.

The sun’s first appearance was greeted by children with half smiles. They had to use their left side to smile. The other, unsmiling side was an acknowledgment of the cold winter weather still to come. Young people ran from household to household blowing out the flames of the blubber lamps. New moss wicks replaced the old. A flame was ignited with a flint and a stone inside a
tartuaq
—a box made of walrus-kidney membrane. From that one flame, others got the fire to relight their lamps.

Future weather could be predicted by what was explained as the contest between the Sun-woman and the Moon-man. If the sun rose before the first new moon of the year, the weather in spring and summer would be dry and warm; if it rose after the new moon, cold storms would continue coming.

The magical and practical lay side by side in Inuit lives. “They didn’t think of them as being separate,” John says. Snowmobiles roar by as we walk. Some drivers are young, others have whole families aboard—a husband, wife, and child on one seat. Do they know the stars? If they left town, could they find their way home? “Some do,” John says. “Most don’t.”

JOHN’S ORAL HISTORY PROJECT is located in a three-story blue box that serves as the municipal building. Leah Otak runs the project. In her late 50s, she has long, black braids and a weathered face. She’s soft-spoken but determined. Two years earlier we had met at her mother’s house. They were talking about camp life: how in spring there was usually plenty of food because ringed seals, walruses, and belugas swam up the newly opened leads. Now her mother is dead and so is one of her two brothers, but Leah is carrying on the traditions and teaching the young.

“Everything is going too shallow,” Leah says, looking out the window at the graves on the white hill. Just below is the high school, and in the other direction are tracks that lead far out to Ikpik Bay and Fury and Hecla Strait, where a few young hunters have gone to net seals.

“Our language is what’s wrong to begin with,” she says. “And that affects everything else. Our language has gone so English. The elders speak Inuktitut and the youngsters speak Inuktitut translated from English. If they don’t know a word, they fill it in with English. Even the teachers in the schools don’t speak proper Inuktitut. It is not a full language anymore. And it’s only here in Igloolik that Inuktitut is really spoken at all. If our language is in trouble, our entire culture is in trouble. You can’t have a culture without the words to describe and name what is.”

Place-names in Arctic cultures point to the attributes of a place and can indicate the area where walruses, whales, seals, or sea birds might be found; they help the hunter remember how to get home. Inuktitut words have a sense of action and liveliness, naming and indicating movement—the direction a star might take, where it begins its seasonal rotation and where it ends.

John and Leah complain that television has helped push Inuktitut into a decline. Though the community voted down satellite TV twice in an effort to curtail cultural erosion, another vote in 1981 allowed it in. One wonders if the language protection bill on the table in Iqaluit, demanding that signs and services be written in Inuktitut, will do any good. “The underlying thing in all language survival is that people need to want to speak it,” John says. “Here, it’s a language of cultural practice, and when those traditional practices are gone, how relevant will Inuktitut words be?”

Leah offers us tea. She talks about her mother. “She knew everything,” Leah says. “She left all her skins to me when she died, so I have to find time between raising children and working here to sew skin clothes.

“We’ve lost so much. The women are forgetting how to prepare skins, how to make a pattern for skin clothing. We have to re-learn before it’s all lost—not in school, they have their Alberta curriculum, but somewhere else where we can get the kids interested again. They think it’s only the past. To be acceptable again, we have to be Inuit in our hearts.”

Leah was born in a winter camp at Iglurjuat, eight hours by Ski-Doo from Igloolik, in a sod house insulated with heather stuffed into the walls and under the beds. “Everything smelled so good,” she remembers. “I was lucky, I wasn’t sent away to residential school. I stayed with my mum, and she taught me everything she knew. My childhood was the tail end of traditional living, when the men ate in one room and the women in another. Food was shared. A haunch of caribou was cooked, a bite taken with a knife, and then it was passed around. During times of open water we traveled by umiaq that had a little sail if there was wind. It could be fast. We went to hunt caribou by umiaq. In the spring we hunted seals. And there was always walrus in Ikiq—Fury and Hecla Strait.

“We had three different camps and stayed in each until we had enough food and skins. There were no doctors. A man in a neighboring camp had a boil, and we stuck a lemming skin on it to suck out the pus. We got aspirin from the Catholic priest.

“Shortly after I started remembering these things, my mother’s oldest brother converted to Christianity. But I kept thinking how wonderful it must have been to live without hearing any government rules or any ideas about God. That must have been nice!”

A young woman shows up in the office, dragging a small child behind her, yelling at William, a handsome man who has come north from Iqaluit to translate some of the oral histories into English. He listens, says nothing, and she leaves. Leah shoots a hard look at him.