The Eskimo Invasion (2 page)

 

 

"Big crack ahead," the pilot remarked as the ice rose to meet them,
and he advanced the throttle lever, making the propjet engine scream
with last instant power.

 

 

Skimming above the ice, the Turbo-Beaver climbed. Scowling, the pilot
attempted another landing pattern, while Dr. West tried to look nonchalant.
Like a brick, the Turbo-Beaver dropped in. The skis skipped along the ice
while the pilot slid the throttle lever past idle into reverse.
The reversed pitch prop frantically beat the air as they slid toward the
Mississippi-wide crack with the pilot shrilly cursing. Instinctively,
Dr. West ducked. The Turbo-Beaver swerved alongside the open lead,
momentarily tail into the wind, and spun around. Motion ceased.

 

 

"Piece of cake," the pilot laughed. "Me Turbo-Beaver may be old because
her first owner bought 'er way back in '67. But twenty-two years old
and she hasn't killed a pilot yet."

 

 

Dr. West was looking toward the distant shore. The tents were so far away
they were specks.

 

 

"Hop out, sir. Help me work these planks under the skis. Shouldn't want to
freeze her to the ice."

 

 

The wind felt sharp against Dr. West's cheeks as the pilot
handed down his sleeping bag, rifle, camera and ninety-pound
pack of supplies. He didn't want to sponge off Eskimos who
might be starving. Staring at the shore he could see smaller
specks moving among the tents.

 

 

"They'll come." Visible through the double doors of the fuselage, the pilot
hurriedly was rigging a rubber hose from a fuel drum to the floor tank.
"If we hear the F-111 overhead, I've lost me aircraft." Violently, he began
to hand-pump. "No use walking, sir. They'll come out after you."

 

 

Dr. West hoped so. Uneasily he suspected some of these Eskimos at some time
must have attempted to leave the Sanctuary. They would have been turned back
by the blue-and-white uniformed Guards. Logically, they might think all
whitemen were their enemies. After twenty years of isolation, these Eskimos
might have strange ideas about the world Outside.

 

 

"They're coming." The pilot called from his higher observation point in
the doorway of the ski-plane. "Only one dogsled. Maybe a dozen 'skimos
running behind."

 

 

Dr. West grinned with excitement. The McGill University crowd were so
damn curious to know how Canada's Fifth Alternative for her Eskimos was
turning out. But the ethnologists and demographers hadn't been curious
enough to risk being arrested and losing their various research grants
from the Canadian Government.

 

 

Dr. West knew the Five Alternative Program offered more varying
life-possibilities to Eskimos than the U.S. offered to Indians or
Anglo-Saxons. With a less cumbersome population than the United States,
Canada had become more flexible in dealing with her people and economy.
He hoped Canada was becoming a guide dog for the United States.

 

 

The loading doors of the Turbo-Beaver slammed shut. The cockpit window
opened. "Pick you up at this camp, one week from today."

 

 

"One week?" Dr. West bleated. "We agreed one month."

 

 

"The way this ice is breaking up, in a month I'll be lucky to walk away
from the crash. Impossible to land ."

 

 

"We agreed on a month. Come back with pontoons."

 

 

"Should of thought of this sooner, I should." The pilot was glancing up at
the sky as if he expected to see the F-111B circling like a hawk. "Eskimos
travel. Probably gossip like old ladies. Word of me aircraft will spread
from this camp to the Guard Stations."

 

 

"There's supposed to be no contact."

 

 

"Those Guards are human, sir. 'skimo girls are a bit of all right, I hear.
Even in a week, word about us may travel to the Guard Station, and you'll be
arrested. If I come back in a month, I bloody well know I'll be flying into
an ambush. Me aircraft's me life!"

 

 

Dr. West stood looking up at the pilot. What could he say?

 

 

The pilot said: "Allow me another week for engine trouble before you
walk out to the Guard Station and give yourself up."

 

 

"I could survive all winter," Dr. West retorted. "I spent an entire year
with the last primitive hunters in Alaska."

 

 

"I'll be back for you in a week. Be ready." The pilot started the squealing
propjet, and the Turbo-Beaver taxied across the ice, its fuselage dimpled
with two decades of dents. Screaming faster and faster, it lifted itself,
fleeing, shrinking away to the west.

 

 

Because Dr. West had ninety pounds of concentrated foods, plus rifle,
sleeping bag, camera, notebooks, binoculars and other whitemen's
paraphernalia, he didn't walk to meet the sled. Discouragingly, it had
halted on the ice. The specks were clustered beside it.
Are they arguing
what to do about me? Theoretically, they've been segregated from whitemen
for twenty years.

 

 

He hoped they would greet him with shy grins and outstretched hands like
those last Alaskan wanderers, whose daily lives resembled Canada's First
Alternative for her Eskimos. They trapped a few furs and were in debt
to whitemen. Seasonally pious, they hung around missions and suddenly
were gone. The Canadian Eskimos of the First Alternative reappeared at
Government Posts to collect their Family Allowances. With much flour
and bacon, and harmonicas playing and raisins fermenting and old women
dancing, they celebrated all winter. The Canadian Government still hoped
the other Four Alternatives would end this alternative or at least tidy
it up.

 

 

The Second Alternative encompassed the Eskimos permanently working at
Government Posts or at Arctic airfields and mines or in the growing
Arctic transport industry. Their children more regularly attended school.

 

 

The Third Alternative had grown from the Second. Eskimos with more education
migrated to the cities. There was a Professor of Sociology at McGill who had
been born in an Eskimo village. These Eskimos simply were vanishing into the
Canadian melting pot. Their Eskimo cultural heritage was lost.

 

 

The Fourth Alternative was Canada's pride. Eight years ago, Dr. West
had lived for a year with the Co-Op Eskimos of Bylot Island and Baffinland.
But the first Co-Ops had begun far back in 1958 at Ungava Bay, near Labrador.
During the next thirty years these Eskimo Co-Operatives had spread throughout
the Northwest Territories. In spite of its ponderous bureaucratic title,
the Cooperative Development Section of the Industrial Division of the
Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources shrewdly and patiently
had helped these Eskimos learn enough self-confidence to begin making their
own group decisions. From carving soapstone art objects, the early Co-Ops
expanded to quick-freezing fish, to breeding reindeer, to shipping meat,
to renting shops as sales outlets in cities. After guiding sportsmen,
Eskimos cooperated to construct tourist airtels. From investing Co-Op
self-help funds in new Eskimo ventures, Co-Op Eskimo groups ventured into
the stock market. They owned houses, boats and ice cars and watched TV
and smoked cigars. The Co-Op Eskimos had created a strong subculture,
which no longer was Eskimo.

 

 

"The true Eskimos are vanishing," an Assistant Professor of Ethnology
at McGill University had cried out before a Parliamentary Committee more
than twenty years ago.

 

 

A Fifth Alternative for Canada's Eskimos was needed, Hans Suxbey had
pleaded; and an excerpt from Hans Suxbey's speech even had been published
in California in a 1968
Sierra Club Bulletin
, intensely read by a
thin high school sophomore named Joe West. "We try to preserve species
of trees and animals from extinction," Hans Suxbey was quoted. "But we
extinguish mankind's distinctive ways of life. What is a man? He is
his way of life. Preserve him from extinction. In this increasingly
homogenized world, any independent way of life has increasing value for
its own sake. Think of Eskimo culture as 5000 years of the hardiest men
ingeniously creating a distinctive way of life which survived the worst
blizzards. But one hundred years of cultural erosion from our kerosene
and rifles, our bacon and flour, Family Allowances and outboard motors,
transistor radios and so-called schools propagandizing our way of life
has almost erased the Eskimo's heritage. Eskimo culture must not die!"

 

 

The Fifth Alternative for Canada's Eskimos officially began in 1970 when
Parliament voted a small appropriation to indemnify existing private
interests in the North and to administer the vast new Eskimo Cultural
Sanctuary.

 

 

"We must stay out." Even Director Hans Suxbey's specially trained Cultural
Instructors, a dozen graduate students of Eskimo ethnology, were withdrawn
from the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary as planned after the first winter. "The
natural environment is the true teacher of Eskimo culture," Hans Suxbey
had announced nineteen years ago. "Not even I will violate the Eskimo
Cultural Sanctuary."

 

 

Dr. West wondered how the 112 Eskimos who happened to be on the Boothia
Peninsula then had reacted when their rifles or cooking pots were taken
away by earnest graduate students. Evidently Parliament didn't think
democratic choices extended this far north. These abruptly isolated
Eskimos' only opportunity to vote had been with their feet. Now there
was antipersonnel radar along the invisible boundary. The windows in the
Guards' patrolling helicopters reportedly had one-way glass. Dr. West
wondered what these approaching Eskimos thought had happened to the world.

 

 

At this distance the Eskimos appeared faceless. Spreading out, they left
the sled behind. There were twelve of them, seeming short and stocky in
their shapeless parkas.

 

 

Dr. West opened his hands. Desperately he smiled. He thought Hans Suxbey
had reported to Parliament every fifth year about these Eskimos,
barely enough details of their "cultural progress" as observed from his
helicopter to support another appropriation for his Guards. Theoretically,
for nineteen years no whitemen had talked with these people.

 

 

They were returning his smile! With the hoods of their summer parkas
turned back, their shaggy black hair gleaming, their wide-cheeked faces
smiled so youthfully that Dr. West kept turning his head, expecting to
discover a more weathered face, a leader. A young man hurried forward
and extended his hand, smooth as a child's. Beginning with a whiteman's
handshake, elaborating it into a ceremony, the young Eskimo raised his
clasped hands as high as his forehead and then down to knee level and
peeked up through his unkempt locks at Dr. West. Shyly they both smiled.

 

 

"This person," Dr. West began speaking about himself in halting Eskimo,
"has come with open hands as a friend."

 

 

"Eh! One of us? All men speak the same?" The Eskimos crowded around him,
all shaking his hand, laughing as if with relief. "That old Peterluk lied."

 

 

Dr. West realized this one with the smallest hand was a girl. Her lustrous
black hair was tied back in a bun. As if casting aside conventional female
shyness, she smiled up at him. He laughed with pleasure. They all laughed
as if they had been friends forever.

 

 

"This person's name is Edwardluk," the young leader laughed, shaking his
hand again.

 

 

It was reassuring that this Eskimo was willing to expose his name to
a stranger, Dr. West thought, laughing inwardly at the Director of the
Cultural Sanctuary. Hans Suxbey would be outraged by such an un-Eskimo
name as Edwardluk. Ever since the nineteenth-century invasion by the
whalers and missionaries, for over a hundred years Eskimos had been
donning the most powerful Biblical names and adding Eskimo endings.
But
Edwardluk
?

 

 

With the ultimate in hospitality, Edwardluk was murmuring:
"You must live with us forever."

 

 

Dr. West picked up his camera and rifle and reached for his sleeping bag,
but Edwardluk insisted on carrying it. As if showing off the power of his
manhood, Edwardluk shouted at the girl to carry the big pack. Dr. West
watched her bend, squat and heft the ninety pounds of supplies weighing
nearly as much as she, but she staggered stolidly across the ice toward
the sled. Edwardluk shouted encouragement after her with such pride of
ownership that Dr. West thought she must be his wife.

 

 

"Ha! We go!" Edwardluk insisted that Dr. West sit on the sled and ran
alongside shouting: "This person -- has killed -- a poor little seal --
unworthy of a hunter." Edwardluk grinned with so much pride that Dr. West
suspected it was a large and fat seal, and he began looking forward to
sinking his teeth into seal meat again.

 

 

Ten years ago, his summer with the wandering Alaskan Eskimos had been the
happiest of his life, and now he felt excitement like a child returning
to a summer cottage. Shouting, laughing, romping, these Eskimos seemed
to radiate happiness as they manhandled the sled across ice ridges. Now
trotting beside them, Dr. West warmed to the exercise, feeling better
all the time.

 

 

As they approached the camp, an amazing number of children swarmed out
on the ice to meet them, laughing and skylarking and running alongside
Dr. West, looking up at him as if he were a giant. Ahead of him in the
camp he saw that many of the dark spots were not tents. They were piles
of beach stones and driftwood, elevated caches to separate the meat from
the dogs, but there were surprisingly few dogs. Beside the largest tent,
an Eskimo hurriedly was tying dogs to another sled.