In the Empire of Ice (18 page)

“Our society in Igloolik no longer reflects our hearts,” Leah says. “It’s not the Inuit way to break into people’s houses and steal, but now that’s common. It’s not the Inuit way to be boastful or envious, angry, violent, or disrespectful. Those of us who have been hurt in the past now give our kids anything they want just to compensate for what they did not have.

“Discipline is very important in our culture. Without it, you don’t survive. When we lived out on the land, we were getting seals and caribou all the time. The women prepared skins and made beautiful clothes. Boys learned by doing, not talking. The men provided lots of meat for us. We didn’t tell people to ‘have a good day,’ because we knew about Sila—the power of nature. We knew the day was beyond our control. It was a joyous way of living. There was no time to fight.”

William goes back into his office and puts earphones on. The wind howls and the world outside goes white. Leah says, “Lately I sense that we’re at our worst, here in Igloolik. I’m doubtful that we’ll ever get back to our strong days. We are not the strong people we used to be. When we were kids, we helped. Life wasn’t only playing. They’re not making children good helping people anymore. Boy, we’ve really changed.” She looks out the window. “Now who among us is
silatujuk
—wise?”

John turns on one of the lab computers and shows me how to access the oral history archive. I punch in keywords: “Shaman,” “seal,” “dog,” “foretelling the future,” and up come the stories that have those words in them. “We’re the best studied community in Nunavut,” William says. “But what good does it do?”

Alone in my cubicle I type in the words “Animal life.” A story comes up: “One thing for certain there are not as many animals as there used to be, especially seals. In the spring there are fewer birds—we used to have so many things like eider ducks, old-squaw, and arctic terns, including
Saurraq.
In the past there used to be more, but now there are less, in fact I miss them.” (Louis Alianakuluk Utak oral history)

“Dogsleds”: “In those days they used walrus hide for the shoeing and
Isajuk,
caribou antlers when they were frozen. Bone shoeing was used too from a bowhead whale. These were the most common shoeing. We used sod too, but bone shoeing was best on moving ice. We made traces and harnesses in the summer for winter use. But we would not
arrsuq
(scrape the fatty tissue from the thong) when the temperatures were at their warmest, only time they would do that was when it was raining or in the evening. The
pittuq
—the draught strap—had to be made stronger. If it snapped the man would lose his dogs especially if he was a slow runner as he would not be able to catch up to the loose dogs. If he was a fast runner, he would have no difficulty.” (Louis Alianakuluk Utak oral history)

“Seals”: “Then there are the albino bearded seals. It is said that if you saw one you should not hunt them down. They are known as
silaat,
their hair is all white, at its back is a diamond shaped dark skin part…the best you should do is look at it even if you saw how you would love to catch it, but you should not try…. It is also said that your life might be cut short. This is what was said by the people before us.” (Margaret Sunaq Kipsigaq oral history)

“Bears”: “There are huge bears. From what I heard they are
inukpa-sukjuit,
giants. They are called
nanurluit.
It is said that if you are close to one of them and it blows out, this alone has the capacity to blow away a person…if it starts to inhale the person would get immediately sucked in. At least this is according to legend. Indeed, they are said to be huge.” (Margaret Sunaq Kipsigaq oral history)

“Foretelling the future”: “The wife of my Uumatiqati, she has the capacity to foretell weather conditions. And when they are going to lose a relative, they usually find they are having very difficult time catching a game animal, very much so…. Or it might be that a man wakes up in the morning, as he gets dressed, in the process he puts on a garment the wrong side. This he uses to expect something good to come this day, a catch of a game animal.” (Lucien Ukaliannuk oral history)

“Animal transformations”: “Sometimes animals take the shape of a person. I’m not certain how it happens, something extraordinary, something to tell others about something—this is
inuruuqajuq.
It may be a dog or another species of animal. You would first notice it as an animal, next thing you notice, after you turned away for a short while, then you see a person in its place. Sometimes the animals get the capacity to talk, at least that’s what I’ve heard, they could talk. They were not feared. They were not scary at all. But when a loon uses its dance-sound in mid-flight there is something amiss. There are birds that fly in circles above you and they are chirping, this too was not liked by people. They know that something unpleasant is going to be heard. There were things that made you to know things, bad things, to happen.” (George Agiaq Kappianaq oral history)

“Gratitude”: “At the time when I was still too small to go on hunting trips and we were living in the igloo, the windows were frosted, including a frost built up on the panes at the entrance. When the frost starts to melt on its own, though the heat has not changed, my mother would immediately start to express her gratitude and announce that the hunters had succeeded in catching a game animal, and our supplies had been replenished. So it would come to be. She was able to tell from the defrosting of the windows.” (Lucien Ukaliannuk oral history)

“Shelter”: “This time of year we would start to move into
qarmaq
(sod house), while some would still be in a tent. Even when there was snow around, some would have stayed in a tent. Some would move into an igloo, using
tullaaq
(stomped hardened snow). Some would use slabs of ice hewn from freezing ice,
tugaliaq,
and some would have made a
qarmaq
before it got too cold. When you were in a tent in autumn, in the morning you wake up you will find your footwear frozen. Water in the pails would be frozen, then when the
qulliq
is lit, will slowly get warmer, so during the day the pails finally melt, that was the way it was. Everything was really hard in those days. It is now so different. Now we are controlled by money, in those days money was something we never thought of. The only thing in our minds was game animals and the need to survive.” (Louis Alianakuluk Utak oral history)

WILLIAM EDWARD PARRY was given the task of finding a passage to Asia by the British Admiralty. The Napoleonic wars in Europe had ended, and Trafalgar, having grown bored, asked the navy to map the world and seek a shorter passage to Asia. Northwest Passage mania emerged quickly.

In 1824, on a second expedition to find the Northwest Passage, Parry and George Lyon sailed two ships, the
Fury
and the
Hecla,
up the wide waters of Foxe Basin. As winter came on, they anchored near the walrus-hunting village of Igloolik. By late summer the ice in the strait named for their ships was already three feet thick and the land was fog shrouded. For the next ten months Parry, Lyon, and their crews lived adjacent to 200 Inuit hunters and their families, going hunting with the men and taking Inuit “wives” for the season.

The Iglulingmiut, the local villagers, thought Parry had come looking for the remains of his mother, since their legends told of white people being the progeny of a marriage between a woman and a dog who lived on Qiqertarjuk, an island near Igloolik. The villagers helped Parry build an ice wall around the
Fury
to protect it, and drew accurate maps of the Melville Coast, assuring him that a passage existed, though, because of the ice, he was never able to find a way through to Asia.

George Lyon took to village life. In the
Private Journals of G. F. Lyon
he gave meticulous descriptions of the seminomadic hunters he came to know in scenes of both filth and splendor: “On the 25th of September 1822 I landed to visit my old acquaintances and found their huts in a most filthy state, owing to the mildness of the weather, and to their internal warmth: the water was dropping from the roofs, the ice had melted on the floors, and the juices of thawing and half-putrid walrus flesh, with other watery inconveniences, had made large sloppy puddles in the low entrances, through which we were obliged to crawl on our hands and knees.”

Winter houses were made of bone and sod;
igluit
(the plural of igloo) were connected by low tunnels that fanned out like stars. They were built with walrus-ivory snow knives on the sea ice near the breathing holes of seals. Farther down the coast Lyon described a house made of freshwater slabs of ice: “Toolemak’s dwelling was a perfect octagon and so transparent that even at some paces distant it was possible to distinguish those who stood within it one from the other; yet at the same time, it was so airtight, as to be completely warm.”

Parry and Lyon enjoyed their new Igloolik friends and admired the ingenuity of their clothing: the deerskin mittens, double sealskin boots with walrus-hide soles, and “summer frocks” made of duck skins with the feathers worn next to the body.

Lyon reported that the women of Igloolik softened the bird skins by chewing them and stretching them on racks to dry. They made whalebone pots, ivory ornaments, gear for bows, fishing lines, and harnesses for dogs. “They also have an ingenious method of making lamps and cooking pots of flat slabs of stone, which they cement together by a composition of seal’s blood applied warm, the vessel being held at the same time over the flame of a lamp, which dries the plaster to the hardness of a stone,” Lyon wrote.

Their kayaks were 19 feet long, with 64 ribs made of dwarf willow, small bones, and whalebone. Dogsleds were six feet long, made entirely of bone with walrus-ivory runners. When hunting walrus in summer, they hoisted their kayaks on a piece of drift ice near a herd of resting walruses and paddled the ice toward the sleeping animals. Harpoon lines were fastened to the ice, so when a walrus was struck, it could not escape. When the animal tired out, the hunter put his kayak in the water and lay low, and when close enough, speared the animal to death.

Social life was easygoing: Marriages, divorces, wife exchanges, and mutual infidelities were carried on in mostly amicable ways, in what Lyon called “extraordinary civilities.” Although the paternity of children was never certain, men treated their mates’ progeny with equal care.

Lyon also observed Toolemak, who was a shaman, as he went into a trance: “A very hollow, yet powerful voice, certainly much different from the tones of Toolemak, now chanted for some time, and a strange jumble of hisses, groans, shouts, and gabblings like a turkey, succeeded in rapid order.” Later, as the trance subsided, Lyon remarked: “The voice gradually sank from our hearing at first, and a very indistinct hissing succeeded: in its advance, it sounded like the tone produced by the wind on the base chord of an Eolian harp; this soon changed to a rapid hiss like that of a rocket, and Toolemak with a yell announced his return.”

According to Lyon, healing consisted of blowing on the diseased organs and open wounds. Newborn infants were swathed in the dried intestines of “some animal,” Lyon reported, then washed in its mother’s urine. Charms made of the foot bones of wolverines, the front teeth of musk oxen, the eyeteeth of foxes, and the bones and teeth of fish were worn. A string of miniature knives made of walrus ivory was worn to charm the weather. Parry and Lyon ate the local specialty,
igunaq
(fermented walrus), and, in turn, taught European dances to the locals. They bought dogsleds and dogs and made frequent forays onto the ice. But when Parry had an argument with one of the shamans and tried to kill him with an ax, it’s said that the blade failed to penetrate the man’s body. “We didn’t need guns or axes. Our weapons were carried inside,” Sheila Watt-Cloutier said about the story. The shaman was reportedly so angry he made the ice become so thick that no outsider was able to sail to Igloolik or penetrate Fury and Hecla Strait for 40 years.

AS SOON AS EXPLORERS and whalers from the British Isles and other parts of Europe and from America began plying the coast of Melville Peninsula and the low-lying island of Igloolik, flour, sugar, knives, cooking pots, steel sewing needles, and wood, plus rifles, ammunition, disease, and rum entered Inuit life. Some hunters took seasonal employment on the ships and used cash or trade goods to buy food for their families, to make up for the months they weren’t out on the land. The accordions and square dances brought by Scottish crews are still practiced today, and square dances are called in Inuktitut.

With the good came the bad. Whalers took on seasonal “wives” who bore half-breed children soon abandoned by their fathers. Epidemics of southern and European diseases followed. Bowhead whales and walruses were hunted almost to the point of extinction by American and European whalers during the 19th century.

As soon as the whalers stopped coming, the marine mammal populations began recovering, but the march of outsiders continued. In 1910 a Catholic priest named Etienne Barzin established a chapel at Avaaja, a camp 15 miles north of Igloolik. Anglican Bibles were printed in the newly created Inuit syllabary. Before then Inuit had no written language. It was easy to learn and to read, and it helped spread Christianity.

With a wry smile, John says, “Theirs was a taboo-glutted society. When they found out they could come to town once a month and make a confession and didn’t need to follow the strict rules of taboos anymore, they were relieved. It freed up their time. It was a shortcut to salvation.”

Traders replaced whalers. In 1921 the Hudson’s Bay Company opened a post in Pond Inlet, and by 1930 another post had been established in Igloolik. Fox furs were the rage in Europe. Subsistence hunters were encouraged to stop winter hunts and become trappers. The Hudson’s Bay Company bought the furs in exchange for credit at the store, where they could buy food and “southern goods.”