In the Empire of Ice (20 page)

During a walrus hunt on moving ice, which is very dangerous, a hunter would sometimes take an old, retired dog out with him. Lucien said: “He puts that dog on the shortest trace who hardly had to pull, because he will know which way the ice is moving and when to get off it before it breaks away and which way to go, because he can feel the currents and knows the wind.”

When the government began taking over, they demanded that the dogs be tied up. Lucien said: “That is when they started to get really bad healthwise, they had to be fed while they were in chain. This caused them to get unhealthy very quickly.”

If the dogs got loose, they were shot. “This person was going to tie his dogs as he was just returning, and before he got a chance to tie them, all of them were shot. When you are just returning from a trip, you would unharness them and the dogs run around before they settle. They will return, close to the dwelling of the owner. That was how the dogs behaved. When the government came to town, they started to shoot off our dogs,” Lucien Ukaliannuk said in his oral history.

The Qikiqtani Inuit Association’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee has been holding hearings on dog-killing issues. Allegedly, 20,000 sled dogs were shot in the 1950s and 1960s in Nunavut and Nunavik, and the Nunatsiavut region of Labrador. Government administrators say that is impossible since there was not enough ammunition allocated in those years to kill that many dogs, and that the few killings were for public health reasons. Inuit hunters say otherwise, and the controversy continues.

John MacDonald insists that it could not have been an all-out slaughter. “There weren’t enough policemen to shoot all those dogs,” he said. “I think it happened irregularly.” But Sheila Watt-Cloutier disagrees: “There was a systematic slaughter of our sled dogs,” she said. “Thousands and thousands of them were shot by the RCMP. It was an assault on us and our way of living. They even shot the dogs of some visitors to our village from another area who had come to trade, so those people couldn’t get home.”

Regardless of who is right, writers for
Nunatsiaq News
say that what’s important now is to heal “the collective mourning for and unresolved grief at the loss of an old way of life.”

Shortly after sled dogs became scarce, snowmobiles were introduced. They were expensive and used petrol. To have one, to be a hunter, to have any mobility at all, meant you had to become “a wage slave,” an indentured servant to the government jobs on offer. The emotional and economic strings that had lured the hunters into town kept pulling tighter and tighter.

Family groups who had never lived near each other were crowded together irrespective of kinship lines. Ceremonial life disintegrated. The local shamans went underground or disappeared. Language weakened. A whole way of being and an ecology of thought vanished.

The only imperative these hunters knew was the one laid down by Sila. Weather and the movement of animals ruled. They had always been told to observe Sila and to be alert to the dangers of weather and ice. But where, in the exhaust of snowmobiles, does Sila reside?

IN 1953 TEN FAMILIES from northern Quebec and Pond Inlet were “relocated” to Cornwallis Island and Grise Fjord and the east coast of Ellesmere Island. This “solution” to what Canadian ministers were calling the Eskimo problem—the failure of the fox-fur market in Europe on which Inuit subsistence hunters turned trappers had become dependent—was actually a veiled attempt to claim sovereignty to areas of the far north and to prevent Greenland hunters from crossing over to Ellesmere, only 30 miles from them, and shooting what they claimed to be “Canadian” polar bears.

The relocation of these families a thousand miles farther north was brutal. Cornwallis is low, windblown, and gravelly. Parry had overwintered off the coast on his first Arctic trip in 1819, on the first of his three Arctic expeditions, and he had found nothing there but rock—no open leads where seals could be caught until spring. The east coast of Ellesmere Island had been uninhabited since the Medieval Warm Period, when Thule people hunted up the coast to the Bache Peninsula. Winds were well over 100 miles an hour and pressure ice heaved up in the narrow strait, making access to marine mammals extremely difficult and dangerous.

The relocated hunters were unused to such weather extremes and were not equipped to hunt on moving ice. Musk oxen and polar bears wandered by, but they were not a dependable food source. The Canadian government may have gotten rid of their “welfare Eskimos,” but they sentenced them to a life of homesickness and near starvation. Their promises of supplies and a return home after a year if desired both proved false.

Among those “exiles” was the son of American filmmaker Robert Flaherty and his Inuit lover Maggie. Flaherty’s romantic documentary
Nanook of the North
(1922) became a classic, but after making it, he abandoned Maggie and returned to his American life and family. His illegitimate Inuit son, Josephie, lived in spiritual poverty, the poverty of being dispossessed.

Young Josephie was kind and well-meaning, but he was neither hunter nor villager. His adoptive father, a fine hunter, was one of the first to be relocated to Ellesmere Island, and on his way there wrote a letter to his beloved stepson, asking him to join him.

Josephie had already packed up his wife and children and was on the annual ship north when he learned that his stepfather was dead. Once on Ellesmere, Josephie was unable to cope with the ruthlessly cold weather. While his biological father, Robert Flaherty, was being wined and dined around the world, Josephie and his family—homesick, grief-stricken, and despairing—began to starve.

THE RECENT NATURAL RESOURCE MAP of Nunavut that I am holding is laced with little red boxes and color-coded dots marking oil and gas, diamonds, uranium, coal, gold, rubies, iron, nickel-copper, and precious metals. A coal project on Ellesmere Island, an iron ore mine on Baffin, gemstones to the south of Igloolik, gold near Churchill, gold and uranium near Coronation Gulf. Between are musk ox refuges, caribou calving grounds, narwhal and walrus migration routes, nesting bird cliffs, and polar bear sanctuaries.

Issues of sovereignty are not over in the Arctic. Northwest and Northeast Passage mania is raging again as areas across the top of Russia and through the Canadian archipelago remain ice free longer. In the summer of 2007 the Russians planted a flag at the North Pole, drew a line from there to the tip of Siberia, and declared that roughly half the Arctic, an area that encompasses 6 percent of the Earth’s surface, belonged to them.

Although the 1800s rush was only to find a shortcut to Asia, now every world power is trying to lay claim to enormous untapped circumpolar oil and gas reserves, as well as iron and precious metals. The entire Arctic is open for business, with no thought given to the consequences on the fragile Arctic ecosystem: its marine and terrestrial animals, humans, migrating birds, insects, plants, fish, and the open-ocean ecosystems. The climate crisis we are facing now results from human domination over the planet. It turns out it wasn’t really “ours” after all.

There are eight proposed uranium projects in western Nunavut. Inuit protesters in Baker Lake say they would be downstream and downwind of the mine, and the nearby caribou calving ground would be adversely affected. The hunt for uranium has gone farther west to the Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary on the border between Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, where two separate caribou herds have a combined population of 772,000 animals.

There’s a diamond rush on in Nunavut. More than seven million acres of land have been acquired by various aggressive mining companies on Victoria, Devon, Banks, Prince of Wales, Baffin, and Ellesmere Islands. On the western waters of the Northwest Passage, in the Mackenzie River Valley and Delta, there are an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of oil reserves and 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. A 600-mile-long pipeline is being built from the town of Inuvik south through Fort Simpson into Alberta.

Nunavut has a new colonizer: the mining industry. It believes the pursuit of profit is the only good.

APRIL 2006: I am in Igloolik with a Canadian film crew, and we are going with five hunters out on the land to look for polar bears. As we leave town, an old man is singing. He hangs his bare arms, palms up, out of the window of his house and tilts his face into the spring sun. “Aya, aya, aya,” he chants. I’m going to spring camp at Mitliluk with Theo Ikummeq; his three nephews Harry, Joe, and Bruno; his childhood friend John Arnatsiaq; and the four-man film crew.

The camp we are headed for is a hundred miles away. It’s already three in the afternoon and cold—around 20 below. Accustomed to traveling by dogsled, I ask how many days it will take to get there. Theo laughs. “We’re modern hunters. Dogsleds are too slow. We’ll be there tonight.”

Nothing could have prepared me for the violence and deep cold of this journey on a machine. “We used to use dogsleds and wear one-piece caribou suits,” Theo says. “Now we drive snowmobiles and wear white man’s clothes with caribou socks.” When I ask why, he looks away and shrugs.

At three in the afternoon, we head out—six snowmobiles and 14 people in all. I’m being towed behind a snowmobile on a flimsy
komatik,
a wooden sled, gulping exhaust as we fly over rough ice.

We are traveling fast, far too fast, careering over snow-covered land down onto ice. We go up and over Coxe Islands, Richards Bay, across the crooked arm of a strait, over Amherst Island, then traverse the edge of Fury and Hecla Strait until we reach the northwest corner of Baffin Island.

When dogs and dogsleds were in use here, this trip might have taken three days. You could see the shapes of the snowdrifts, feel wind changes, see animal scat and tracks, sleep in tents, tell stories, make food, sleep close together, and, while traveling, avoid the horrendous wind chill.

As the speed increases, I support myself with a straight arm. The jolts are wrenching, and at the speed of 30 miles an hour the windchill drops the temperature to minus 50. A peach moon rises over Ikiq. It is full and looks like something to eat. But we’re going too fast to tell which way the wind is blowing or where we’ve been, and I’m at a loss to understand why anyone would choose to travel this way.

It takes nine hours to reach camp. At midnight the pink moon deepens to the color of a rose. There’s a tiny cabin with a sod roof, not big enough for all 14 of us, so the drivers move their Ski-Doos in a wide circle and shine their lights on John, who has begun building an igloo.

Between blanks of night and ice light a knife flashes. Its curve-cuts come fast—
whoosh, whoosh,
and a block lifts out of the snowbank, whole and glistening.
Whoosh, whoosh
—the knife swings again. Is it cutting darkness or ice?

The sides of each block are shaped, the edges beveled, then John sets it between other blocks, tamping it gently on the top with the handle of his knife until there’s a soft thud and it shifts perfectly into place. Another rectangular block comes free, and another. As the walls go up, we chink the cracks with snow. In an hour the “boss block” is carefully set in the hole at the top and the igloo is ready.

Inside caribou skins are laid on ice benches. Our duffles are thrown in, sleeping bags unrolled. The single flame of an old primus stove is lit, giving off heat and light. “There are tidal cracks just off the point here,” Theo says. “In the winter, we set nets there to catch seals. Caribou, seal, polar bear, arctic char—it’s abundant here, so that’s why there’s a camp here. The name Mitliluk means ‘sea-running char’ and tells you where you are, and that you will be eating good fish here.

“A name prescribes and describes,” Theo explains, taking off his winter-camouflage parka. “It tells a story about a certain kind of ice, where it’s safe to hunt walrus, or it is unsafe to walk on. You need to know these things. Without those names, you won’t know. You may know how to get home, but you don’t know how to behave where you are.”

He tells me that in a southeasterly wind, there are two kinds of snowdrifts. “One is cheeklike, the other drift is like a tongue. Then the cheeks turn into tongues, where the wind has driven through. We have words for wind and all the ways it carves snow.

“See, I’m thinking in Inuktitut. But the youngsters are thinking in English. That makes it hard for me to explain these things to them. Without language, there can be no proper transmission, there is no finding your way to a polar bear and then getting home.”

I make tea for John and Theo. It’s three in the morning and we’re still talking. John says that snowdrifts are more accurate than wind for finding one’s way. “I just drag my foot a little in the snow, and that drift will tell me which way the wind is blowing,” he says. “Not so many know how to read drifts anymore. The people have lost a degree of independence that will never be recovered or know what one learns living out on the land and ice.”

Theo says that there are only a few left who know the traditions. Some don’t even hunt seals anymore, and it’s the same with moving-ice hunting and the winter walrus hunt. “When the hunt goes, so does the reason to speak the language.”

A night wind blows and the sod roof seems to shift. The low entry door made of driftwood creaks. My toes, frostbitten many times over the years, hurt now as they thaw.

“My grandmother survived on human flesh. Her husband offered himself!” Theo says and looks to see if I’m shocked, but I’m not. Starvation stories are abundant in the Arctic. He continues, “It was my father’s mother. She was gone by the time I came to be. A young couple, they were headed for their autumn camp with their two children when they discovered their winter cache of food had been raided by wolves. They stopped and hunted for caribou but with no success. They jigged for fish. Nothing. Winter was coming on fast, and they knew starvation was near. Finally, they began killing their dogs for food.

“They tried to catch rabbits but couldn’t find any. They ate leather thongs and straps, and later they ate their own clothes. My grandmother was only 14 years old. Her husband was older. He said to her, ‘When I die, please eat me. I taste like caribou.’ And finally she did. Then she ate her two children after they died.