During his overwintering in the Belchers, Flaherty shot thirty thousand feet of film footage with a Bell & Howell hand-cranked motion picture camera, but he accidentally dropped a lit cigarette on the flammable nitrate-based film. The film ignited and was lost.
A few years later, Flaherty made the celebrated documentary Nanook of the North near the mainland village of Port Harrison. The film depicts a barely contacted group of Inuit very similar to the Belcher Inuit. Indeed, Flaherty’s lost Belcher footage might be regarded as a tryout for Nanook.
The word Qiqiqtarmiut, as the Belcher Inuit call themselves, means “People of the Islands.” A slight mispronunciation, and you’ll get qiqittaq, which means “frozen feet” in Inuktitut, the polysynthetic Inuit language.
Nanook’s real name was Allakarialluk. Flaherty didn’t think cinema audiences would like such a hard-to-pronounce name, so he changed Allakarialluk’s name to Nanook, which means “polar bear” in Inuktitut.
In the film, Nanook is a proverbial Noble Savage, a perpetually smiling primitive who knows nothing about white man’s world, but in real life Allakarialluk was Port Harrison’s postman, a man fully aware of that world.
Postman of the North is probably not a title that would have appealed to cinema audiences in either Flaherty’s time or our own.
Nanook struggles to survive in a constantly harsh world, but Flaherty may have been more harsh to him than this world. In the journal he kept while making the film, Flaherty wrote: “Nanook’s laziness reached a climax today.… Busted him, his pipe, and his tobacco in the snow.”
So popular was Nanook of the North that its hero’s likeness appeared on Eskimo Pie wrappers around the world all through the 1920s.
One of the film’s most popular images shows Nanook listening to a record player with a mixture of bafflement and hilarity, as if he thought some sort of talking spirit inhabited this qallunaat box. A response many Inuit had when they first heard voices emerging from a record player.
Allakarialluk died shortly after the film was released. Flaherty announced that his hero had died of starvation, a condition much appreciated by the media.
In 2005, I visited Johnny Inukpuk, Allakarialluk’s ninety-three-year-old cousin, who lived in the village of Inukjuak (formerly Port Harrison). During my visit, I mentioned that his cousin had starved to death. Johnny, who was flensing a seal at the time, nearly flensed himself.
“He died of tuberculosis,” Johnny sputtered.