“The most dangerous book on earth,” George Bernard Shaw called the Bible.
In the late nineteenth century, an English missionary, the Rev. E. J. Peck, translated the New Testament into Inuit syllabics in order to bring the Inuit, he declared, “the glad tidings of Jesus” and “give them a burning zeal for their salvation.”
One of the Rev. Peck’s Bibles somehow found its way to the Belcher Islands in the 1930s. The person who interpreted it to the other Qiqiqtarmiut was a man named Keytowieack. Over and over again, he emphasized the fact that Jesus was a very good person, and Satan was a very nasty one.
Keytowieack also quoted Matthew 24 from the Rev. Peck’s Bible: “the stars will fall from the sky … and they [you] will see the Son of Man coming.”
“I saw the pages of the Bible moving all by themselves, and then they stopped moving,” the old woman told me. I asked her where they stopped. Perhaps the Book of Revelation? She looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “I’m so old, I don’t remember.”
The Bible in question ended up being burned. For Jesus would provide each snowhouse with its own Bible when he arrived in the Belchers. Or so the Qiqiqtarmiut thought.
Nowadays, in Sanikiluaq, there isn’t a resident clergyman. I asked the visiting clergyman about the events of 1941. “Past history,” he said, then offered me a cup of tea.
Only elders were willing to talk to me, and then only certain elders. Others felt that what happened sixty years earlier made them seem embarrassingly primitive or, as one man told me, isumairutivuq [completely crazy].
“Those murders are like someone raping your daughter,” a local Inuk told me. “You wouldn’t go around talking about that rape, would you?”
The old woman asked me not to use her name if these notes were published. Markassie and Simeonie also told me not to use their actual names. But Taliriktut told me that he liked his name, and it didn’t matter to him if I used it or not.
At present there’s no actual mention of the tragic events of 1941 on the Belcher Islands website. All that website says is this: “RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] investigates incidents of violence.”
“If you can’t find it on the Internet, it’s not worth knowing,” an IT person recently told me.
The IT person in question was an inhabitant of Cyberia, one of the most highly populated realms on our planet. While Siberia possesses either endless taiga or endless tundra, Cyberia has no landscape, only endless screens.
Like Siberia, Cyberia has gulags, but the prisoners in those gulags can’t hope for freedom because they don’t realize they’re in prison.…
Some of the activities commonly pursued in Cyberian gulags are cyberbullying, cybertheft, cybersquatting, cyberhacking, cyberstalking, cyberpiracy, cyberterrorism, downloading, and upgrading.
There is neither a past or a future in Cyberia, only the eternal present as purveyed by a screen.
Simeonie disagreed with the visiting clergyman. “Try to kill the past, and it will get stronger and more angry … like a polar bear you’ve shot and only wounded,” he told me.