A geologist who saw it on my desk told me that they now reckon that type of stone to be something like a thousand million years old. What has it been, before there were any men to throw it, and where will it be when you and I are not even a pinch of dust? Don’t cling to it as if you owned it. I did that . . . None of us counts for much in the long, voiceless, inert history of the stone . . .
Robertson Davies, The Manticore
A FULL 1,300 miles from Ottawa, Iqaluit squats at the bottom of the fifth biggest island in the world.1 Now the capital of the largest Canadian Territory, the site was just another white ice plain until 1941 when the US government, shocked into action by U-boat attacks on its aircraft carriers, activated a plan to establish a chain of airfields in Arctic Canada to ferry planes to Britain under the terms of the Lend-Lease Act. Machines could not yet fly non-stop but, starting out from three points in the USA, they could hop across the North Atlantic. A staging airfield was required in Upper Frobisher Bay, and Inuit guides selected a site on Koojesse inlet where the Everett mountains rise from the coast. Construction of the airfield that grew into Iqaluit was one of countless logistical challenges war brought to the polar regions, especially as a barrier of islands dotted and dashed across the deep water channels leading to the head of Frobisher Bay. Once the installation was up, it turned out that maintaining gravel runways built on permafrost was a Sisyphaen task reliant on brute force and patience. But by 1943, US Advance Air Base and Weather Station Crystal Two was operational on the Iqaluit site, and a permanent Inuit settlement had grown up with it, its members obliged to wear dog tags because military personnel could not tell them apart.
By that time the staging route was already obsolete. Allied antisubmarine warships had neutralised U-boat activity, aided by airborne radar units and protective air cover. In addition, flights over the Greenland ice cap had a dubious record. The death blow came when, as a result of advances in aeronautical engineering, planes with extra fuel tanks were able to leap from Goose Bay in Labrador to Great Britain. But military interest did not end with hostilities. The US incorporated the airfield into its Pinetree Line of long-range radar bases, and in 1955 the embryonic Iqaluit became the construction centre of the Cold War DEW line operation that reached halfway across the circumpolar lands. After that it transmogrified into a Ballistic Missile Early Warning Site and a station for a squadron of KC-97 mid-air refuelling tankers that supported nuclear bombers. The military finally moved out in 1963, B-52s having made the Arctic obsolete once again, from the point of view of a bomber pilot.
Freed from military control, the community settled into a quiet civilian existence. In 1987 administrators named it Iqaluit. It was there that I had my first experience of Arctic Canada. I was in transit en route to a geology camp on Southampton Island in the north of Hudson Bay, and while waiting in town to hitch a ride on a resupply flight, I squatted in the flat of a friend who was in the field, and had the place to myself. The sky lay on Frobisher Bay tight as Tupperware, and chained dogs howled all night, lupine whines that carried far out over the water.
For the first few days the temperature hovered at a midsummery 5° above, and in the mornings the sky was striated, like bacon. Two wide paved roads forked through sections of Iqaluit’s small, semi-urban sprawl, while sand roads careered around the place, or gave up in roadblocks of mud and ice. The jostling pack ice of the bay dominated the scene – that, and the beach in the heart of town, damp sand crowded with rowing boats, motorised dinghies, locked wooden storage huts, ambulant dogs and leaking mounds of rubbish, signature of the inhabited Arctic. Unequal rows of stilted low-rise apartment blocks radiated from the beach like spokes. Public buildings included a gleaming hospital, a tax office and a new francophone school for the tiny French-speaking community at 65°N. Signs appeared in three languages to reinforce the Canadian-ness of the nation’s newest territory: French, English and Inuktituk in both the Roman alphabet and in syllabics, a script invented by missionaries. As a result, all the signs were huge. I went into the North Mart supermarket, where a notice in the baking section indicated that vanilla essence was available, but that due to its ‘special status’ it could only be produced following consultation with the management. I enquired about the incarceration of the harmless vanilla essence. But it turned out not to be harmless at all. It ensnared the innocent. ‘Do they swig it or sniff it?’ I asked a shelf-stacker. ‘Drink it,’ he revealed with a grin, acting out the gesture of raising a vessel to his lips, ‘if it’s all they can get their hands on.’ Failing to find anything tempting in the supermarket, I tried the restaurants. There were a dozen, none good, though you could get a passable lunch at the Discovery Inn, if you could stomach the ambience and decor – tiny, high windows, sulphurous lighting and a smell of something that might once have been alive. A few hundred yards from the school and the swanky hospital, the backyards on the muddy streets outside the Discovery disgorged broken-down white goods and soiled cardboard boxes. Stooped old Inuit sat around doing nothing, children skidded on home-made skateboards and podgy teenage girls plugged into iPods drifted around in amautiit duffels, a flat-faced and soot-headed baby peeping from every hood. When I spoke a word of greeting, a person invariably replied cheerily. One child enquired after the provenance of my freckles, and older women looked on with gummy smiles. Shreds of the internal robust endurance of Inuithood had outlasted the troubles, for now.
They should have called it Fattytown, not Iqaluit. Obesity was a sad symbol of cultural collision. It represented exile, metaphorically speaking; exile from the traditional Inuit environment and its complexities of meaning. Cut off from a country diet, people had ballooned into grotesque parodies of the white man. Canadians had tried hard to put things right. But they couldn’t turn the clock back. In his book Arctic Dreams, after describing the annihilation of bowhead whales in Arctic waters, Barry Lopez turns to the present. ‘This time around, however, the element in the ecosystem at greatest risk is not the bowhead but the coherent vision of an indigenous people. We have no alternative, long-lived narrative to theirs, no story of human relationships with that landscape independent of Western science and any desire to control or possess.’ These are issues that go to the heart of being human; their resolution controls our ability to be fully ourselves. The Inuit might appear drunk, fat and stoned, but they just about still know something we have forgotten.
When a countrywide survey quizzed the public on what it means to be Canadian, the majority of respondents cited ‘not being American’ as the primary characteristic of nationhood. As a secondary badge of identity, Canadians pointed to the existence of ‘our north’. ‘We are a northern country,’ its citizens repeatedly asserted in the poll. ‘We have our Arctic.’ It is true that the Arctic occupies a higher percentage of the Canadian landmass than it does in any other country. Yet, despite the central position of the Arctic in the national identity myth, only 100,000 out of 33 million Canadians reside north of sixty degrees of latitude, the political boundary of the polar provinces (and roughly the treeline).2 Most are Inuit. My geologist-campers seemed to understand both sides of this paradox instinctively. ‘Hardly anyone I know’, said one, ‘has ever set foot north of sixty.’ Many countries are burdened with too much history, but as Prime Minister Mackenzie King once said, Canada has ‘too much geography’.
‘Inuit can’t rely on Canadian staples like forestry,’ explained the publicly-funded chief of the geology project as we cuddled up to a stove in a soggy mess tent. ‘Nothing is ever going to grow up here. Toyota will never fly in a factory to build the new Prius. It’s too far from anywhere else for much tourism. Our main aim at this camp’, he continued, ‘is to see what the land can produce in the way of natural resources which will stimulate an economy.’ An acrid smell rose from the socks drying over the stove rail. Inuit had exploited their environment in collusion with the Arctic for many centuries, curing seal hides with spittle; catching bowhead with bone harpoons; conjuring gods and spirits from the ice to invest the universe with meaning. Southern interlopers came for whale oil, then blue-fox fur, then hydrocarbons, and then (now) diamonds and gold. Encounters between the two groups were never harmonious, but once the land was consolidated into a single nation, proper trouble started – the kind of trouble, it turns out, that never goes away, taking on a life of its own and playing out unenvisaged dramas that resonate throughout the circumpolar north.
The nomads who fished the inlets of the Foxe Channel during a period of Arctic cooling between about 600 BC and AD 1000 carry, posthumously, the ‘Dorset’ name, after a cache of artefacts that surfaced at Cape Dorset on Baffin Island. Using chipped stone tools, a Dorset man or woman once carved a male swan half the size of my little finger out of walrus ivory, an exquisite bird with its neck arched, its feet extended and its beak open as it clamoured to a female out on the tundra; another craftsman made a perfect stylised gull’s head from driftwood weighing less than a sixtieth of an ounce. While waiting to leave Iqaluit, I had made friends with a collector who had allowed me to handle the gull’s head. It was less detailed than my Siberian penis bone, but more evolved. Many Dorset carvings depict anguished human faces locked in a grotesque scream, calling to Munch and us, across the centuries.
The Dorset people, their successors and their descendants respected the land to a religious degree. It was all they had, and they cherished it with attitudes and behaviour that encapsulate the essence of Inuithood. Generation after generation, people sang of creation myths and a land once peopled with superhuman hunters who invested every glacier with a past. The stories tied them to the land. And the land provided. Puffballs of pualunnguat cottongrass healed a baby’s umbilical, formed a portable qulliq lamp wick and did a hundred other things; the purple flowers, black berries and matted shrubbery of paurngait, or crowberry, made mattresses and medicine and, later, cleaned gun barrels; creeping willows relieved toothache and, mixed with rancid blubber, made a tasty chewing gum. Inuit honed their survival skills to a degree of perfection almost unknown among the milk-drinkers of warm latitudes. In lean times, a seal hunter sat next to his sea-ice hole resting his bare feet on an empty caribou-skin bag (tutiriaq, in the western dialects), as he knew the lightest scrape of footwear, amplified below the ice, chased away the seals. The women not only cured hides with spittle, they also chewed their menfolk’s boots every morning to unfreeze the leather. In 1929 a white ornithologist asked two Aivilik hunters from Southampton Island, where the geology camp was situated, to draw a map of the whole island coastline – longer than that of Vancouver Island – from memory. When set down next to a modern map, the resulting sketches are accurate to a quarter of a mile.
Inuit perceived the environment as a revered partner: interlopers like Peary and the other Pole-seekers saw it as an enemy to be beaten into submission. As they had few skills with which to take it on, many expeditions culminated in farce, disaster, or, at the very least, a bout of shoe-eating. In the last of his voyages to Baffin Island, in 1578, Elizabethan buccaneer Sir Martin Frobisher shipped up 300 Cornish miners in a fifteen-strong fleet. The men duly mined 1,100 tons of ore. When Frobisher got it home, he found that what glittered in the rock was not gold but pyrite. Nobody knew what to do with it, so it was used to repair Kentish roads. Until the Dalton Highway, they were the most expensive roads ever laid. Others had more luck: merchant-adventurers made fortunes from whales, and chartered companies did the same from furs. The Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670, effectively handled the exploitation of all the land draining into Hudson Bay for the British crown. According to their royal charter, company men were ‘true and absolute Lordes and Proprietors’ of a landmass comprising nearly 40 per cent of modern Canada. In the early years, hunters brought so many beaver pelts to the trading posts that Company men acquired the money and confidence to send mapping expeditions north, to find out if there might be a Klondike of furs there. In 1771 Samuel Hearne, a young Company-sponsored seaman, became the first white man to see the north shores of the North American continent, and his book recounting the expedition remains a classic of the genre. Hearne was that most compelling example of the species, the reflective man of action. Fluent in Athabascan, over a period of three years he travelled more than 3,500 miles across the western sub-Arctic with a party of up to 200 Dene men, women and children, living with them their eternal cycle of feast and famine and smearing his face with goose fat to ward off insects.3 A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean offers an unflinching portrait of people Hearne greatly admired (this despite the fact that his first guides robbed him, leaving him to eat not his shoes but his buckskin jacket on the march back to Prince of Wales Fort). He praises, for example, the stoicism of the Chipewyan, a subgroup of the Dene. At one point his party stopped for a woman to give birth, resuming again, after her fifty-two-hour labour, as soon as the infant appeared. The nursing mother then had her sledge hauled for her – for one day. But it wasn’t all good. The twenty-five-year-old Hearne had to watch his companions hack a party of Coppermine River Inuit to death for no reason at all. ‘First, we war,’ chief guide Matonabbee informed an alarmed Hearne in advance of the massacre. ‘Later, we survey.’ When he returned to England, Hearne met Coleridge, who later cited the older man’s anecdotes as an influence on his unfinished ballad ‘The Three Graves’. Coleridge said he wanted to show that the ‘witchcraft’ of the Dene – the workings of their imagination, in other words – was ‘not peculiar to savage or barbarous tribes’, and in the ballad he changed Hearne’s Dene people to English ones. Some critics think Hearne was a model for the Ancient Mariner. He said that as a young man he had been inspired by the story of the fictional Robinson Crusoe. Alexander Selkirk (the real-life Crusoe) inspired Defoe; Defoe inspired Hearne; Hearne inspired Coleridge – and so it goes.
The Hudson’s Bay Company lost its monopoly, traders pushed north, Britain began to cede control of Canada. Through it all, in the collective imagination of lower latitudes the image of the Eskimo remained that of a primitive and uncorrupted nature-dweller who played little part in the national narrative.4 There was not yet any meaningful contact between the two groups. Instead, one of the first documentary films – perhaps the best ever made – played up the white man’s idea of an Eskimo. The film was Nanook of the North, the director a dogged Irish-American called Robert Flaherty who pitched up, in 1920, among a group of Inuit in Port Harrison (now Inukjuak) on the east coast of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec. I saw Flaherty’s film for the first time in the final year of primary school (I was eleven), and it opened my eyes to the idea that man and the wilderness were not enemies. It might have been that film that set me on a path of polar investigation. Like Coleridge, Flaherty found his subject in the Arctic, that ‘fabulous land where Indians were still Indians’, by which he meant compared with semi-assimilated aboriginals further south, who no longer conformed to any idealised white model. He had been trying to make a polar film for years, and had travelled with dogs in northern Ontario and the Hudson Bay region as a kind of geographer-explorer, mostly in the pay of an iron prospector, working closely with Inuit and other groups. On the 1920 expedition he used Akeley cameras fitted with gyroscopic tripod heads and lubricated with graphite rather than oil, which froze. For a year, living in an abandoned fur-trader’s cabin near Inukjuak, Flaherty filmed the daily life of his neighbours. Difficulties queued up for attention: insufficient daylight, dry snow in the lenses, film that shattered in the cold (that was only the start of it), but Flaherty sailed home to New York with 75,000 feet of film. It turned out that he had a gift for drama and the instincts of an ethnographer. The edited version of his film was and remains a triumph. Who can forget the footage of the hunter Nanook steadying his umiak while, from the impossibly tiny hole at the stern, one wife emerges, then another wife, then a series of children of ever-decreasing size, and, finally, the dog?
Nanook’s story captured the imagination of the world. At the Capitol Theater in New York the movie grossed $43,000 in its first week. Cinemagoers wallowed in images far from the brittle landscape of Scott Fitzgerald’s Charleston-twisting metropolis, and the film’s reputation spread to lands where moviegoers had to be told what snow was. Nanook catered to the eternal fascination with the noble savage who led his life in a natural paradise untainted by the horrors of civilisation. It also revealed something timeless about the human spirit. A still of the plucky little hunter was used to sell ice cream; the thirty-eight-year-old Flaherty became a household name; in Malay, nanuk entered the language as a word for a strong man. The Canadian Eskimo was an international star, leaving the Eveny, the Chukchi and all the other Russian herders out in the cold, unknown in the outside world, as they remain. Of course, the depiction of Inuit life the world swallowed was a romanticisation. Thirty years after Nanook first enchanted me, I read new material about Flaherty and his filming. This was another Arctic myth, another case of semi-fictionalisation. In 1923, life expectancy in Arctic Canada was twenty-eight. Two years after the film opened, Allakariallak, the man who played Nanook, died of what was probably TB. (Flaherty, in thrall to his vision and with an eye on commercial potential, put it about that Allakariallak perished of starvation while hunting caribou.) But nobody below the treeline was interested in that. Much later it emerged that there had been romance all round. Flaherty had had an affair with Alice ‘Maggie’ Nujarluktuk, the woman who played Nyla, one of Nanook’s wives, and when he left the Arctic – never to return – she was pregnant with their son.
As the population of Canada climbed, Arctic interlopers, increasingly, were settlers from lower latitudes rather than plunderers on a brief visit to make film or take fur. When Federal authorities brought the Arctic Islands into the new Canadian Dominion in 1880, they institutionalised the antagonistic relationship between Inuit and everyone else. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the desperate story of government-sponsored relocations – desperate in several unforeseen ways. Josephie Flaherty, the film-maker’s son, was among the victims. He had never met his father.
Three decades after Nanook, the Canadian government moved twelve Inukjuamiut families up to the uninhabited Ellesmere Island 1,500 miles from their home along with an unrelated group of five families from Pond Inlet (Mitimatalik) on Baffin Island. I changed planes in Pond Inlet once (from a twelve-seater to a three-seater). It was bleak, but the second pilot said you didn’t know what bleak was until you’d been to Ellesmere. In 1953 and 1955, the eastern Arctic Inuit started new lives at Craig Harbour (later Grise Fjord, now also Nusuittuq, and still Canada’s northernmost settlement), and Resolute Bay (Quasuittuq) on the adjacent Cornwallis Island. The Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources (as it then was) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the Mounties of Boy’s Own legend), citing a paternalistic motive, had concluded that as some Inuit were starving due to lack of game, it would be irresponsible not to try to find at least some of them a better place to live. It was also true that new settlements would shore up Canadian sovereignty in the face of Norwegian and other claims to High Arctic islands. In the early fifties the relocation concept took hold in government circles, even though it was anathema to an Inuit to leave the all-important nunatuarigapku, or homeland, imbued as it was with ancestral spirits. Josephie Flaherty had always lived and hunted in the area known to outsiders as The Hunger Coast.
It was not an exclusively Canadian story. Government agents were relocating Arctic peoples across Greenland, Alaska, Russian Lapland and Siberia. Tobias Holzlehner had witnessed the abandoned camps in Chukotka to which pining hunters returned occasionally, in flight from crumbling Soviet new towns. Civil servants like settlements because they facilitate governance; there is little place within such systems for concepts of emotional topography. Relocations hastened the end of Arctic nomadic life as it had been lived for centuries.
As for the residential schools to which Inuit and other indigenous children were routinely despatched, words almost fail the writer who tries to convey their horror. ‘I went to the principal’s office and got strapped for using our own language,’ a Nisga’a man from British Columbia told the anthropologist Hugh Brody. The Nisga’a had been sent to a school miles from his home when he was eight. ‘My heart was beating very fast at that time,’ the man recalled of this, the first of many strappings. ‘I didn’t understand what the meaning of the principal’s words were. But a few minutes passed after I got strapped. I didn’t want to go back to the classroom. I sat in the hallway until after dinner. I sat there for about two hours. I didn’t want anybody to see me cry. So they – sometimes they’d send you into this little room where they, I guess, where you could go and cry, I guess. Very quiet little room . . . That’s when you get strapped by a strange person in strange surroundings. It’s very difficult to grasp what the, what they really wanted you to do.’ Whistleblowers vanished. Possessions vanished. Siblings vanished. Minor transgressions earned beatings. Boys and girls were regularly raped. It was a regime of torture. Mary Carpenter, an Inuk from Banks Island, attended a mission school in Aklavik for twelve years, and during that time staff did not allow her to return home, even once. ‘I remember when I was six,’ she told another writer in 1966, ‘there was a girl near me who was so miserable she often wet her bed, so the girl who was boss of the dorm made all the rest of us line up and pee in her bed, then this girl had to sleep in it . . .’ Tuberculosis was prevalent until after World War II; they called it the White Killer. Doctors sailed north and carted the most serious cases back with them to sanatoria in the south in a vessel known to government officials as the Shakespeare Ship – TB or not TB. Many Inuit died in sanatoria, without anyone with whom they could speak their own language in their last hours. Well-meaning healthcare initiatives regularly fell foul of the law of unintended consequences. In the spring of 1961 a government plane landed at Perry Inlet with an X-ray machine and a posse of nurses. They X-rayed everyone, finding them clear of TB. But the nurses brought the flu virus, and six Perry Inuit died. It is easy to spot the mistakes of an earlier generation. But cultural allegiance blinds us to our own errors, as we march on armed with the same old conviction that we must be right. The ghost in the machine is always invisible.
The fierce sense of self-preservation required for survival meant that Inuit were routinely brutal to one another. There were no noble savages, although there was quite a bit of savagery. It was not some icy utopia. The American visual anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, a deeply sensitive scholar of Inuit culture, left an account of an eight-year-old orphan he came across cowering in a qarmaaq in 1951. The unwanted boy was left to sleep on the snow floor rather than on the furs with his foster family. He caught pneumonia and was made to stand all day, terrified, half-frozen and abused, until he died. Myths half-sung in sealskin tents encapsulate the sense of suffering intrinsic to the human condition. Ayornamut, the Inuit say; it cannot be otherwise.
According to one critic ‘the best known Canadian writer of all time’, Farley Mowat remains one of the most compelling white chroniclers of the realities faced by Arctic peoples in the modern age. In 1952 he published People of the Deer, a book in which he informed his countrymen of the lamentable circumstances of their northern races. Readers woke up to the predicament of their compatriots, and the awakening unleashed a tidal wave of guilt. A fugleman for the dispossessed, Mowat became an instant and controversial celebrity. The book was to the cause of northern peoples what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was to the environmental movement a decade later.
Mowat was born in Ontario in 1921, spending his teenage years in Saskatchewan, where he kept company with boys from the Dundurn Indian Reserve. He first went to the Arctic aged fifteen with a great-uncle, learning of ‘ways of life that were old before ours were begun’. On that journey he saw the multitudinous herd of caribou that migrates through The Barrens, that immense expanse of largely unmapped wilderness extending from the treeline to the Arctic Ocean, and from the Mackenzie River to Hudson Bay. A hunter might sit outside his tent for nine days watching a continuous tide of caribou rush past on either side. The herd became, for Mowat, ‘a spiritual talisman’, and, instilled with an intangible longing for the Arctic, after serving in World War II he became a biologist of sorts and returned to The Barrens to spend two years with the inland Ihalmiut. Mowat grew familiar with the ghosts and spirits who shared The Barrens with the people and the caribou, among them Kaila, god of weather and sky, Hekenjuk, the sun, and Taktik, the moon. People told him the stories through which they looked back across the void of the years that had passed since their ancestors first trekked into The Barrens. But as trading posts opened, guns had begun to replace bows and spears; first the single-shot loader, then the magazine rifle. When bullets were scarce, a good hunter lined up two caribou for a single shot, so that a bullet going through one animal would also strike a second. Centuries of history had disappeared with the ancient weapons. It was the story of the buffalo on the southern plains, but it was and is close enough in time to see it happening. Mowat watched the Ihalmiut as they waged a war of attrition against extinction. Their lives had always been a chiaroscuro of feast and famine: a healthy hunter could eat fifteen pounds of meat a day in times of plenty, and go without for weeks when he had to. The rivers of tightly packed caribou that surged back and forth across The Barrens had always been, for the Ihalmuit and the forest peoples to the south, a bulwark against starvation. But when the guns came, men lost the old knowledge, and as they became enmeshed in the infamous ‘debt system’ at the trading posts, they could not afford a single bullet. Even police reports acknowledged that traders had made the plight of Arctic peoples worse by encouraging trapping and discouraging hunting.5 ‘I was very deeply disturbed’, Mowat wrote to the editor of Atlantic Monthly in the cover letter to a short story he submitted in 1948, ‘by seeing the havoc that can be wreaked on the interior peoples by the passive stupidity of an avowed friend – the white man. It wasn’t the sort of picture I expected to find in my own land; it is a damned ugly picture, and rightly or wrongly, I feel impelled to do quite lot of talking about it.’
People of the Deer is a lament for a group the author regarded highly. He had found in the company of the Ihalmiut ‘a communization of all material things in the most real and best sense of the word’. Yet the Ihalmiut story, Mowat said, was one of ‘disintegration and degradation’. After he left The Barrens in 1949, starvation struck again. Fewer than forty Ihalmiut now lived. Mowat ends his book with an impassioned plea for Arctic peoples, imploring his government to restore food supplies that had been diverted by fisheries and whaling plants, and to curtail the power of commercial interests to hijack economic independence. Many balked at his message, and some objected to his methods (‘Fuck the facts!’ the author once yelled at a journalist). A restless, buffoonish figure with a beard like an Old Testament prophet, Mowat churned out many books with the flavour of the potboiler (detractors refer to him as Hardly Knowit), but in his old age he produced the remarkable High Latitudes, in which he recorded a 10,000-mile odyssey across northern Canada in 1966. Booze and decay had taken hold and, as Mowat saw it, ‘almost the entire region was undergoing seismic change’ in consequence of a campaign launched in 1957 by the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker to ‘enrich the nation by making available the Canadian Arctic’s golden cornucopia of minerals, fossil fuels, and other valuable resources’. It was called the Northern Vision, and it was to ensure that the twentieth century would belong to Canada. (It was Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s scheme that targeted Iqaluit as First City of the North.) The agonising process of the ‘Canadianisation’ of the Arctic necessitated (people thought) the integration, if not assimilation, of the peoples who hunted there into the wider Canadian framework. Government policy fell little short of the Soviet insistence, in the twenties, that ‘One should simply tell the nomads, “Enough of this wandering around”.’ ‘All us young people are a lost generation,’ a young woman told Mowat in 1966. ‘Most of us have lost touch with who we used to be, and with our own land . . .’
By the early 1970s, almost all Canadian Inuit were living in prefabricated housing in invented villages with a school, a clinic and a general manager, or inulirijik – ‘one who fixes up the Inuit’. I saw many settlements of this kind, little changed in a generation. Scheduled air services arrived at about that time, as did the skidoo, or snowmobile. Planners created a new kind of Arctic community for what they called ‘refugees from the Stone Age’ (the Bone Age would be more accurate). As a result, Inuit began to grasp the way things were done in the white man’s world. Their spokespeople started to make representations to the government on the grounds that the relocations had been against their will; that they had not been starving at their old homes – in fact they had suffered at the new ones due to lack of country food; that they had not been allowed to return to their ancestral land, despite promises that they would. Supported by white activists, they said the relocations had taken place solely as a means of asserting Canadian sovereignty, and that Inuit had been used as human flagpoles. Grise Fjord had been (they said) the most northerly gulag in the world, a frozen penal colony. At first, nobody took any notice. But in the more sensitive political climate of the early nineties, descendants of relocated Inuit formalised a compensation claim for Can. $10 million. The Federal government commissioned a blizzard of reports, set up a parliamentary standing committee and established a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples at which Inuit testified in the ballroom of Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier. For months, newspapers and broadcast media all over Canada led with the hearings. Two different stories emerged. Police reports from the thirties onwards revealed appalling hardship at Port Harrison, as did Inuit accounts of starvation on The Hunger Coast when people lived on ‘nothing but lemmings’. ‘You see a small person,’ one hunter said at a Commission hearing held not in Ottawa but in Inukjuak itself, ‘because during the age when I should have been getting bigger, I was always hungry.’ Documents indicated that, rather than wanting to return to their old homes, settlers had applied to have family members travel north to join them. But in 1993, Inuit queued up to say the reverse.
The object of the expensive Royal Commission was reconciliation. The result was the opposite. There could be no reconciliation between two versions of history. Personnel from the Department of Northern Affairs and the police, the two agencies involved in the relocations, continued to insist that the moves had taken place to safeguard the well-being of the Inuit, and indeed evidence indicated that food scarcity at the new settlements had not been as bad as ‘witnesses’ suggested. Declassified material in the National Archives of Canada marked ‘Secret’ and ‘Top Secret’ failed to reveal the smoking gun that would prove the human flagpole theory. The relocations were an experiment, those on the government side assented, but not Nazi-style, as others stated during the interminable hearings. It also emerged that many Inuit had changed their stories once the smell of money wafted north. A few independent Inuit-supporters who had been on Ellesmere and Cornwallis Islands during the early fifties had visited the new settlements and expressed satisfaction, among them Bishop Donald B. Marsh, a pro-Inuit Anglican who spoke fluent Inuktituk. (He signed official correspondence ‘Donald the Arctic’.) Letters written in Inuktituk syllabics by relocated Inuit at the time contradicted allegations of systemic abuse by police officers. On the other hand, how could a victim have voiced protest? Minutes of Prime Minister Louis St Laurent’s 1953 cabinet meetings did reveal sustained unease at the role of the US in the Arctic, and a desire to bolster the Canadian presence. When incompetence emerged, the Department of Northern Affairs and the police blamed one another. And anyway, there had always been cycles of abundance and scarcity, just as there had always been starvation: Inuit sang of it in their myths. I am not convinced that a paternalistic motive was at work in the relocations. The issue of sovereignty must have played a role. But neither was the ‘trial’ fair. By the time the Commission sat, the liberal public perceived northern indigenous peoples as passive victims of colonial forces. In the years since Flaherty made his film, the dynamics of the Inuit image in the public mind had shifted from blithe spirit to welfare-dependent victim. The notion that white ways threatened native well-being was irreversibly entrenched, and collective white guilt, stoked by the media, conditioned the public to accept revisionist claims of injustices put forward by Inuit activists and their white supporters even if the evidence didn’t stack up. Politicians in Ottawa in 1993 would have leapt into the Arctic Ocean rather than take an anti-Inuit stand. The Commission awarded the ten million. The money went to a Heritage Fund for housing, travel, pensions and compensation for the descendants of relocated families.
In 1999 the groundswell of guilt culminated in the creation of a new Canadian Territory owned by the Inuit (it had been a lengthy process; negotiations started in 1976). The Federal government sliced the new administrative region of Nunavut off the east of the Northwest Territories and designated Iqaluit territorial capital. In return for the land, Inuit formally relinquished their right to the other half of the Northwest Territories. In case the point needed reinforcement, the name Nunavut means ‘our land’. Extending over two million km2, an area five times the size of California, the territory occupies a fifth of Canadian land surface, with between 25,000 and 30,000 citizens – in comparison with thirty-three million Canadians who live in the other four-fifths of the country. Like Chukotka, Nunavut still has fewer than fifty kilometres of road.
The good intentions of liberal Canadians continued to sail on a raft of unintended consequences. Often, issues revolved around food, drink and drugs. Of the three, alcohol enjoyed the highest profile. Most communities of the Canadian north are officially dry, but regulations achieve little beyond the enrichment of those smart enough to smuggle booze and flog it to their neighbours at grotesque prices – either that or the abuse of vanilla essence. When it comes to drugs, traffickers profit from a lively trade funded by institutionalised handouts. When I was in Iqaluit waiting to depart for the field camp Nunatsiaq News ran a story about a drugs haul worth $800,000 in Salluit, a community of just 1,200. How, I wondered, could so few largely unemployed people generate such high disposable incomes? It turned out that Salluit had been flooded with cash that month following the Raglan Mine Profit Sharing Agreement, which in June 2007 paid out $4,800 to each Salluit resident. I began to understand that wherever the state intervened in the Canadian Arctic, which was almost everywhere, the mechanics of the system moved in an arbitrary, aimless fashion, like the hands of a clock disconnected from the machinery behind the face.
The battle for the Inuit diet had been fought since traders stimulated economic dependence on the white man by introducing flour, lard and baking powder at the stores, along with tea, all of it available on credit, or in exchange for coloured tokens Inuit received for fox pelts. The abandonment of country food left the Inuit without a major component of both diet and rituals. (A single bowhead produces in excess of 60,000 lbs of meat, and communities celebrate the hunt in the major festival of the indigenous calendar.) The next generation of southerners began to argue that Inuit should stop eating country food altogether, in order to save the whale. ‘In support of the decimation of the mammals in the Arctic’, they declared, ‘. . . the Eskimos and Indians must, in the long run, learn to eat our food if they are ever to become part of our way of life.’ Regional authorities introduced quotas, strictly limiting the number of beluga and bowhead which could be hunted.6
That was all well and good (or wasn’t), until Inuit began to develop health problems associated with a processed-food diet, and southerners began to feel guilty for the way in which they had imposed religion, money, boarding schools, fixed accommodation, the English language, and pizzas. Tradition, it turned out, was good after all! Civil servants from Health Canada flew north to advise Inuit to stop eating hamburgers and drinking Coke. Then something happened which turned everything on its head. It was one of the most agonising episodes in the baleful saga of relations between the peoples of the circumpolar north and their colleagues from lower latitudes.
In the late 1980s researchers studying the effects, sources and pathways of toxic chemicals discovered that because of bioaccumulation (poisons stored in animal fat increasing as they move up the food chain), and the Arctic’s position as a sink (the result of patterns of long-range transport by air, water currents and river outflow), seal and whale blubber contained high concentrations of pesticides and industrial pollutants. When clinicians tested indigenous peoples, the results sent shock waves through the municipal corridors of Ottawa. Virtually overnight, Arctic contaminants turned into a crisis for the Canadian government. This was the Arctic Paradox: the most contaminated people are the ones who live furthest from the polluters. POPs – persistent organic pollutants – attack the human immune system, and Inuit children were already experiencing higher than average rates of infectious diseases (this was only one of the deleterious effects linked to contaminants). So should Inuit eat less traditional food, or more? Health workers found themselves in a quandary, stranded between the need to educate and the risk of frightening people by driving a wedge of fear between them and the land that sustained them. Inuktituk lacks the appropriate vocabulary, to start with, so white speakers and their interpreters facing worried Inuit in community halls had to invent words to describe the contaminants and their effects. The noun they chose for the toxins in country food, sukkunartuq, ‘something that destroys or brings about something bad’, introduced a note of supernatural mystery, leaving people confused and fearful. In some cases the distress the information caused was worse that the potential risks of contaminants, with the result that health workers dropped the new policy. The situation was a paradigm of the way in which scientists struggle to send a cohesive message amid uncertainty, and it marked a new phase in the advance of western culture into the Arctic, as well as providing a fresh problem for modern Canada as it tried desperately to do the right thing by its northern peoples. In the words of Marla Cone, a leading Arctic environmental writer and academic, ‘When it comes to protecting Arctic people from contaminants, no other country has tried so hard, agonised so much and stumbled so many times as Canada.’7 Russia had not agonised at all. It had effectively kicked the Chukchi onto the rubbish heap of history. America had thrown money at the problem. Studies of the mental health of circumpolar peoples in same period reveal serious decline, with increases in depression, suicide and related issues.
The race to extract natural resources continues to dominate the agenda, and the hydrocarbon and mineral potential of the Hudson Bay region has become an investigative industry of its own. Of the 130 companies exploring in Nunavut at the time of my visit, thirty-two were looking for uranium, the rest for gold, diamonds, silver, zinc, nickel, copper, iron ore and sapphires. A gold mine in Nunavut is scheduled to go live in 2010. Canada is a relative newcomer to the murky world of diamond plays but interest in Nunavut quadrupled overnight after a diamond rush in the Northwest Territories in the 1990s following a strike under Point Lake. The little-travelled Barrens, still without year-round access roads, suddenly thrummed with choppers, and in the winter convoy headlights bored into the darkness of the ice roads. Stock market analysts began to compare the Barrens to South Africa, or Botswana. The joke used to go that a typical Canadian-Inuit family consisted of a father, a mother, two children and an anthropologist: now a geologist has replaced the anthropologist. The irony of this latest chapter of the Inuit story is this. Although they have consultation rights defined in Section 35 of the constitution, and title to 350,000 km2, Inuit own mineral rights to only 10 per cent of their land, those rights in Canada normally belonging to the Federal government. So just as circumpolar peoples win a measure of self-government, the Arctic emerges as the last energy frontier and the lower latitudes need it as never before. A warming climate has also stoked the wider debate over sovereignty, as minerals previously locked under ice thaw with lascivious promise. In August 2007, Russian parliamentary deputy and Arctic brave Artur Chilingarov drilled his flag into the bedrock at the North Pole 4 kilometres below the ocean surface. ‘The Arctic is Russian,’ the bearded one claimed once he resurfaced, ‘and we should manifest our presence.’
Meanwhile in Kingston, Jamaica, somnolent bureaucrats woke from a long slumber. They were the mandarins of the International Seabed Authority, an independent body incorporating the UN-hosted Commission of the Limits of the Continental Shelf. The five Arctic nations must lodge a claim with the commission if they wish to prove that their shelves, and therefore their territory, extend beyond the statutory 200-nautical-mile limit. Mr Chilingarov’s flag supported the first ever claim, and, bemused at this unexpected turn of events, perspiring commissars told him to go away and produce more data. As for the Canadians: they were prepared to give territory to the Inuit, but they weren’t going to let the Russkies have any. Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced plans for a deep-water port on the northern tip of Baffin Island for both military and civilian use, as well as the deployment of six new armed ice-breakers and the opening of an army training centre for cold-weather warfare. The episode provoked a British newspaper to run a story headed, ‘Canada Uses Military Might’, a candidate for one of the least likely headlines ever to appear in the western media. ‘Canada’s new government understands’, declared Harper, ‘that the first principle of Arctic sovereignty is: use it or lose it.’ That same month, Denmark too elbowed its way forward, introducing a programme of research aimed at an international legal claim to more Arctic territory. The mix of panic and confusion implicit in the political grandstanding reflects the unanticipated speed with which the ice is melting. But it also reveals how many issues remain unresolved.
The double engines continued to drone over the Foxe channel, the inky water reflecting little, even in the westering evening sun. The pack ice had gone, but white dots flecked the coasts of the swirled espresso islands. The leaders of the geoscientific mapping project on Southampton Island had chartered the Twin Otter on a resupply mission from Iqaluit. The other three passengers were geologists. I had talked at length to one of them during hours of delay at Iqaluit airport. Doug was a senior scientist from the Canada Geological Survey of Canada, a branch of Natural Resources Canada, not an insignificant government department in a country with more natural resources than it knows what to do with. A rangey Englishman in his sixties who had made Canada his home several decades earlier, Doug had only picked up the trace of an accent. His first field camp in the Arctic had been on the site of a former DEW line station. Like the conflicts before it, the Cold War had hurried Arctic science forward, opening up ice landing strips and stimulating investment in cold-weather technology. Since those heady years, Doug had spent hundreds of months tramping over Arctic tundra looking at rocks. He was phlegmatic about the aesthetic appeal. ‘You always think from the aerial photos that it’s going to be different and interesting,’ he had said as we drank bitter airport coffee from polystyrene cups bearing the image of a polar bear. ‘But it never is.’
Shaped like a sea lion sniffing the air, Southampton covers 15,700 mi2, or 41,439 km2, and with a cluster of smaller islands corks what is in effect Canada’s fourth ocean – Hudson Bay and its drain-like appendage James Bay. The earliest known residents of Southampton, the Sadleirmiut, called their island Shugliak, which means puppy suckling (or island-puppy suckling mother-continent). The Sadleirmiut died out at the beginning of the twentieth century when they contracted an unknown disease from some whalers. In the 1920s the Hudson’s Bay Company built a fur post on the island and shipped in Aivilimmiut and Uqqurmiut from Baffin Island and elsewhere to service trade. The descendants of these two groups still live in Coral Harbour, the only settlement on Southampton, situated on an inlet on the south coast.
The camp clung to the west bank of the Kirchoffer River. As we approached, a rope of caribou spooled away from the din of the engine: from the air, you could not see the gallop. The Otter bounced hard before ramming itself to a stop, and the four of us climbed down the ladder into sheet rain that fell horizontally. Instead of good old clean snow, sharp air and zero precipitation, one had to contend with mud, fog and drizzle. Washed of all colour except dun, the landscape could not have looked bleaker. ‘Told you,’ Doug shouted at me over the competing roars of wind and engine. Later he recounted the story of a student who did years of fieldwork in Arctic Canada. ‘When I looked through his logs, I used to read SOS a lot. I eventually found out that it stood for Same Old Shit.’
A figure taped in dripping Gore-Tex appeared dragging a banana sledge. Four sodden kitbags sat on it, with our tents in them. There was nothing to be done but put them up. So we battled with waterlogged canvas (was this the only camp in the world still deploying actual canvas tents?), arcing poles and semi-freddo soil in driving rain and wind, all four of us casting longing glances at the Otter as it taxied away, leaving us in that wind-blasted, soaking, cold place at the end, as it seemed to us, of the known world.
Much later on that miserable first day, the rain stopped. The sun came out, spangling the river, and I sat on an empty fuel drum watching geologists return from the field in the two camp helicopters. On one side a semi-circle of low hills protected the small camp; along the other, the river ran fast. Camp consisted of twenty Logan tents that had once been white, two lavatory tents positioned at a safe distance, a shower tent deploying a Heath Robinson-Rube Goldberg system of pulleys and buckets to empty an old fuel drum of tepid water over one’s head, a gabled cook tent and an identical ‘office tent’. The two helicopter pilots each occupied a cabin-sized, standard ‘prospector’s tent’ of the north, their spacious quarters reflecting their elevated role in the mapping project (actually, it reflected the fact that they weren’t really part of the team, and that they had to be kept happy, despite the fact that theirs was a rubbish job). Three Inuit ‘bear monitors’ recruited from Coral Harbour brought the head count to twenty-four, and if we were all in the cook tent together, steam began to rise from the many layers of our garments, as well as an eloquent smell. The bear monitor positions were rotated between any Coral Harbour man who fancied the job. It was a token gesture, as the monitors never really did anything, but they were a friendly presence in camp. The Inuit owned the land, not the geologists, and in effect, the monitors’ wages represented blood money. And why not?
Don James was head of the Canada-Nunavut Geoscience Office in Iqaluit and the most senior scientist in camp, as well as an articulate and friendly individual whom everybody liked. I asked him why so much public money was being pumped into mapping an almost empty slab of rock and tundra. ‘We’re assisting’, he said, perching on an oil drum next to me, ‘the mineral exploration companies by gathering data so they know where to start looking. The end product of a season of traverses and months of processing work in the labs will be a map of the bedrock of the island on a scale of 1:250,000.’ I asked if the team were looking for oil and gas. One was inured to the irony of searching for more hydrocarbons when everyone knew they were contributing to the destruction of the Arctic. It was a kind of Emperor’s New Clothes scenario. Nobody mentioned it.
‘Basically, yes,’ Don continued. A powerful smell of aviation fuel was seeping from the welded seams of the drums. ‘The geologists concerned might not have oil and gas in mind, but those using the data later will interpret it for that. We’re hopeful that there might be diamonds and base metals here too. Exploration companies analyse the till [glacial deposits] a lot, but they are often not sure where to look, or what to do with the information when they get it. They need start-up data to keep costs within reason. We map, assess, and test rock.’8 The Arctic was beginning to shed light on a human capacity for sacrificing the long-term future of the species for the short-term benefits of the individual. We could keep going, throwing the best of ourselves into finding – and burning – more oil, while fully understanding how little time it had taken to destroy an indigenous culture. Climate change suddenly wasn’t an abstract issue, because human beings had to solve it – untrustworthy, venal, loveable humans.
Each night before supper, the geologists gathered in the office tent for a group assessment of the day’s work. It was called Rock Talk. They went out on foot traverses every day for the whole ten-week season, if the weather let them, and at Rock Talk described what they had observed, passing round lumps for inspection (someone described one rock as ‘maple-sugary bronze’ – a nice Canadian touch, that), speculating on the rocks’ origins and evaluating the implications of what they had found. After Rock Talk, and dinner, people pored over aerial photographs in the office tent while planning the next day’s traverses. In the middle section of the tent a bristling bank of charging satellite phones and radios took up one whole canvas wall, each device plugged into the rack of power bars that sucked energy for the eight hours each day that the generator was operational. The students shared a pair of tables in this middle section. The six of them, mostly undergraduates, constituted a distinct group in camp, treated by the senior scientists halfway between slaves and pets. They rotated chores, from washing up to burning trash, according to a pie-chart with revolving arms pinned on the canvas wall.
On the way to one of many traverses, over the chopper headset I heard the others talking about ‘the coast’, and pointing. I peered out, squinting at a jellied sun in a failed attempt to spot any sea, any beach, anywhere where land might conceivably end. Later, I asked Doug about it. ‘We were talking about the coast 7,000 years ago,’ he said, as if that were a normal activity, which in fact, for them, it was. But in the end we did arrive somewhere recognisably coastal. It was the top of the cliffs of Duke of York Bay, looking out at a crescent-shaped beach. Doug strode around the outcrops brandishing his Brunton compass, eventually homing in on a patch of whaleback rock formations. ‘These’, he told me, kneeling to scrape off lichen, ‘are illustrative of former glacier-covered land. And these’ – he pointed at a set of parallel lines etched into the rock – ‘are striations.’ Formed when debris at the base of flowing glacier ice scours the bedrock, striations reveal the direction in which a glacier moved. ‘If we can provide that directional information for mining companies,’ Doug continued, ‘they have more of an idea of where to look.’ So the rocks spoke a language of their own. Unlike the other languages of Nunavut, this one brought development, and wealth, and other things that wreck a landscape.
After an hour logging information, we took off again to pick up two students whom we had dropped off on the slope of a valley earlier. Their role, every day for ten weeks, was to fill large plastic sacks with soil, or till, that had at some point been conveyed by glaciers. They had to dig it up, sieve out the rubble and bag the soil for repatriation to a laboratory in the south where it would be analysed for kimberlite, the crumbly grey-green rock that transports diamonds, and for heavy metal tracers. The work was a kind of rite of passage for prospective geomorphologists, and it was important not to complain about it.
It was 7°C when we gathered for breakfast the next day, and the bugs were dense in the fresh morning air. Ah yes, the bugs. The pages of my notebook tell their own story, encrusted with flattened mosquito and blackfly corpses and splodges of my own blood. The bugs bit us even as we wore jackets with full-head net hoods and peered out at the landscape through a veil of brown mesh. Everyone had his or her own system which created the illusion of small victories in the eternal battle against the mosquitoes. A student had a lamp on her desk in the office tent, and when she switched it on at about nine o’clock at night as the light failed, the insects would arrive in squadrons. When they fell, the student swept them into heaps and kept a chart of nightly kills, adjusting the angle of the lamp head to optimise slaughter. Someone else kept a specimen jar in his parka pocket and raced himself each day to see how fast he could fill it with corpses. A pilot devised an outfit without a single unbattened edge of fabric, thereby exposing not a square millimetre of skin, and he challenged the bugs to get one bite in a twenty-four-hour period. I doused myself in 95 per cent deet, which melted part of my Ziploc sandwich bag and bled black dye out of my notebook cover. But the mosquitoes always won. Their victory was made more bitter (for us) by the knowledge that the female of the Arctic mosquito species, unlike her southern counterparts, does not actually need a blood meal before she can lay eggs. Due to the absence of life in many parts of the Arctic, she has evolved a system of autogenous egg-making using food reserves stored up during the water-borne larva phase. High Arctic blackflies have gone one stage further in the evolutionary plod north. There are no males at all. The lucky females reproduce parthogenically.
We sat on fuel drums swatting mosquitoes, waiting for the choppers’ purr as they returned from the first drop-off of the day to pick us up. I was going out on a bedrock traverse with Joyia, the project co-leader, and Joe, another old hand from the Geological Survey of Canada. Joyia was a sanguine figure who looked younger than her thirty-two years. She exuded serenity, perhaps a legacy of her South Indian heritage, and she had welcomed me warmly to camp; we often stood on the tundra and had a talk last thing at night over a final cigarette, if the bugs weren’t unduly menacing.
At about ten o’clock we put down a couple of miles to the south-west of camp and started out across a plain surrounded by low hills and glacial outwash deposits. The sky was flawless, and mist rose from a livid blue lake. We had walked a kilometre from our first station and just arrived at our second. It was hot, and our backs had been sweating under the packs. As we began getting out the observational instrumentation, Joyia stiffened. She said, ‘Bear’. I tasted again the coffee I had drunk at breakfast. Eight hundred metres away, a polar bear was loping up an escarpment. We had been downwind of him for an hour, so he must have smelt us, and after a few minutes he lifted his snout in the air, and began to circle. Eight hundred metres might seem like a long way to a reader sitting in an armchair. When there is nothing between you and a bear that can outrun you, 800 metres is a very short distance indeed. Joyia cocked the gun, and the three of us loaded the anti-bear firecrackers that allegedly frighten the beasts into running away (an improbable outcome, I always thought). Half the world’s polar bears hunt in Nunavut. But only one mattered. We called camp on a sat phone, asking for a pilot to come and get us. The bear completed a quarter circle, and disappeared over a ridge. We kept vigil, and chatted. Joe looked at rocks; it was difficult to say whether his nonchalance was studied. Joyia alternately scanned the horizon with field glasses and fiddled with her Brunton. I tried to think of something to do and failed, my mind fixated on images of my motherless sons. Then we heard the helicopter. It was a good sound. Before we could see the machine, Joyia made radio contact. The pilot had found the bear, and chased him to the other side of a lake. The chopper landed, and dropped off Noah, one of the bear monitors, as he was going to spend the rest of the day with us, increasing our gun quotient. We continued. We had not exactly looked death in the eye as we confronted – with our bare hands – the wrath of Mother Nature in the wilderness, specks of life battling for survival against insuperable odds in the hostile Arctic. But it was going to make a good story at Rock Talk.
Sharp, heavy rain squalls unfurled across the tundra quickly as fog, painting the landscape grey. The horizon dissolved, and the world turned to a miasma of opaque vapour. When the rain cloud rolled back, the distant rocks shone, as though they had been varnished. If that happened in the early morning, our hopes of getting out on a traverse rose, like milk to the boil. But the rain always came back. On my tenth day, it pinned us in camp. The pilots went off to read what they referred to as heli-porn (this turned out to be a stack of magazines called Vertical). The scientists retaliated with geo-porn: magazines about hammers, drills, screws and shafts. We mostly hung out in the office tent. Doug put his head out of the door during a lull, withdrew it again, stood up and announced, ‘Here’s the next bit of crud coming in.’ He was the most phlegmatic, as he had so many seasons under his belt: shutdown conditions were an integral part of the Arctic experience. After a week, I had the measure of the weather. The temperature ricocheted between +5°C and, exceptionally, +21. More significantly, the pendulum swung between freezing wind, and warmish calm inhabited by dark billions of mosquitoes. For a few heavenly moments every day, the pendulum looped through the midway point, and there were no bugs, no lacerating wind. But you couldn’t really enjoy the interlude, because you knew what was coming next. I can’t say it was ruinously grim, because I enjoyed those weeks in camp. But in comparison with the luminous dry air of the Brooks Range in Alaska, say, it was – well, it just wasn’t very pleasant on Southampton Island.
The bear monitors Chris and Noah came with us on traverses. Once, when I was with them, we put down next to a pair of rounded, symmetrical hills hunters had named The Buttocks. Throughout the Canadian Arctic one comes across Tit Hills, Shit Brooks, Dog’s Balls Lake – you get the picture. Names also record the places where things happened. They do in most languages, but Inuit have no misgivings – thus Pisspot, or Where Robert Broke Wind Loudly. A bull caribou raced up and down behind us, his harem of splay-footed cows and their calves observing from a safe distance. The Buttocks region was noted for its hunting, and Noah and Chris speculated on the high-summer availability of caribou. Noah was thirty-two, and the taller, less confident Chris twenty-eight. Neither had ever been outside Nunavut. They both loved talking about hunting. They kept, cooperatively, nine working dog teams in Coral Harbour, but most people went out on snowmobiles instead of mushing; either that or on ATVs (all-terrain-vehicles, or quad bikes). Noah and Chris shot bearded seal, walrus, narwhal, caribou, hare, tundra swan (the ones with black beaks and feet), snow geese, sandhill cranes, eider duck and king eider. ‘My freezer is full of caribou jerky,’ said Noah. ‘My eldest son loves it.’ Everyone’s favourite hunt was the polar bear. ‘Our community quota for bears’, Noah continued, ‘used to be sixty-five a year – and we would catch them all, too. Three years ago it was cut to thirty-seven. Our branch of the Hunters’ and Trappers’ Association picks numbers out of a hat to decide whose turn it is to hunt a bear. When it’s my turn, and I get one, I get home and cut it up and make an announcement on the local radio, telling people to come and get some meat for free. In an hour, it’s gone. We throw away the neck and most of the innards. The liver’s too strong even for the dogs – if they eat it, they go bald. We all have cabins out on the land, and if we have free time we go out there for a few days on the ATVs. My kids love that.’ His eight-year-old son had recently shot his first narwhal. But someone stole the tusk.
Buried amid restrictive quotas, alternative food supplies, the economic demands of a family and the blandishments of the Internet, the dream of the Arctic hunter still flickered.
Every year, Noah took his children over to family in North Baffin, driving his snowmobile over the sea ice with a sledge attached. The freeze usually came in time for the caribou hunt on the mainland in the fall, and for the opening of the polar bear season on 1 October. ‘But last year it was the end of December before the sea froze,’ he told me as we moved along the bank of a creek, following the tap-tap of a geology hammer. ‘My grandfather told me he always used to travel over sea ice in the first week of December. Hasn’t been possible for a decade.’ Close contact with ice meant that modern Inuit were in touch with the repercussions of a changing climate. But they were struggling to stay connected to the value systems of their ancestors. ‘Fifty years ago,’ Noah told me later as we waited for pick-up at the end of a long day, ‘outsiders kicked my grandparents off the land. They never went to school. My parents did, even though the adults in the family said they should be out hunting instead.’ It was already frosty, and the air was sharp, but the sky seemed to be sinking into the earth. The only movement in the air was the soft downward drift of microscopic beads of drizzling mist, and, on the low hills, smoky plumes of snow crystals. ‘I don’t think’, Noah continued, ‘that education has really worked its way through our collective psyche yet – there are still conflicting values. It’s too big a leap for just fifty years. But it will work. I feel we at least have a voice now, and some political power, so we can express our position.’
Despite the hopelessness I observed in many settlements, expressions of self-belief occasionally surfaced. Noah was a keen blogger on an Inuit website called Igloo Talk. I followed this site when I got home. At one point bloggers were posting candidates for the longest word in any Inuit dialect. (Inuktituk is a polysynthetic language in which words are added together to form compounds that are neither verbs nor nouns.) Someone had put forward Sikusiilarmiutaviniunirarpalauqsimammijuillittaungugaluaq, a useful locution meaning, ‘Indeed, they used to say they were from Sikusiilaq originally’. But it didn’t win: it was thrashed by ilinniatulirijijjuakuniiniatugivalausimangikaluamijungalitau, ‘I never thought I would be at the board of education’, and by the Kalaallisut word Nalunaarasuartaatilioqateeraliorfinnialikkersaatiginialikkersaatilillaranatagoorunarsuarooq, the meaning of which is too complicated for these pages.
After we had returned to camp from The Buttocks, the others got out while I stayed in the chopper, as the pilot was continuing to a pick-up on the west coast. Scattered lakes lay flush, with no lip onto the tundra. As we approached the delta streaming back from the Bay of God’s Mercy, it was as if the inanimate rock had dissolved into an eddying flood, for the south-west corner of Southampton Island is one of the world’s great waterfowl breeding grounds, a bubbling sea of hundreds of thousands (‘perhaps millions’, according to Noah) of lesser snow geese, Atlantic brant, oldsquaws, tundra swans and more. It was a spectacle so overwhelming in its magnitude that it was as if a living entity had possessed the land. Whistling swans colonised the tidal flats, still in breeding pairs, while recently hatched snow geese streamed from the wetland tundra towards feeding meadows beneath the limestone plateaux that absorbed the last trickles of the delta. Dark clouds of herring gulls billowed from the coastal cliffs, melding into swarms of plovers, their iridescent breast feathers flashing intermittently, like Morse, as the helicopter wove among the sun’s late afternoon rays. Yet by the time the waters froze in October, every bird would be gone. A large biomass and few species distinguish polar ecosystems at both ends of the planet. Extreme environments require huge numbers of individuals in order to secure a viable survival rate (and even so, populations can crash disastrously), and low temperatures inhibit mutation, as opposed to the teeming tropics, where organisms mutate crazily in a riot of moist biodiversity. Neither Darwin nor his brilliant contemporary Alfred Wallace would have had much to go on up there. But I love the ponderous plod of the polar regions, processing in dignified slowness to what might be a better world.
After the west-coast excursion, the fog that follows rain pinned us to the ground for two days in a row. The entire camp repertoire of music started its second cycle over the boom boxes. We listened to the music libraries on everyone’s laptop. By the end of the first day, we were listening to Christmas carols. Someone got out a set of electric hair straighteners and we all had a go. The students started a moustache-growing competition (who said Canadians were boring?). Chris appeared offering everyone a cube of maktaaq, a delicacy of whaleskin with blubber attached (‘Higher in vitamin C than oranges and lemons!’). Noah was desperate to get back home to Coral Harbour. For the hunting? ‘No, for the Internet, and Poker Stars.’ Conversation turned to horror scenarios of polar lore. The camp in which two senior scientists argued so bitterly over who was in charge that one set out for Ottawa in his snowshoes, returning three days later with a letter confirming his authority. The two bored Russian engineers who went blind drunk – literally – after glugging liquor distilled from brake fluid. Or the Antarctic Soviet station in which, during the long dark night, a man killed a colleague with an ice axe during an argument over a game of chess. (To prevent recurrence, the Soviets banned chess.) To lighten the mood, Joe gave a talk on crustal formations on a Baffin Island batholith, with PowerPoint. I sat through it, but he might as well have been talking Inuktituk.
On the third day we woke yet again to fog, but got ready to go out on our traverses amid the familiar flurry of sandwich-making, waterproofs and rifle checks. An early frost starred the pools alongside the river. The first load left in a chopper at nine, but by ten they were back. Mosquitoes crouched in the lichens, taking a cue from the pallid sun. An hour later, the storm broke. Black clouds uncoiled from the horizon, and the freezing, musky smell of the darkening shores intensified over camp. The low hill behind turned purple, the sky a layered, frowning grey, and the river ran fast. Outside the office tent, Canada and Nunavut flags flapped from their poles with insane gusto. But it didn’t close in, so we all went out. One group returned with stories for that night’s Rock Talk of a browned circle that was once an Inuit tent ring. Don reckoned it was 5,000 years old. Alongside it lay a flinty limestone tool someone had once used for scraping. Nobody seemed surprised. The past was not a foreign country to them; it was somewhere they visited often.
It turned out that the weather really had cleared. One or two people went for an evening swim in the river, and the bugs came back. I went fishing with Noah, and got two landlocked char which he threw back in, claiming that only the ocean-going variety are worth eating. One of the fish caught on a saputit, a stone weir built in shallow water by some ancestral Inuk to catch char, or the sardine-like angmagiaq which make an annual spawning run up the inlets. When we walked back, half the camp was in shadow. In the other half, evening sunlight intensified the tundra colours on the ground, deepening the tents to French grey.
‘Fuck OFF!’ A student hurtled out of his tent like a limbed missile. I knew how he felt. It was impossible to keep the bugs out of the knackered tents, and as the early morning sun warmed the air inside through the canvas, the mosquitoes focused on the fleshy contents of the sleeping bags.
Don was off to Yellowknife on geology business, and I took the chopper with him to Coral Harbour, where he was picking up a commercial flight. John the pilot departed to move some traversing groups, leaving me and Wayne, the helicopter engineer, to spend the afternoon ‘in town’, where Wayne had to acquire lubricating fluid. The airstrip, built as one of the Second World War staging depots, was 18 kilometres from the settlement, and at first Wayne and I sat in the small terminal building, apparently waiting to see what was going to happen next. A couple of First Air Otters gleamed on the strip. Wayne eventually commandeered transport in the back of a small pick-up which we shared with a pile of plastic chairs, and we set off for Coral Harbour, speeding past the urban dump dating from Coral’s origins as a US base and now a registered archaeological site.
‘See SNAFU?’ shouted Wayne, pointing at pyramids of tyres and wood at the dump.
‘Is that an Inuktituk name?’ I shouted back.
‘No,’ yelled Wayne. ‘It’s from the military phrase, Situation Normal – All Fucked Up.’ In fact, the distinguishing feature of the whole of Coral was rubbish, as there was a lot of it everywhere, including piles of once-decent timber planks freighted in from hundreds of miles away (possibly thousands) and left to rot in someone’s front yard. The harbour itself was almost attractive. Every house and cabin had at least one dog chained outside as well as an all-terrain vehicle and a skidoo parked in the yard. There were two supermarkets, and Wayne selected Northern for the purchase of our picnic lunch. The spacious, windowless aisles pumping out music composed to engender a mood of high-spending relaxation could have been anywhere in the developed world. But fresh food was limited to Californian peaches so withered that it seemed inconceivable anyone would ever buy them, coal-black bananas in a similar condition, shrivelled grapes, mouldy cheese and cartons of milk well past their sell-by date (at least they were half price). There was no bread. Of processed food, there was an abundance. Gloopy cheesy dips in plastic tubs, packets of flavoured sugar crystals for the preparation of fizzy drinks, pot noodles, instant mashed potato, snack-size ‘pepperoni’ sausages, lurid Miracle Whip, fluorescent candies, and more, much more. It seemed to me that every processed item in the world had made its way to 63°N, up across the latitude lines and the treeline, over the tundra and the pack ice, over the wastes of Hudson Bay, through the indigenous settlements battling for dignity, down into the overheated, lino-floored, echoing corridors of a giant supermarket provisioning the 800 residents of Coral Harbour. And as if that wasn’t enough to make them obese, close to the checkouts a worker was unpacking a consignment of LCD screens the size of caribou and marking them with prices that were double or triple those below sixty.
After Wayne had acquired his fluid, we repaired to Leonie’s Place, a guesthouse known to him where we were invited to share tea and bannock. Installed in the lounge, we sat on velour sofas among a display of gewgaws, knick-knacks and framed photographs of graduating children and men holding waist-high char, as well as a plasma television. Leonie herself was a large and genial Inuk clad in a spangled top. She must have been about sixty, and she and her husband ran their profitable fifteen-room guesthouse and its adjoining shop for the stream of Federally-funded visitors who serviced the northern communities. Many of her guests, she said, were construction workers and doctors from Winnipeg. At this point, as if the scene were scripted, a guest ambled in. A healer from Pond Inlet, Ootu was a small, owlish man wearing glasses, a grey toothbrush moustache and smartly pressed leisure trousers. He had been flown in by the government to teach public seminars in the art, or was it a science, of healing. With Leonie as translator, I strove to find out about the healing. There was talk of plant roots, then the Church, and then the conversation petered out, resisting my efforts to revive it. Leonie had the idea of turning on the huge television. Images from an amateur DVD revealed a church meeting in Rankin Inlet at which Leonie had preached. Crowds of obese people were laying hands on one another and speaking in tongues (I knew it was tongues, not Inuktituk, because Leonie told me), dabbing their eyes and writhing on the floor. The meeting apparently went on from nine in the morning till six at night. An Inuit quartet from north Quebec sang into microphones and played guitar and drums. ‘Four evangelical movements are going strong in the communities around here,’ said Leonie, beaming at this outstanding civic achievement and fingering the remote control like a secular rosary. ‘Our church in Coral belongs to Glad Tidings. But we all try to get along.’
1 1. Greenland. 2. New Guinea 3. Borneo 4. Madagascar. 5. Baffin Island. Neither Australia nor Antarctica qualify, on account of being continental landmasses.
2 The treeline in North America in fact dips up and down quite a bit. In Alaska and the north-western parts of Canada it lies a long way above the Arctic Circle; in Hudson Bay it falls as far as 53°. The southern limit of continuous permafrost, similarly, dips a long way south in the Hudson Bay area. This is because the pack ice on the shallow waters of the bay lingers until midsummer, leaving no time for the water to warm up. Summer temperatures on land near Hudson Bay are as a result cooler than those near larger bodies of water such as the Arctic Ocean and Beaufort Sea.
3 The Dene are a group of peoples, including the Chipewyan and Sahtu, living across a wide region of northern Canada. Dene were the first to settle what are now the Northwest Territories.
4 White men adopted the Algonquian word ‘Eskimo’ as a blanket term for all indigenous peoples of the north. The word means eaters of raw meat, and it was coined as a term of abuse, as Algonquin and indigenous northerners were enemies. ‘Eskimo’ refer to themselves as Inuk, plural Inuit, which signifies, ‘true man’. In Inuit legend, all other races are the product of the coupling of a woman and a dog. The Inuktituk word for white man, qallunaaq, plural quallunaat, literally means ‘big eyebrows’. It could have been worse.
5 In addition – and as in Arctic Alaska – people were soon perilously dependent on fur fashions in a southern world of which they knew nothing. When the price of white fox plunged in 1931–2, nearly three-quarters of the children born in one coastal district died of malnutrition or a disease associated with it.
6 In 2008 public radio crackled with stories debating the possibility of a collective legal action against Health Canada for ‘loss of nutrition’ on account of controversially diminished beluga quotas.
7 Yet in September 2007 Canada was one of only four countries to vote against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. (One hundred and forty-three voted in favour, and eleven abstained; the other three to oppose were the USA, Australia and New Zealand.) Spokespeople said that the Declaration contained elements that were ‘fundamentally incompatible with Canada’s constitutional framework’. In particular, the Canadian government had problems with Article 19, which appears to require governments to secure the consent of indigenous peoples regarding matters of general public policy, and with Articles 26 and 28, which could allow for the re-opening or repudiation of historically settled land claims.
8 In February 2009, Anglo American acquired fifteen prospecting permits on Southampton Island. The same month, Vale Inco, the nickel and metals division of mining giant Vale, acquired three prospecting permits on the island.
