Twelve
Guy Amarok, 1932–95 Chesterfield Inlet
The story was that he was taken by the evil spirits.
My parents used to travel along the north side of the main body of Ukkusiksalik. They had a camp I remember near Douglas Harbour — it might have been one of those islands [Nuvuk&it] — when I was a very young child. Then we moved up the inlet to where there were houses [Tasiujaq]. That’s where we travelled to. When we came up from Chesterfield Inlet, we went to the old Wager Post, then moved up the river into Qamanaaluk. That I remember very well. I was roughly six years old, maybe a little more. I remember the people from Repulse Bay would come down overland, in through Douglas Harbour, into Ukkusiksalik.
I was born in 1932, somewhere between Chesterfield Inlet and Baker Lake. My father was Kreelak. I remember moving up to Ukkusiksalik by Peterhead in the summer. I was old enough. I remember Iqungajuq, an Inuk, who was the post manager at the time. He had a wife there with him. And I remember that they had a house and the store and the warehouse when we first moved up.
When we came up in the summer, we spent the summer at the post with Iqungajuq’s family. In the winter, we moved up to where other people were living, at a place called Kugajuk. I was young, but what my father did was wrap me in caribou skin so I could stay warm, and tied me down to the qamutik. That’s how we travelled. I don’t know exactly how far inland [he points to an area approximately a hundred kilometres northwest of Qamanaaluk on the map] but I remember we were eating muskox for food. There were muskox in that area. We travelled by dog team from the post up to where the Inuit were. We slept one night out on the land on the way. We were travelling very fast by dog team, so we slept one night and then reached the other Inuit the next day.
At Kugajuk, I remember these people’s names: Qamukkaaq, Iksatitak, Ukayuitok, and Pisuyuitok. Iksatitak was driving his dog team through fog and he went over a cliff and he was paralyzed by the accident. Ukayuitok wasn’t very old then; he was a young man then. Qamukkaaq has two children in Rankin Inlet, two daughters that live in Rankin Inlet.
We lived in this area during that winter only. In the summer, we hiked back to the post at Tasiujaq. It was right in the summer because I remember there were lots of mosquitoes. It was maybe during 1936 or 1937 that we spent that winter at Kugajuk.
When we were coming back in the spring from Kugajuk, we passed the area where my father’s older brother Kapik had been with my grandmother and my grandfather Siksaaq. My grandfather got lost and was not found at the time. They found him dead later that same year. He had built an iglu, but his body was on the floor of the iglu and his feet were on his bed. He was pulled partly off the bed, with his feet still up on the high part [sleeping platform] and his body on the floor. He was pulled down and killed by spirits. There was nobody else in that area, other than himself. The story was that he was taken by the evil spirits. People looked for him for a long, long time. That spring, when we were going back to the trading post, I fell off the sled beside an esker.* As soon as I fell off I started to cry. I remember the landscape, the esker and the slope and this flat valley, all very well. I was too young, so I couldn’t run to keep up with the sled. I remember seeing this animal, sort of like a raven, coming at me. You see ravens today that are small, but this was bigger. I tried to run away from it, and I saw my mother coming to pick me up. Then I looked up and this thing wasn’t there anymore. I was the only one who saw this thing. It was like a spirit that went after me. It was close to there that Siksaaq’s body had been found. My grandfather was an angakkuq [shaman]. It looks like he was killed by another angakkuq, another spirit. That’s what it looked like, but that’s how he died. Back then, people died of accidents or people died of getting murdered or people died of carelessness or just pure negligence, those kinds of things. People didn’t die too often from disease like they do now. [Amarok breaks into chanting song as he tells this story.]
We spent the summer and fall at the post, with my father’s younger brother, Okpik. There were no qablunaat at the post, just an Inuk as manager. We lived in part of a building in one of the porches. It was probably the manager’s house. There was another family that lived in part of the building with us. I remember that my parents and myself and Anawak’s family were living in the porch and the post manager had his room with his wife in that building. We were living in the original trader’s house and there was another building, either a warehouse or a store. Off to the side there was an outhouse. The reason why I remember the outhouse was there was one wolf that kept coming back, and the manager’s dogs would get into fights with it, but never killed it. They would gang up on the wolf but they would never kill the wolf.
I remember there was some kind of stove in the house, either a wood-burning oven or a space heater. I remember going into the store quite often. I remember that there was no heat in the store, and all they could sell was food that could freeze but not perish because it was frozen. Those were the kinds of foods that I remember being traded. My father was trading fox skins during the winter for tea, tobacco, sugar, biscuits, flour, porridge — that is the food that I remember. The post didn’t have the food that we have today, which is perishable when it freezes.
The only thing traded then was fox skins. We didn’t trade muskox skin. We used it in the fall when there was no snow and you can’t freeze anything. We used it as a sled; we tied it together and it’s very slippery, so we used it for dragging. Later, after the Rankin Inlet [nickel] mine opened, that’s when we started selling sealskin and other skins.
My father hunted caribou around Tasiujaq and to the west, inland. In the summer we didn’t have a canoe, so we hunted only caribou in the summer. In the winter we hunted seal.
In winter we moved from the post down to the islands [Nuvuk&it]. There were other people who had come from Repulse Bay when we moved there. These people were Puujuut, Uliq, and Ataq. These three were men, and Itimanik, who was my aunt. Ataq and Itimanik were married. We spent the winter with them. I heard when they were coming in through the entrance, there was a boat lost because of the current in the whirlpool. We spent the whole winter at Nuvuk&it. In the winter, we lived in an iglu. In the summer, we had canvas tents. Before we made the move up to Ukkusiksalik, I heard about people living in caribou tents and sealskin tents, around Chesterfield Inlet.
I remember a priest there at Nuvuk&it. This priest was living with the people. He lived with Inuit, but he had his own iglu. I remember every morning at seven, we had to go to church. The services were held at a family’s iglu, the biggest iglu in the camp. The only time that I ever remember coming to a real church was in Chesterfield Inlet. Today, it’s not every morning that church is conducted. It’s either Sunday or on special days. They called him Father Vilea. He died here after he came down from Ukkusiksalik, when he was walking on the sea ice. He might have gone through the ice.
I remember playing ball. We used a piece of stick, any kind of wood, for a bat. In the winter, snow would build up on the outer layers of the parka and we had to use a stick to knock off the ice. So we used that for a bat. We had a caribou skin for a ball, which somebody sewed together to make it kind of round, round enough to use for a ball. That’s what we used for playing ball. The bats we used were not like the ones they use on TV, where they are totally smooth and shiny. We just used any piece of wood. Another game I played quite often, I would pretend to hunt caribou. I used caribou antlers, lined them up on the snow, and I would throw something as my weapon. If I hit the caribou antlers that I had lined up, that would be my hunting game.
For toys in the spring, we used bone and rock; we didn’t have real toys. I remember my father built me a bow and arrow out of caribou antlers. That was one of my toys. I hunted ptarmigan with it because they don’t fly off very quickly. You can get really close to one. So I hunted ptarmigan with that bow and arrow.
I remember one time in the late spring, the snow had melted on the land and over the ice, but one night it got really cold and the ice on the lake at Qamanaaluk melted and then froze over. Then there’s water and then ice, water, and then very thin ice. When we were walking on top of this thin ice, we would go through. By the time we reached the other side, we were soaking wet. I remember that very well. I don’t know why we were crossing it when it was like that.
We also lived over near Iriptaqtuuq at one point. I remember one particular area when the tide changed, when the tide went out, it turns into an inlet or a little bay. It turns into a river and then fish would get trapped in there. I remember people were catching fish, but it’s really so silty, it was dirty.
We lived in Ukkusiksalik for two or maybe three winters, but not longer than that. Then we moved back down to Chesterfield Inlet. I don’t remember what age I was then.
Long before we were there, I heard there were some whalers coming into Ukkusiksalik. One story I heard, from before I was born, there was a wooden ship with sails that came in, and it was shipwrecked. I don’t know where it was. That’s one story I heard about the whalers being in there. The place where it was wrecked, there used to be a little shack that was probably used by the whalers. That’s where that wreck happened. After that ship got wrecked, people used the ship for firewood.
* An esker is a long, winding ridge of stratified sand and gravel deposited by a sub-glacial river during the last ice age. Many of these are evident across the tundra.