Fifteen

Anthonese Mablik, 1940–2001 Repulse Bay

People lived in Ukkusiksalik before I was born and before anyone today was born, long ago, probably in the Tuniit era.

We know for sure that people lived in Ukkusiksalik before I was born and before anyone today was born, long ago, probably in the Tuniit era. When you look at it closely, there are inuksuit [the plural of inuksuk] and other structures made by human hands that have been there for years and years, before any of us were there at all.

I was born November 1, 1940, in the Repulse Bay area at Tikiraq. My father’s name is Akkurdjuk. I think he was from the Pelly Bay area, Nattilik. My mother, Tannaruluk, was from the same area.

I first went to Ukkusiksalik when I was seventeen years old, in spring, around May. We used to travel from one place to the other, to look for more game, for hunting and trapping. At that time, in the Repulse Bay area, food was getting scarce, so we moved down to Ukkusiksalik.

There were two dog teams, my father’s and my older brother’s, Arsene Putulik. There were about eight people: my father, Akkurdjuk; my stepmother, Eitoq; my brothers Arsene Putulik, Pilimon Tigumiaq, Antoin Siatsiak; plus my stepsister Annie Qupanuq and Arsene’s wife, Celina, plus my wife, Suzanne. We got married earlier that spring. We were newlyweds on a honeymoon! We were married in church in Repulse Bay.

From Repulse Bay we went across the sea ice and stopped at Beach Point. Then we went along the shore; our next stop was at Qiniulik, then Ikalupilina. We stayed there at the islands. It was in early spring so the trip was very easy. There were no soft spots. It was fun. We didn’t see many caribou but quite a few seals.

We stayed at Nuvuk&it for a while. There were two families there: Tavok and Saniqtaq. Our boat was already there. After the ice was gone we moved to Tinittuqtuq, a good place to anchor the boat. We stayed at Tinittuqtuq during the summer, although we used to go up to Tasiujaq for caribou hunting. The boat was a whaler with a sail and an inboard engine. It was called a tuq-tuq-tuq because of the sound.

I went to Tasiujaq in the summer by boat, but I never actually went to the buildings. I could see the buildings, but I never went there. I don’t know why, but my father and also Saniqtaq told me not to go to those buildings. Those two were the boss; I had to listen to them. I was told that the place was haunted. I know I wasn’t going to see any ghosts or anything, although it can happen.

One time I went on a caribou hunt with my younger brother, Tony Siatsiak, to a place called Umiijarvik. We were walking, and my younger brother saw a person with a tusk. He was so scared that he didn’t know what he was doing any more. I myself saw nothing at that time, but my younger brother was so scared that I believed he had actually seen something.

We based the whole summer at Tinittuqtuq, staying in a canvas tent, trying to catch caribou. Tinittuqtuq is where my fond memory is, because there were both seals and caribou there. I caught a lot of them when I was there. The place itself is beautiful also. That’s why I like it there. We didn’t stay there long enough, only one year.

My older brother, Arsene Putulik, and I walked from Tinittuqtuq straight north, inland, looking for caribou. There were not very many caribou, just a few. Then, in the winter, we moved down to Nuvuk&it, because it’s close to the floe edge, for hunting seal. We lived in an iglu there. We stayed there the whole winter. We used to get hungry all the time. There wasn’t enough caribou or enough seal. We got very hungry during that year. In spring, sometime in May, we moved back to Repulse Bay.

We travelled by dog teams again; instead of two dog teams there were three dog teams, one for each family. I don’t remember how long the trip took. We were travelling at nights, too. So I don’t remember how many nights we stopped on the way back. We brought the boat back with us by dog team. We had large dog teams; I estimate about fifty or sixty dogs altogether. Not too many people had twenty per team; the normal was between six to twelve. Not many had fifteen dogs per team. We got all the dogs together to pull the boat up a hill.

When we came back from Ukkusiksalik, Inusatuajuk and his son, Utaq, were living with us. Utaq was very young. His older brother, Kaunak, stayed with Tavok and Saniqtaq as a group.

My parents never went back to Ukkusiksalik. Utaq and I went there again a few years later by dog team to go seal hunting in late April. After Tavok and Saniqtaq came to Repulse Bay, about a year later, we went down to Ukkusiksalik. Later on, my older brother and I went down by snowmobile to Ukkusiksalik for a seal hunt.

When Utaq and I went there, I was in my twenties. Utaq was younger than me, and he brought his son. We left our wives behind in Repulse Bay. We were at an aukaniq [polynya] where the flow of the water keeps it open. That time, there was a lot of seal, so much seal that we didn’t have to use a boat to get them, just on the ice. We brought a boat with us, but we never used the boat at all. It seemed like [the seals] were ducks, birds, popping up and down, there were that many. They were right close to the edge of the ice, so we just used harpoons. There were so many that we were right close beside them. We had to pull it up very quickly because of the current. If we took our time the seal would go under the ice because there were very strong currents, so it was hard to pull up. As soon as we harpooned it, we pulled it right up quickly. We were at the aukaniq for two days. The first day we caught a hundred ringed seals. The next day we were going to catch a little bit more, but there were too many seals to skin, so we stopped after two days.

We brought only a certain amount of the seal meat back home. We couldn’t carry it all. We cached them right in the ice, so if anybody went there from anywhere, they were just there to help themselves.

It was approximately two kilometres from Nuvuk&it to the open water, the polynya, which is about a hundred feet across. The polynya near Nuvuk&it was open during the winter months. Toward spring, about the time we left, in April, it was frozen over, instead of the other way around. I am not sure if this happens every year, but when I was there, that’s how it happened.

I saw three seals had been killed on the ice when they were basking, and I figured they were killed by a wolf. If they were killed by a bear, they would have been eaten, but they were just killed and not eaten at all. I noticed that there were quite a few wolves but I was just using a dog team, not a snowmobile, so I couldn’t go chasing them.

When I went back there seal hunting later with my older brother Putulik, by snowmobile, in the very early days of snowmobiles, we went to the same aukaniq, but there were very few seals this time, not many at all, because that’s the way Ukkusiksalik is.

It’s the tradition of Ukkusiksalik that if there’s people living there, the game will get scarce. Once there are no more people there, the animals will return. If people live there a long time, the game will go away, and when they are gone the game will come right back again. This is different from other places. What I think is that Ukkusiksalik is so narrow at the mouth and the bay itself, a lot of snow accumulates on the sea ice. The seals get scared and start going away. That’s what I think, myself.

When there were too many people there, that’s when the seals started to get scared away. So, when Tavok moved from Ukkusiksalik to Repulse Bay, we knew there would be a lot of seal soon, after nobody stayed there for a whole year. After Tavok left Nuvuk&it and moved to Repulse Bay, that’s when we went to go seal hunting. We used all the seals, for food and dog food, and also we used the skin to buy some groceries. Utaq was going back to Igloolik with his wife. I had to get some seal meat for dog food and food for me and my wife. I was also using the skins to buy some groceries. We were not using money then, just trading tokens.

At that time, food and everything wasn’t that expensive. I remember [that] for one good-quality skin you could average twenty-five pounds of flour. Smaller flour bags were cheaper. For one sealskin, you could get a bag of flour, a pound of lard and baking powder, and also a box of bullets. It’s kind of hard to tell because the sealskin prices always went up and down. And it all depended on the quality of the sealskin. I figure at that time, five good-quality skins for a new rifle.

There is an unwritten rule of life: too many people scare the seals away. It is something that was true in the past and will probably be true in the future, too. Wildlife gets frightened away. That’s why, in the past, we respected the policy to get enough to last you, no more, so that you won’t waste the meat, and so there won’t be many bones littered all over the place. So the land and the air will be clean at all times. This was respected by the younger people; the older people made sure they were going by this. If the oldest people figured there was enough to last them a whole year, they told the other people, that’s enough, no more, and they will stop hunting. That is Inuit philosophy.