Finding Franklin

13 Inuit

Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, is the closest modern Inuit settlement to the place where the last of Franklin’s men perished. Roald Amundsen, the first man to succeed in Franklin’s goal of navigating the Northwest Passage, anchored there in 1903 aboard the Gjøa and stayed for nearly two years; he named the place after his ship. A tiny trading post eventually was established there, but as with most northern hamlets, it was not occupied permanently by the Inuit until the late 1950s or early 1960s, when native settlements became a policy of the Canadian government. Its current population is a little over 1,200, most of whom live in the same sort of prefabricated insulated housing common in all northern settlements. There’s an airport, and just one hotel in town, operated by the Inuit-owned Inns North chain – appropriately enough, it’s called the Amundsen.

I first visited Gjoa – the local pronunciation is more like “Joe” than Amundsen’s “yoo-ah” – in 2004, as part of a documentary team shooting a film about Franklin and Amundsen. The film’s producer/director, Louise Osmond, had been advised that the scenes in the far north would look best on film, and so they were to be shot on 16mm. Local Inuit had been recruited to play the part of their ancestors; anyone who could bring a complete caribou-skin outfit and speak credible Inuktitut was invited to come to the set and paid with a crisp $100 Canadian bill for each day. The crew had already been there a week, filming the actors who were playing Crozier and Fitzjames and the men of Franklin’s ships; by the time I arrived these actors had left, though Kåre Conradi, who played a quite capable Amundsen, was still there for a couple of days. One of the producers told me that Kåre was hugely popular in Norway, and that his arrivals and departures there were packed with teenage fans seeking autographs – but here, in the north, he could have been just any other guy.

The day I arrived, I was invited down to the town “beach” – a euphemism in April when open water was months away – where a large igloo had been built for the use of the film crew. As with most of our brief trips around the area, this was made by snowmobile, towing a qamutiiq or sledge made of 2×4s and plywood. It took some getting used to; the locals stepped on to and off these things the way you would a skateboard, but, for the rest of us, riding on one over rough, icy terrain was like trying to stay on a bucking bronco. Reaching the igloo, we waited for our cue, as two Inuit in furs sipped coffee from the film crew’s canteen. Here in the north, I soon learned, you’re burning calories, and losing heat, by just standing around breathing – constant replenishment with hot cocoa, candy, and coffee is a must. It was springtime here in Nunavut – the night was already reduced to a period of a couple of hours of semi-darkness – but the thermometer still hovered around twenty below zero for most of our time there.

Near the igloo, there was a small shack with clapboard sides, which I later learned was Louie Kamookak’s fishing “camp.” He was away hunting during my time there, so I never got to meet him, but in Franklin circles he’s something of a legend. It was his grandfather, the legendary trader William “Paddy” Gibson, who was the first modern searcher to find the bones of Franklin’s men near the Todd Islets, less than an hour’s snowmobile-ride away. These bones had been seen before; the Inuit told Hall that among the bodies was one of the men they called “Ag-loo-ka,” although Hall was unsure whether this was Crozier or some other officer. When he reached the place, the snow obscured them, and the only body he was able to find was the one later identified as Le Vesconte, and later still as Goodsir. Gibson collected the bones and built a new stone cairn over them, passing on the knowledge of the site to his family. His grandson Louie knew it well; almost every time a film crew or a shipload of Franklin buffs passed through, he would take them to see it, but for whatever reason, no one had ever made a proper archaeological survey.

There’s a strange sense of the Franklin legacy in town. Everyone has stories to tell, and sometimes it’s hard to distinguish genuine oral tradition – which, as Dorothy Eber has shown, still retains some faded echoes of the earlier tales told to McClintock, Hall, and Schwatka – from garbled versions of written and printed sources. One afternoon, while I was in my room at the Amundsen, I got a knock on the door from young Danny Aaluk, a local artist. He had a pen-and-ink drawing of a polar bear doing a drum-dance that he wanted to sell me, and I told him I would be glad to buy it. The only trouble was that I didn’t have any cash; like a typical southerner, I asked where I could find a cash machine, but Danny just laughed. He suggested I come with him to a place where I might be able to get some money with a charge card, and since I wasn’t due on the set that day, I got on my wind-pants and parka and followed him out and across town. We arrived at a blue building that looked more or less like one of the larger settlement houses; Danny gave a special knock on the door. It was opened by another townsman, who gave me a suspicious glance before Danny explained, then let us in.

It turned out to be a sort of town speak-easy. Most of the north is supposed to be a “dry zone” – the only alcohol legally sold is the low-octane “near beer” at the HBC store. The locals had found a quiet way around this: the place had the look of a private club, with a pool hall at one end and a kind of small store at the other. It smelled powerfully of disinfectant, and the crowd was all young Inuit men; hip-hop music was blaring in another room, and the dress code here seemed to be leather jackets and knit caps. The guy behind the counter greeted Danny, who introduced me and explained the problem. “All I got here is loonies and toonies,” the man declared (referring to Canada’s $1 and $2 coins), but he said he would give it a try anyway. It turned out, though, that the machine wouldn’t take my MasterCard – “Up here, we only use Visa,” the proprietor told me. It sounded almost like a commercial.

And so he and I fell to talking, as one does in those parts; word had got around that we were in town to film something about Franklin, and the proprietor was a man who followed such news pretty closely. He said he had heard the story about two last survivors heading south along the western edge of Hudson Bay, and dying there – now that was a story he believed. I had read that same tale in Woodman, of course – and now here I was, on King William Island, a first-hand recipient of real live Inuit testimony! I could hardly contain my excitement. The man told me a few more stories, each one of them remarkably close to the versions I had read; I wished I had planned ahead and brought some kind of voice recorder. Maybe, I thought, I could borrow one from the film crew. And so I asked him: Where had he heard these stories? Could he take me to some of the elders who still remembered them? He shook his head, laughing, then reached behind the counter and pulled out a battered copy of Woodman’s Unravelling. He thought it was the greatest joke in the world, and I found myself laughing with him – back home, I might fancy myself some sort of Franklin expert, but here I was just one more crazy Qallunaaq.

What drives these Franklin searchers to come up here? Asked this question, the local doctor, with whom I shared a cup of coffee at the hotel, refused to speculate – but he noted that at least it does something to help the local economy. Unemployment in Gjoa Haven hovers somewhere around 30 per cent, and any kind of money, any kind of work, is scarce. Most Inuit families live in whole or at least part on the dole, since decent jobs are few and require some degree of higher education or training. The better jobs go overwhelmingly to Qallunaat: teachers (who get a “northern bonus” for a three-year tour), town officials, RCMP officers, and the workers at the HBC store. When the territory of Nunavut broke off from Northwest Territories – perhaps somewhat portentously on April Fool’s Day 1999 – many Inuit hoped that, by refusing the “reservation” model and simply instituting majority rule, they would avoid the troubles experienced for generations by more southerly tribes. But when you compare Gjoa Haven with, say, a town on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota, the similarities are more noticeable than the differences.

The housing is in better shape – up here, it has to be – but the common threads are numerous: unemployment is endemic, and the population, which skews young, is drawn to alcohol and drugs; suicide is the number one cause of death among young people. The local doctor shakes his head; he tells me the thing that bothers him most about northern suicides is how often they succeed. “See those houses up there?” he asks, gesturing to the slight rise atop which most of Gjoa’s boxy, prefabricated homes are perched. “Every single one of ’em has a gun. Hanging is popular, too.” Besides the speak-easy I had stumbled upon, plenty of liquor is smuggled in by passengers arriving by plane – there’s no baggage check, no airport security up here – and anyone who tosses a couple of bottles of Jim Beam into their duffel stands to make a handsome profit by it. The Qallunaat, of course, live by their own rules, since they have the money to afford liquor, along with typical western fare; in a place where a bunch of bananas runs $10 at the HBC store, such food is a luxury.

There are a few families who still hunt seasonally – you can hear their dogs howling on the edge of town – and traditional foods (called “country food” up here) such as seal meat, blubber, and muktuk are still enjoyed. But almost no one lives on the land in the old way, migrating seasonally with the food supply, camping in igloos in the winter and tupiks (skin tents) in the summer. Ever since the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Canadian government’s settlement policy has made it increasingly difficult for anyone to get by unless they have some sort of permanent home; without that, government checks, health care, and other basic necessities are impossible to obtain. Originally, every Inuk was given a red tag with their “Eskimo number”; later on, the government launched “Project Surname” and insisted that everyone take a surname so that they could distinguish one Inuk with the same given name from another. By the early 1960s, nearly everyone had a name and an address, but the settlements, or “hamlets,” that this policy created were too poor and too isolated to sustain themselves, which has led to a cycle of dependency at least as bad as that on any southern “Rez.”

Inuit traditions lasted longer, though. Back when most of the southerly tribes were first confined to reservations in the United States and Canada in the 1870s, the Inuit were still living the traditional life of their ancestors, and they would continue to do so for almost another century. Their language, Inuktitut, is still alive and spoken, although the median age of its speakers is creeping upward, and its oral traditions – including those about Franklin and other explorers – endure. The stories have become a bit tattered, the loss of detail and confusion of events probably inevitable; as Dorothy Eber notes, the starving, cannibalistic men of the Franklin expedition survive now as a species of weird Arctic bogeymen – be well behaved, the elders tell their grandchildren, or they might come out and gobble you up! And in this young territory, the elders are increasingly isolated, unable to pass on their collective wisdom to a generation raised on satellite TV, video games, and action films.

This was dramatically evident in my ten days in Gjoa, during which the town hosted an annual drum-dance festival. One of the oldest and most treasured of Inuit traditions, the drum-dance involves large skin drums with handles, upon the rim of which each dancer beats with a small mallet or stick, all the while chanting to the beat. Some are boasting songs and could be thought of almost as kindred to hip-hop’s “battles on the mic”; others are traditional songs, usually belonging to a single family or individual, that recall their histories, their achievements. On my second night in town, I went with one of the documentary’s producers and a friend to the festival, held in the school gymnasium. There, the elders, in their traditional fur costumes, were dancing and swaying vigorously to these songs, with those not dancing joining them in the chorus. Up against the edges of the gym, running and playing, were the youngest children of the hamlet, there in the care of their grandparents or great-grandparents, oblivious for the most part to the old peoples’ songs. But where were these children’s parents? Their older siblings?

The answer, as I found out later that same night, was at the local hockey arena, where the Gjoa Haven team was taking on a regional rival. The arena was packed with young people, many of them sporting leather jackets, bleached or dyed hair, and various tattoos and body piercings. These young people, clearly, had a Western outlook; they wanted to emulate the tough street kids they saw on television. The sad thing was that the best they could muster was a sort of knock-off of that culture; like kids in the old Soviet Union who craved Levi’s but ended up with cheap imitations, you could see that most of the “leather” jackets were plastic, and the T-shirts and jeans looked like something a southerner might pick up at the Goodwill or Salvation Army. Their energy, though, was completely authentic, bound together as they were by a force greater than either traditional Inuit culture or syndicated cop shows: hockey. As the sport in which Canadians have always excelled, and which promised the kind of fame that could turn an unknown Inuk kid into the next Wayne Gretzky, hockey felt like their ticket to the future. Yet, as with the African-American kids in Hoop Dreams, such a future wasn’t a very likely one for anyone there that night.

So what was the future to be for Gjoa Haven? With severe social problems, little prospect of improved employment, and traditional culture in danger, what could possibly be done that could really improve matters? The hamlet’s proximity to the shores on which Franklin’s men slowly, inexorably, expired seemed to many to be its one hope for distinction. And, in the anticipation and planning for such hopes, there were rivalries. On the one hand, there was Wally Porter, a descendant of George Washington Porter, who for many years ran a CanAlaska trading post at Gjoa Haven; on the other, there was Louie Kamookak, whose grandfather William “Paddy” Gibson had re-located the remains of Franklin’s men near the Todd Islets. Both men and their families had a special claim upon the Franklin story, and both thought that they would be the logical people to convert the Qallunaat obsession with that late great explorer into something that would benefit their community. How deep did that rivalry go? Late in 2009, some five years after I had visited Gjoa, I was to find out.

It began with an e-mail from Wally Porter:

What would you do if I told you that my grandfather George Washington Porter, years before he passed away said to one of his sons where he buried the Actual records of Sir John Franklin. If you look up George Washington Porter in the web, you’ll know who he was. I am one of many grandchildren of George Washington Porter.

My grandfather was a fur trader with Can-Alaska Post, around the 1920’s. You ever wonder why no ones ever found Sir John franklins Documents, records or what they call, A Diary that he may have when he died in around King William Island. Want to find more information. Call me. I live in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut Canada on an Island that’s famous for expeditions called King William Island.

I wrote back, of course, expressing interest – as well as a good deal of skepticism that records of the Franklin expedition could have somehow survived until the 1920s – and asking for more details. He wrote back, saying the matter was too important to trust to e-mail, and again giving me his phone number. And so – throwing caution and long-distance bills to the winds, I called. In a roundabout, rambling account, he recounted how these records, which his grandfather had in his keeping, caused concern in his family. They had a “bad feeling” about them and didn’t know what to do, and so the grandfather decided to bury them. I imagined that he must have done so under a cairn or inukshuk at some remote spot, but according to his grandson, they had been buried right in town in Gjoa, underneath – of all things – a stone memorial to “Paddy” Gibson!

This memorial, as it happened, had been built atop an earlier one – a marble slab left by Roald Amundsen in 1905 – and it was this slab that turned out to be the key to the story. Porter was quite clear as to his family’s tradition that Franklin records were buried there, and the association with Amundsen lent a certain plausibility to the story. Amundsen, after all, had held a reverent attitude toward Franklin; in his autobiography, he wrote that, as a boy, what had appealed to him most were the “sufferings” Franklin and his men endured, which inspired him to become an Arctic explorer and take up Franklin’s quest. Along with the crew of the Gjøa, Amundsen spent nearly two years with the Inuit; having learned their ways and formed a strong connection with their community, perhaps he would have entrusted something of value to them. And, as it turned out, he had buried a metal box buried under the slab, a box whose contents had apparently not been seen in several generations – could Franklin’s records really be there?

Porter was unwavering in his belief that they were; the only question he had was how to turn their discovery to the advantage of his family and community. We spoke several more times on the phone; from me, he wanted an estimate of the value of such records, should they be found, and how much interest there would be in them among historians. I quite honestly told him that their value would be immeasurable; to have an authoritative record in Franklin’s hand would rewrite the entire history of his expedition. Porter stressed that he didn’t want to sell the records, but he did want their value to be recognized; he told me that he would like to see a special museum built for them in Gjoa, one that would help bring tourists to town. The Gjoa community centre – a small room attached to the hotel – needed expanding too, and the townspeople needed better services and help with issues ranging from health care to youth counselling. Having seen the poverty and desperation that young people faced there, I could understand his hope to use this discovery to help them.

He didn’t want anything to go public, though, at least not yet. He and his family had retained the services of a law firm to make sure that the Canadian government would come through with the funding and support he wanted before they considered parting with their valuable knowledge and documents. I was privy to some of the discussions the Porters had about their plans; after getting nowhere with their first lawyers, they fired them and hired another firm; there seemed to be considerable distrust on their part – understandably so – about the lack of respect shown to Inuit by white lawyers, archaeologists, and government bureaucrats. Eventually, they must have felt that they had got their ducks in a row, since Wally broke the story to the press in September 2010. Doug Stenton, the chief archaeologist for the Nunavut government, arrived in Gjoa a few weeks later, and, amidst considerable media fanfare, the monument was removed, and the box – just as described! – was carefully lifted out of the ground and flown to Ottawa for examination. The world waited with bated breath to see what it would contain.

In the meantime, I tried a little sleuthing of my own; I contacted my friend Kenn Harper, long-time Iqaluit resident and historian, and he made some inquiries among his old Arctic friends. He had heard something about this box before, and eventually he tracked down Eric Mitchell, a retired HBC post manager who had a story of his own to tell: he knew exactly what was in the box, since he and George Washington Porter had dug it up back in 1957!

Mitchell described the original box, a small iron one that had been left by Amundsen under the marble slab in 1905. In it, Amundsen had placed an inscribed photograph of Dr Georg V. Neumayer, the man who had taught him all he knew about terrestrial magnetism, along with a note asking that the box be left where it was. “Paddy” Gibson had dug it up back in 1927 when he was the post manager at Gjoa, and – after copying the note – had heeded Amundsen’s request and reburied it under the slab, where it lay undisturbed for the next thirty years. In the meantime, Gibson himself had been killed in a plane crash in 1942, and some years later the HBC had decided that a memorial to him should be erected in Gjoa. A plaque had been duly made, and sent to the post, though without any concrete or other materials from which to construct a memorial on which to place it. By then, George Washington Porter was the post manager; he requested concrete, but it was some time before any could be requisitioned and delivered. Mitchell – then stationed at Spence Bay – volunteered to pick some up from the DEW-line station at Mount Matheson and drop it off in Gjoa. He and Porter considered Amundsen’s slab as an ideal foundation for this new memorial, and resolved to dig up the box once more to check on its contents.

The original photograph and note were still intact, wrapped in some old newspapers from 1927. Still, the iron box had grown rusty, and Mitchell and Porter were concerned that the documents wouldn’t last long unless they were protected from water. To keep them dry, they asked Porter’s wife to sew them into some waterproof cloth; after replacing them inside the iron box, they put the box itself inside a second box – a wooden ammunition crate, of the sort commonly used in the north – which they then filled with tallow to make it watertight. It was April, though, too cold for concrete to set properly, so they decided that erecting the monument would have to wait for the summer. After directing Porter to rebury the box and build the monument over the slab, Mitchell headed back to Spence Bay; so far as he knew, his instructions had been followed and the box was still there.

Kenn and I were fairly confident, then, that the box would contain nothing more than the Neumayer photograph and note, wrapped in waterproof cloth, inside a metal box inside the tallow-filled crate. And despite this, when the crate was examined, it was found to be full of sand; although the archaeologists carefully removed the sand – a small amount at a time – when they got to the very bottom, there was nothing but sand inside. Oh, and a trace of tallow. Where had the box and the record gone? Of course, no one had bothered to ask Louie Kamookak, Gibson’s grandson.

Louie knew about the contents of the box as well, and more: that it had been dug up on yet one further occasion, back in the 1980s. At that time, as he described it, they had decided that the records in the box were too fragile to rebury, and so instead they had sent them to the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife. There, they were duly catalogued as part of the historical collections of the Northwest Territories; when Nunavut split off in 1999, all the materials from sites in this new jurisdiction were set aside to form the “Nunavut collection,” including these relics. Unfortunately, the young government of this new land either wasn’t made aware of this or simply needed the resources elsewhere; no one had ever been sent to oversee this new archive, or check on its contents. I did a quick online search, though, and there they were: Amundsen’s photograph, along with a chunk of the marble slab itself; the items had been given the new catalogue number N–1985–005. The description read: “This accession consists of one print of a portrait of George Neumeyer with the inscription, ‘Best wishes for success in exploring the North Magnetic Pole to his friend Roald Amundsen, 1905.’” Included is a mostly illegible note from George Porter and E. Mitchell of the HBC regarding the site’s excavation on 14 April 1957 (from Paddy Gibson’s cairn near Gjoa Haven).

I never had a chance to speak with Wally Porter and get his reaction to this news. In his conversations with me, he had offered many details – even recalling his grandmother’s use of waterproof cloth – but apparently, the family tradition had been imperfectly passed along. That the records of a great explorer had been buried under this monument in 1957 was true enough – it’s just that they were the records of the wrong explorer.

Technology has always come readily to the Inuit. They’re problem solvers, careful watchers, and intuitive engineers, and readily think in three dimensions; Robert Flaherty, filming what would become Nanook of the North in 1921, was astonished when, after his camera slipped into the icy water, the men he was filming as “primitives” were able to take the entire apparatus apart, dry and clean it, and reassemble it into working order, a feat that he himself could never have managed. Distance has always been a factor in the north, and the Inuit were quick to learn and employ Qallunaat technology such as radio, using it as a link between their now more-isolated settlements. The CBC’s northern broadcasting service in Inuktitut began in 1960, and much of the content (along with a good deal of the announcing, engineering, and music) was provided by the Inuit themselves. And so it was to no one’s surprise that Inuit also embraced the Internet, despite the fact that, as with radio, the connections from one point to another were at times slowed or blocked by clouds or bad weather.

In the early days of the Internet, many communities had only one or two computers, usually located in a community centre or other public area. But that number soon grew, to the point where Nunavut boasted more computers per capita than any other state or province. The service to connect them, though, was much slower in coming; as complaints about poor service mounted, the Nunanet company, which for a time was almost the region’s only provider, collapsed. New companies sprang up in its wake, however, and service has rebounded since then. Satellite-based Internet is now a part of daily life throughout Nunavut. The Nunatsiaq News, the territory’s paper of record, made the transition to the Net early on and is now primarily accessed online; nearly every house in every northern settlement has a satellite dish (though, to be fair, they have one other use: watching hockey games).

There’s something, too, about the way the Internet works which makes it a particularly good match for Inuit culture. In the old days of the shamans, magic was worked through tupilait, helping spirits that would travel outside the shaman’s body, diving to the sea bed to see where fish or sea mammals might be found, visiting sick relatives, or even voyaging to the moon. When, in the early 1940s Peter Freuchen told one shaman about the war against Hitler, the shaman replied that he would take care of the problem; after all, his tupilaq was a particularly powerful one – he had no doubt he could kill this man and bring the war to an end! Indeed, one early (pre-Google) search engine, popular on Nunanet, was called “Tupilak,” while a later, similar page was dubbed Nanivara (“I have found it!”). The idea of a powerful spirit, conveyed invisibly over the air, travelling great distances to bring back information, fit perfectly with traditional Inuit mythology.

When I first started researching the Franklin story in the mid-1990s, it was enormously difficult to contact anyone in the far north; the main choices were satellite telephone (enormously expensive) or Canada Post (much less expensive but enormously slow and unreliable). By the later 1990s, I was able to contact Inuit and other northerners by e-mail, although I had to allow a few extra days in case of outages or technical issues. When I was in Gjoa Haven in 2004, I was able to post text and small images to a class website I had set up for my students, although it often took a whole morning to do it. And yet today the Net is instantaneous and ubiquitous; every day, Louie Kamookak calls out Ublaakut! (“good morning”) to his Facebook family and friends, and every morning, within a few minutes, we say it back. Still, there are some limits; when news broke of the finding of Franklin’s Erebus, reporters anxious to reach Kamookak (who has no land line, though he has a cell) called his employer instead. “They’ve been calling the school nonstop,” he told a reporter for Canadian Geographic. “I’ve had to apologize to everyone there for it. I’m the only Louie Kamookak in the world . . . just one, in the whole world. So people can find me. This might be easier if my name was Andrew Stewart. I’m just lucky that they can’t find my cell number.”

This same technology that’s connected Louie and his community into the world of modern media has, at the same time, connected Franklin scholars, from those who actually search the ground each year to those – far more numerous – who work from their proverbial “armchairs.” I started my own Franklin e-mail list in 1996; in 2001 I converted it into an automated LISTSERV, and in 2009 into a blog, “Visions of the North.” More recently, a “Remembering the Franklin Expedition” page on Facebook has emerged, where now hundreds of members around the world exchange Franklin news and theories. The vaunted documents, from the Victory Point record to the infamous “Peglar Papers,” are now getting a fresh set of eyeballs – several hundred of them – and work that once took place in the pencil-scratching silence of an archive now flashes back and forth across continents and time zones, solving century-old cruxes as quickly as Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot. Some mysteries, though, will never be solved, and that’s as it should be.

Figure 32 Jacob Tirttaq and Jermaine Porter, Gjoa Haven, 2004. Photo by the author.

Yet, for all the continuing interest in the “southern” world, it’s to the Inuit that the future of the Franklin search will – and should – ultimately belong.

When I was in Gjoa in 1994, waiting in the community room at the Amundsen Hotel for my next camera call, two young Inuit boys – they were, I would guess, between eight and ten years old – came in and shyly asked where I was from. To show them, I opened the atlas program on my Mac and made Gjoa Haven and Providence, Rhode Island, blip on the globe. Then they wanted to see more pictures, so I opened up my iPhoto library and showed them all the ones I had taken around town. They especially liked the photos I had taken at the drum-dance festival. “I can drum-dance!” said one. “Me too!” said the other. “Do you use a small drum or a big drum?” I asked. “A big drum!” they both answered in unison. They wanted to know if I had brought my camera so that I could take their picture. Of course I could, I told them. They immediately went over and sat for a portrait with their arms around each other, then laughed as they saw the image on the back of the camera. “Can you put that picture in your computer?” they asked. I loaded it into iPhoto and showed it to them, not noticing at first the red-eye effect from the flash. “We’re monsters!” they shouted – but then I showed them how you could take it away, and they were delighted with the results. I asked them their names, and they told me “Jacob and Jermaine.” They must be about twenty by now, if they’ve made it so far. In their community, unemployment is still bleak, and Iqaluit – the young capital of the young territory of Nunavut – never seems able to get the resources it needs from the Canadian federal government. It’s nice to send search ships – great to be in the spotlight! – and (according to some) this will all help Canadian sovereignty somehow. But it would be a lot more meaningful if it could contribute something to the fragile northern economy, to Jacob and Jermaine, and their generation of young Inuit across the territory. Our histories, after all, are tangled up together.