Panniqtuuq announces itself. Consistently, insistently, it tells you, reminds you, of its presence. And it’s not as if it has to. To reach Panniqtuuq, you travel by air or sea. There is no road, no winter road, no proposals for a road, no dream of a road. Panniqtuuq is located near the Arctic Circle on the east side of Baffin Island, on a fiord, the Pangnirtung Fiord, that runs northward off another large body of water, Cumberland Sound, which runs westward. It is hard to imagine reaching Panniqtuuq—having taken the trouble to get there—or being in Panniqtuuq and thinking that you might be someplace else or wondering where you are.
However, if for some strange reason you forget, there it is, written in small white stones that make up large white letters, a short way up the smaller of the two mountains that overlook the community: “Pangnirtung, NWT,” the anglicized version of the name written in English and Inuit syllabic print (more recently it has been amended to read “Pangnirtung, NU”). And farther along, on the same hill, a little higher up, the words “Welcome to Pangnirtung,” in the same white stones, in the same English and Inuit syllabic forms, translations, though which is a translation and which the original, and for whom, are open questions. A strange (double) repetition: “Pangnirtung, NU” and “Welcome to Pangnirtung,” the only words inscribed in the hills that overlook the community, in two languages, a kind of doubling, a repetition and a difference. One welcomes, one announces: both in two languages and two forms of writing, inscriptions in stone on the land, both specify: Pangnirtung.
Should your gaze not wander so far out of the community, you would still not be at a loss for location markers. The fire station, in small white wooden letters, says “Pangnirtung Fire Station.” The Co-operative grocery store says “Pangnirtung Inuit Co-op.” The post office says “Pangnirtung Post Office” not once, but twice. The community radio station is marked as the “Pangnirtung Radio Station.” It is as if Panniqtuuq cannot resist the opportunity to inscribe itself, remind itself of itself.
On a rock between the ‘downtown’ and ‘uptown’ parts of the community, divided by the airstrip, can be found what was for many years the only graffiti in town. Here, presumably some of the younger folk, in a fit of daring, flaunting convention and authority, leave traces of their generational energies and “weak messianic powers.” On this rock, they scrawl in black spray paint: “Pang.” Their youthful exuberance doubles over with their ‘proper’ citizenship, as if a crew of rebels had taken great risks to establish control of the governor’s palace because they wanted to decorate it in a manner better suited to the dignity of the office. Some years later, an expletive so well known to speakers of English that one need not violate the sanctity of the academic text by repeating it here, gets added in a different colour (reminding us of how the supplement can overturn the meaning of that to which it is added), and more graffiti proliferates around the community including, among the more typical and expected scrawls, an unexpected “have a nice day.”
Much of this could be said to be both normal and benign. After all, many communities—perhaps all—mark themselves. But the double inscription on the land, on the hill overlooking the community, is peculiarly insistent, certainly unusual, and over-determines a reading of the other inscriptions. Something here relates to Fredric Jameson’s reflection on landscape in The Seeds of Time, where he suggests that “this kind of analysis effectively neutralizes the old opposition between the rational and the irrational . . . by locating the dynamics of meaning in texts that precede conceptual abstraction,”1 texts like the inscriptions on landscape, or the landscape itself. Jameson goes on to suggest that in these texts “a multiplicity of levels is thereby at once opened up that can no longer be assimilated to Weberian rationalization, instrumental thought, the reifications and repressions of the narrowly rational or conceptual” (23). In a community where, as I will illustrate, elders have stressed the colonial relation by deploying the metaphor of over-inscription—”they wrote their laws over ours”—this gesture, this inscription on the landscape, marks perhaps on one level a written response, the construction of a different sort of text. Panniqtuuq’s improbable insistence on itself reflects, not least, the politics of being that is a key feature of Aboriginal politics in Canada. It equally reflects something about writing, about the being of writing, about kinds of writing: a certain kind of writing and, perhaps, a certain kind of writing lesson.
Jameson writes of landscape potentially as “a space that is somehow meaningfully organized and on the very point of speech, a kind of articulated thinking that fails to reach its ultimate translation in proposition or concepts, in messages,2“ and, in reference to a text from the Pacific North-west called in English the Epic ofAsdiival, argues that “the various landscapes, from frozen inland wastes to the river and the coast itself, speak multiple languages (including those of the economic mode of production itself and of the kinship structure) and emit a remarkable range of articulated messages.”3 What message is evoked by Auyuittuq, “the land that never melts”? Auyuittuq is a valley that stretches northward from the end of the Pangnirtung Fiord, along the Weasel River and across the Arctic Circle through a stretch of mountains named by the Qallunaat after Norse gods, up to Summit Lake, then down along the Owl River to the fiord at the north end, on which is an island that holds the community of Qiqiqtarjuak. Auyuittuq is glacier country: glacial moraines, glacial streams, tundra, landslides. Here, the world is new, still being carved, still being formed. Now a national park, Auyuittuq provided Inuit with a way of passing across this peninsula of Baffin Island: it was and is well-travelled-upon country. Though nowadays, physically fit tourists with expensive hiking gear do most of the walking.
Panniqtuuq is perched near the entrance of the fiord that leads to Auyuittuq, the fiord slowly widening as it winds southward from Auyuittuq to Panniqtuuq. By the time you reach Panniqtuuq, the world is no longer new, the landscape well formed, presenting a more established aspect. This is ocean and mountain country, far north of the treeline, with a moral topography all its own. And it is a spectacular setting for a remarkable community, a community in conversation with its landscape like few others.
Panniqtuuq is a kind of coastal community. Not quite coastal in the way the term usually designates, because for much of the year the ocean is frozen and travelled on by snowmobiles. Even in summer, the boats have to navigate around the floating debris of ice packs that can on occasion squeeze together tight enough to make themselves unpassable. Hunting, here, involves most frequently going out on the water or ice. The community itself is perched on a tidal flat, so the rhythm of titles dominates life in summer, and, in winter, creates a zone of broken ice that must be navigated over in order to get to the smoother ocean ice.
But there are also trails that lead overland, and hunting parties that follow those trails, as in the one that goes through Auyuittuq. Inland, following those trails that wind along creeks and rivers, surrounded by mountains and rolling hills, meadows and valleys, moss and boulders, a different kind of reality prevails. It’s somehow more pastoral, serene, nurturing: no longer the harsh exposure of the open ocean. Walking overland here invites poetic reflection of the sort John Moss so eloquently practises in his writings on arctic landscape.
In the Pangnirtung Fiord the dramatic highs and lows of the kind of moral topography Taussig talks about have relevance. So do other oppositions: inland and coastal, or winter and summer, though going high up the mountains seems to be a comparatively rare venture, much less frequent than going out on the ocean (whether frozen or not). Certainly, this is a landscape that invokes the sublime: Auyuittuq, especially, provides the kind of contrast, starkness, and impressive, awe-inspiring quality that might be associated with the sublime. While camped across from Crater Lake, near sleep, I hear an enormous roar that sounds as if it comes from just above the tent. It continues, not thunder, a landslide, growing louder. We sit up and look out. Across the valley, kilometres away, we watch for almost twenty minutes as the roar continues, marking tons and tons of rock, ice, and snow, falling down sheer cliff and mountain, making a vast pile at the bottom, soon to become just another part of the moraine, one I am glad not to be under.
An earthly place, marked by stunning, unearthly beauty. The clearest air I’ve ever seen: ocean air. Wild, wild winds. Mosses and other small plants, covering all the ground: a giant feeding field for caribou and other wild-life. The best time of year to see this terrain is May, when you can travel by snowmobile across the frozen ocean or along and over the land ridges, across valleys and valleys, high up to see ridges fading into the distance, or low along valley floors, wandering along frozen rivers and streams, the dry air working to lessen the feel of coldness, which has dissipated enough to have lost its sting. And no trees to block the view: better to be a hunter than prey here.
My Inuit students in southern Canada can not quite get comfortable with the presence of trees: trees are always ‘in the way’ of the view. One northern Inuk I talk to, when asked what he remembered most about a recent visit to Toronto, gave the distinctly Inuit answer: “all the trees.” Who else would associate Toronto with trees?
The variety of global changes in political and economic structure currently taking place in Nunavut—involving both the land claim and the new territory—have had little immediate impact on the architecture and social landscape of Panniqtuuq, and in fact appear almost to derive from their community-based embodiments. Which is to say that a community like Panniqtuuq primarily gets built from the ground up, gets built from a variety of everyday and strategic decisions made by local people, albeit sometimes at the behest of opportunities made available from the outside and frequently drawing on outside technical assistance. The site of Panniqtuuq was chosen by Attagoyuk in the early 1920s, who advised the Hudson’s Bay Company that it would be a good place for them to set up shop. Perhaps he deliberately chose a location not used as one of the semi-permanent family bases scattered around the Sound. The name “Panniqtuuq” translates as “where the bull caribou are.”
A walk from one end of town to the next takes about forty minutes at an easygoing pace, and will serve here as an adequate rhetorical structure around which a description can be fashioned. Walking, like reading, allows thought to travel across inscribed space; small wonder that thinking so frequently converges in the two activities. In this walk, the trace we follow is that of the road that stretches from one end of town to the other; although not connected by road to the south, there are many vehicles—mostly trucks—in Panniqtuuq and a well-established road and trail infrastructure.
The two main parts of this community of about 1500 people are called ‘downtown’ and ‘uptown’. The former is the older part of the community. Here, one can still make out the traces of the old Anglican mission and training school, the freshly painted, bright white and red Old Blubber Station from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s flirtation with the whale and fox fur market, the remnants of appropriately named ‘matchbox’ houses from the earliest government-sponsored housing programs next to the more spacious and solidly built houses of recent years, as well as other new additions to the community: three commercial stores, a substantial medical centre, and something resembling a public square or triangle with the Auyuittuq Visitor’s Centre, the Angmarlik Cultural Centre, and the Uqqurmiut Artists Co-operative facing each other. Standing on the road amid these buildings, it’s possible to look along the coast and see the Hamlet Office building and, further along, the building that supports the local commercial fishery.
This architecture embodies the three major sources of cash income for the community, tangible representations of the community’s economy. Tourism, primarily oriented towards wilderness hikes in Auyuittuq National Park, brings a steady midsummer trickle of clients to local businesses, including Inuit outfitters who usually carry tourists by boat to the park entrance, and sometimes take tourists out on fishing or hunting trips, or out to the more distant territorial historic park at Kekerton Island. The tourists also provide some support for a second source of cash income in the area of art production. The Uqqurmiut Artists Co-operative (the name “Uqqurmiut” means “people of the lee side,” referring to the situation of the community at the foot of Mount Duval) produces an annual catalogue of prints and tapestries, all made by local Inuit artists, for sale at the outlet in Panniqtuuq as well as in southern markets through a variety of art dealers. Finally, the commercial fishery allows individual Inuk, primarily through hook and line fishing, to sell turbot and Arctic char to southern markets.
What is striking about these three economic activities is the degree to which they conform to and support a fourth activity, one that takes a dramatically different form. That is, of course, what is called the subsistence economy, life on the land. The fishery, the ecotourism, and the arts and crafts all serve to support movement out of the community and into the ecologically rich Cumberland Sound hunting and fishing territory. Each provides the money that allows for the gas, bullets, and other supplies now necessary for getting from the community to the hunting grounds or hunting camps. The brilliance of Panniqtuuq rests in this, more so than in the architecture or even the setting; it has found a way, its own unique way, of making the cash economy and the subsistence economy support each other. This would not be feasible if the cash economy depended upon large, non-renewable resource extraction projects—mines or oil wells—which demand time, skills, work discipline, and social organization antithetic to the demands and rigours of life on the land (of course, the environmental damage that comes with these projects also mitigates against subsistence hunting). Each of Panniqtuuq’s main sources of cash involves and supports going out on the land, as going out on the land supports the art production, ecotourism, and fishery.
For this to work, Panniqtuuq has also had to be innovative in the use of technology. Strikingly, at about the time that most people moved out of their hunting camps, which had been widely dispersed along Cumberland Sound, newer forms of mobility allowed them to continue to use virtually the whole of the area. Snowmobiles and motorized boats allowed people to take advantage of settlement life while still having access to wildlife-rich areas quite remote from the community. In his very exhaustive and engaging study of social structures of Inuit in the region, Inuit, Whalers and Cultural Persistence, Marc Stevenson suggests that “the advantages of the snowmobile were realized soon after its introduction in 1964; the hunter could now cover more ground in less time, which allowed travel to traditional hunting grounds and back within a day.”4 It is not uncommon to find Inuit hunters or outfitters today equipped with the latest in satellite location devices; they have been quick to take up any technological innovation that is of practical use. For many families, the community acts more like a base camp, a secure place to return to in the worst seasons or when one suffers an injury or begins to find life on the land too demanding. As a result, fewer people spend extended periods of time in their hunting camps. The physical structure of the community is strikingly open to the spectacular landscape that surrounds it, not so much in the interests of beauty as in the interests of access, though the two serve each other well. Comings and goings are more hourly than daily events, organized around the titles.
If we walk further, past the airport that cuts the town in two (the shortcut right across the airstrip was once marked by a light on a pole, which flashed to warn of the impending arrival of an airplane, but eventually Transport Canada realized the dangers inherent in this and blocked the shortcut), to the newer ‘uptown’ part of the community, we find an equally dense community infrastructure. More of the homes here are larger and newer. This part of town holds the two schools, a new Adult Education Centre, an arena. On its margins: warehouses, electrical generators that produce a constant, somewhat discordant, mechanical hum, and, along the coast, graveyards and massive oil containers.
Further along, our walk ends with trash, refuse, debris: the garbage dump. The garbage dump is situated about a kilometre down a gravel road that stretches along the coast northward. Garbage disposal is a problem in the north, where the dryness and coldness of the air make for very slow decay. In Iqaluit, the garbage dump has been a stain on the landscape, as refuse falls over, slides down, and litters the dark bank on the ocean with whitish smirches in full view of the rest of the community. In Panniqtuuq, the dump is closer to town but less obvious, more adequately contained, though smoke from the almost continual burning acts as a constant reminder of its presence. The road appropriately enough ends at the stink of the dump, the final resting place of the detritus of civilization, the terminus of things. However, this reflection is cut short by a student, Tara Wittman, who, while working on a project in the dump, notices that the bulldozer-driving staff daily wait to begin their burning until a small group of regulars has picked over the refuse. Local recycling. Northward, the coast stretches invitingly towards a peninsula with a high hill that promises a view, and stretches further towards Overlord Mountain and Auyuittuq. Straight inland from the dump is Mount Duval, the taller of the two mountains at whose feet Panniqtuuq rests.
One of the post-1999 Nunavut impacts has been the construction of housing and office units on the far side of the small river (simply bearing the name ku, river). Slowly this area is evolving into its own suburb: a ghetto for government workers. While creating jobs at the community level is a Nunavut government priority, and decentralization is one of its mantras, there is a worry that the creation of areas of a community with government housing and government offices will bring to Panniqtuuq a newer version of a colonial social structure marked by a colonial architectural structure. A critical mass of Qallunaat who do not need to interact with local Inuit might make an indelible impression on the place: ironic that Nunavut should be the initiator of such a process.
Rosie Okpik’s house near the end of her life was in the middle of down-town, one of the older private homes in the community of Panniqtuuq, with the rundown and comfortable feel of an old, southern farmhouse, although it was much smaller. From her dining room window, Rosie could look out along the coast at the small mountain and, in mid-afternoon, find inscribed on the cliff edge a face, perpetually and resolutely turned towards the sun: a gaze forbidden to mere humans.
I first met Rosie in Peterborough, at the elders’ gathering, where she had been invited, along with two other Inuit elders, to speak. She came to my home, attending a feast that Inuit students sponsored for their elders, and gave me a small gift, a bookmark made at the tapestry studio, and invited me to visit when I next travelled to Panniqtuuq.
I visited her several times, for conversation, tea, and bannock, as well as a formal interview. We would sit at her table, place a teapot between us, and talk away the time. She would tell me that “a good thing would happen if we would adopt our own culture,” and how when she goes out on the land, “it’s a good feeling, a good life” where she’s “at peace” and “it’s good for your mind and body.” She “worries about what’s going to happen, next twenty years.” She emphasized the need for people to “teach their children” Inuit culture because “we will never become Qallunaat” and, significantly, “we should have it written, so we can teach the children our own.” She also said, “When you learn, when you’re [at an] early age, you don’t forget those, what you learn, outside of your parents. And again, when you learn from your parents, and you don’t forget them either. Even [when] your parents die, they [are] long gone, you know, their words, it’s right there in your mind. When you have to use them it’s right there.” Although a very devout Christian (an Anglican gone Pentecostal!), Rosie Okpik has great respect for her own and other Aboriginal traditionalists, commenting on how impressed she was by the strong traditional spiritual presence she observed at the elders’ gathering she had attended in Peter-borough, for example, or taking great interest in braided sweetgrass. The questions of cultural survival interest her, and, in “her little house” where she is “not rich” but “comfortable,” she said emphatically, “we can talk all day!” about these issues.
Rosie nearly always had the radio playing in the background, as did many people in the community. Local broadcasts in the daytime hours featured community announcements and Inuktitut-speaking hosts playing music. During one visit, Rosie insisted that I “go over the radio” to say a bit about who I was and thank the community. I gladly agreed, and then found this was as easy as picking up the phone and calling the station; suddenly I was “on air,” fumbling my way through a thank you to the community for welcoming me and helping me with my research, which Rosie then translated. And the “thank you” extends, since I must here thank Rosie for showing me the proper form; one more “thank you” in the infinite chain that circles around the many ritual and spontaneous expressions of gratitude offered by Inuit, by Dene, by Anishinabe, by Cree, by Haudenosaunee, to their friends, relations, creators, so often for that good life.
Inuit are not subject to the Indian Act. They have constitutional status in Canada as Aboriginal peoples (s 3 5) with Aboriginal rights, but, thanks to the outcome of a 1939 Supreme Court of Canada legal decision,5 were not defined as “Indians” in accordance with the provisions of the Indian Act. Therefore, there is no band council structure in the community and no reserve lands. Instead, formal politics in the community are focussed on a hamlet council, a municipal government nominally open to participation from anyone in the community—Inuit or Qallunaat. However, since the vast majority of the community is Inuit, the council is dominated by Inuit representatives. In the years of my study, there was not a single Qallunaat on council, so meetings were held in Inuktitut. Instead of a chief and council, whose resolutions must be approved by the Minister of Indian Affairs and whose powers are defined by the federal Indian Act, in Panniqtuuq a mayor and council have powers under territorial legislation and, rather than the Department of Indian Affairs, in the nineties worried about MACA, the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs of the territorial government.
In these circumstances, self-government takes on a markedly different inflection. Self-government in Panniqtuuq, as in the rest of Nunavut, involves gaining increased power for local public governments. It is not seen as a distinct, separate, or ethnic government. The democratic franchise takes care of Inuit participation. Hence, there is no need for restructuring the Indian Act or any of the other key elements that will work to establish self-government among other First Nations. The political project here, rather, has been to gain as much power as possible for regional and local public governments. The establishment of Nunavut represents an enormous move in this direction. A Nunavut government now passes legislation of its own respecting municipal councils. The degree to which communities will have control and responsibility for management and delivery of programs and services such as education, health, social welfare, justice, and so on, is being negotiated. However, the negotiations are dramatically different from those most band councils will have, because they take place in the context of an Inuit-controlled territorial government, a context that may imply that communities will not have as great a need to establish ownership over broad program and service areas. The whole discussion of self-government at the community level is moot, to a point, because of this context, while at the same time the general project of Aboriginal self-government remains as relevant to Panniqtuuq as it does elsewhere.
The Panniqtuuq Hamlet Council meets regularly in the boardroom of the community centre. The mayor in the early nineties was a young man named Jaypetee Akpalialuk. Most of the councillors were men, though an active female councillor was on council during the early nineties and it appears that one or more women have been involved since then. The council also included a youth delegate who was female. The council meets regularly, both in regular work hours and in the evenings, as circumstances demand. The agenda is dominated by municipal affairs: determining what will happen on what lots, how municipal buildings will be used, what social events would be held in the centre, appointment of municipal staff including a “bylaw officer,” usually referred to as “the bylaw,” who acts as a quasi local policeman, and so on. The council, as representative of the community, will also be asked by outside bodies to express its views on broad issues and to name delegates to regional bodies. Two things of ongoing concern in Panniqtuuq are the speed at which municipal vehicles, particularly water and sewage trucks, are driven because in the everyday chaos of children, roads, trails, the potential for serious accident seems of concern; and the constant, lingering, unresolvable problem of dogs roaming freely around town. One of the bylaw officer’s main responsibilities is, following council directives, to go around and shoot loose dogs on designated “dog days.”
Administration of the council’s affairs was managed by an efficient local staff. The senior administrative officer (SAO) in the early years of my study was a Qallunaat man. There had been serious conflict between him and the mayor, which led to the mayor’s handing in a resignation and the SAO’S feeling uncomfortable, frustrated, and distressed. However, over the course of about a year, the mayor somehow retained his position and the SAO gladly moved on, making way for a local Inuit woman, who held the position for many years. Tension at the office, which always worked relatively efficiently, seems to have been markedly reduced. A typical council meeting in Panniqtuuq will likely begin within fifteen minutes or so of the announced time. The meetings are open to the public, though I never saw other observers. Occasionally, as when discussing the highly charged resignations and counter-resignations of mayor and SAO in the summer of 1993, meetings might be held behind closed doors.
The boardroom in the community centre features a picture window view looking down the Pangnirtung Fiord to Overlord Mountain and Auyuittuq. On the windowsill is a heavy and quite large soapstone maple leaf, about one square foot. An outline is carved into the maple leaf, which roughly corresponds to the landscape outside. The maple leaf, in a land without trees, remains a signifier that still works to mark ‘Canada’ in spite of the fact that the literal referent—the leaves of maple or any other trees—are not part of this reality. ‘Canada’ then, embracing and written over by the Pangnirtung Fiord: the fiord marking ‘Canada’ and ‘Canada’ marking the fiord: a dialectical image, one that equally inscribes the totalizing power of the dominant nation and a subversive capturing of that power to invest a local landscape with national significance: an imaginary staging of the dramatic tension between ideology and Utopia. A fitting image to think through the position of the Panniqtuuq Hamlet Council, which itself sits at the interstices of power, power derived from legislation that comes from the federal government via the territorial government as much as it is derived from the people of Panniqtuuq. Somehow, uneasily, the Panniqtuuq Hamlet Council oscillates between, and is accountable to, both; like the Pangnirtung Fiord, over-inscribed by a maple leaf, written in stone.
Living history: a history that is alive: a life that is historical: a history that “hurts.” The Angmarlik Centre in Panniqtuuq, the community’s cultural centre, dramatically stages a relationship between history, nature, and culture. The centre consists of four, distinct, interior-architectural components: a reception area, the entrance where shoes are left behind, and a front desk, like any other front desk, occupied by very friendly and helpful staff (all female through the course of this study); a small community library, with a good collection of northern, Panniqtuuq-related and Auyuittuq-related books; a museum that focusses on traditional Inuit culture in the area and the history of the community, special attention being paid to whaling in the early part of the twentieth century; and, finally, an elders’ room, where elders can frequently be found, playing cards, drinking coffee or tea, sewing, and chatting about old times and new.
The museum is situated in the centre of the building, surrounded by the reception area, library, and elders’ room. The most striking display in the museum is the first one: a frame dwelling, with a wide variety of traditional clothes, tools, toys, that can be worn, handled, played with, set in front of a blown-up photograph of the Pangnirtung Fiord. This leads to a picture window view of the real scene, in front of which is a bench and table with a series of photography books, which contain images of the past organized along themes such as whaling, old days, the land, elders, Qallunaat/friends, and so on. Around this, behind the signature display, a series of small museum pieces focus on life on the land, missions, whaling days, the early history of the community.
The photographs would make for an interesting study in themselves. Many are subtitled, with the names of their subjects in syllabic Inuktitut and English. Other subtitles are commentaries, often with no immediate relation to the image: stories, reminiscences, reflections, comments.
The images and texts represent only one aspect of the centre’s living history. The elders, who provide the centre with its pulse, are another. The elders gather during regular weekly hours. They are available to chat with and will tell stories or ponder over the photographs, centre staff providing interpretation. The school can bring classes who will sit in on storytelling sessions. The elders are organized as in no other community I have visited, to be consulted, interviewed, or simply for conversation. For this study, I set up in a small side room with my interpreter, Kayrene Kilabuk (formerly Nookiguak), and tape recorder. We approached the elders as a group, introduced me, explained the project, and asked for direction. Elders were eager to participate, and during interviews, whenever I asked if they were too tired or wanted a break, they always replied that they enjoyed the chance to talk about the past and would be happy to talk as long as I had questions. Elders who had spent their early years growing up on the land, before the community existed, could relate from their varied perspective a whole history of contact and relations with Qallunaat.
The history itself is organized into roughly four periods: a period before the Qallunaat, when Inuit lived in dispersed hunting groups entirely on the land; a period in the mid- and late nineteenth century, when there was a whale boom in the Cumberland Sound area, leading to a period through the first half of the twentieth century when whaling was replaced by a fur trade and a redispersal along Cumberland Sound; and a more recent period after 1962, when people were brought in from their dispersed camps to the community and Panniqtuuq began to take its present form.
Inuit have great pride that derives from their memory of the first period, when they were self-sufficient and Inuit ways thrived. Elders, especially, remember those days with great pleasure and speak evocatively of bringing back the old ways. At the same time, they stress the difficulty of life in the old days, the hardships, near-starvation experiences, and the dangers. It is not, therefore, an idealistic and nostalgic representation of the past that lingers in these images and stories; rather and arguably, what lingers is an implicit critique of the modern. The memory of the past provides a position or a standpoint from which the modern can be assessed and the weaknesses of the modern, particularly in terms of social relations, are exposed, rendered visible.
The whaling period is a source of dramatic historical events, reflected in the dangerous chase for the whales themselves. The hunt of whales roughly parallels the hunt to near extinction of buffalo in the great plains in the same period. Curiously, both large mammals provided critical raw materials for industrial technologies, lubricating oil from the whales and leather belts from the buffalo, though commercial products were made from both as well. The shallow waters of Cumberland Sound, an area biologically rich in sea mammals, provided a major successor for a depleted Davis Strait whale industry in the mid-nineteenth century. Whaling stations at Kekerton and Blacklead islands attracted hundreds of Inuit and hence led to a period of population concentration. The centre is itself named for the most important male leader of the whale hunt in the last stages of this period, Angmarlik, whose strong persona is still vividly and fondly remembered by elders in Panniqtuuq. One of his adopted sons, Pauloosie Angmarlik, provided my most interesting and complex conversations in the community during the early years of my involvement with it.
A combination of depletion of whales and changing technologies that rendered some of the whale products unnecessary led to a decline of whaling in the early twentieth century. Inuit dispersed again to hunting camps along Cumberland Sound, within a few decades finding that the value of fox furs, the hunting of which was quite compatible with hunting for the main dietary staple, seal, was sufficient to allow for the purchase of store-bought goods that had become increasingly necessary. In effect, a kind of retraditionalization took place as Inuit moved away from the sustained, regular contact with Qallunaat and the subsistence economy enjoyed renewed importance. In the early 1920s Panniqtuuq was established at its present site as a Hudson’s Bay trading post.
A sketch from the 1920s that is noticeably absent from the centre refers back to the earlier period. A. Y. Jackson, one of the Group of Seven painters who refigured perception of the Canadian landscape in the twenties and thirties, travelled with the Eastern Arctic Patrol in 1927, and included in a portfolio of printed sketches from that trip are three of Panniqtuuq. I first saw two of these sketches on display at the McMichael Gallery northwest of Toronto in the mid-eighties and was excited simply because of that great Western conceit: “I have been there.” Four sketches of Panniqtuuq are reproduced in The Arctic 1927. Two show Inuit and their skin tents against the backdrop of a view towards the mouth of the fiord. One looks inland, an overgrown moraine, at the hills of Panniqtuuq. The other depicts Inuit in a small camp on the present site of Panniqtuuq, and a view, the same view, always the same, of the Pangnirtung Fiord, looking northwards, toward Overlord Mountain, towards Auyuittuq. Jackson’s gaze, too, could not avoid that direction. The sketch, remarkably, stages virtually exactly the same image as the primary display in the centre, evoking the first historical period, though seen from the perspective of the second.
The summer of 1962 marks a fourth period. At that time, there were buildings at the present site of Panniqtuuq—a nursing and police station, a mission school, the ever-present Bay store—and a small group of Inuit permanent residents, but the site acted more like the centre of an extended group of people who occupied camps all along the shoreline of Cumber-land Sound, in places like the shallow bay of Avataqtu, where Arctic char are to be found in great numbers in the late summer. In 1962 an epidemic struck the dogs, killing them off in great numbers. Without the dogs, which meant mobility in winter, life on the land was too dangerous. The ‘authorities’ gathered up the people—in camp after camp they were swept up in a purge that left few out—and took them to Panniqtuuq, where they were ‘settled’. The community, its present social being and the architectural and urban infrastructure that together form the social landscape, began to take its present shape.
These four periods of history circle around each other and are represented in the stories and images focussed in the Angmarlik Centre. The view of the fiord, the artistic representations, the artefacts, the images, the elders, the books: nature, culture, and history folded over each other. The three periods, likewise, playing off against each other: images of traditional life ways remain vivid through the latter two periods. The Angmarlik Centre is a kind of university, a kind of museum, a kind of library, a kind of art gallery: a cultural centre, a repository of knowledge, a site of conversation, dialogue, exchange, discussion, and a fitting stage for the intricate intellectual life of Panniqtuuq. That it is ‘open’ to the community, that it is ‘legitimated’ by the tourist traffic in the summer and its ‘function’ of organizing rides for English-speaking tourists with Inuktitut-speaking ‘outfitters’ to Auyuittuq, that it is likewise ‘open’ to a breathtaking view of the Pangnirtung Fiord, the light from which providing enough open air that tourists and researchers can photograph the feature display, the frame dwelling and photographic image of the fiord behind it, ‘as if it were the real thing’, an image of an image, simulacrum, whose power doubles back to say ‘tradition’, that it has become all this and more: a certain kind of writing, what could be called a writing against the State.
The Angmarlik Centre is in striking contrast to the nearby Auyuittuq Visitor’s Centre. Both exist in part to serve a tourist clientele, though the former is at least equally oriented to local people. The latter, with an oblique entrance, is much more forcefully directed towards outsiders. It contains five distinct areas: an office area like those of recent, fluorescent-light, numbing style; a room dedicated to the park; a room dedicated to ‘nature’; a room dedicated to art; and a workshop-like meeting room. The room dedicated to the park is in the centre of the building, the other four areas surround it. It is made up of maps, photographic images, and displays that provide the expected useful information about the geology, flora, and fauna in the park. Most useful is the map that shows recent polar bear sightings. To the side are two temples, one to art, the other to nature. A separate room, artificially lit in the spectral tones of a ritual space, is devoted to art works: large sculptures produced by local artists. Next to it is a room with a display of all the wildlife one will not see on a hike through the park. A huge, stuffed polar bear leans over a stuffed seal, while the dead gazes of lemmings and owls and foxes survey the scene, on a backdrop of ice and cliffs. A dead nature, here, animals treated with the most extraordinary disrespect, offered as spectacle, as a stand-in for what the northern tourist wants but will not likely see. Tape-recorded sounds of animal and other ‘natural’ noises enhance the simulacrum, strive to create an ever-receding aura. The workshop room stages in its physical structure the dialectic of seeing. The room is brighter than any of the others, one wall being of glass, allowing for the view. The room is filled with chairs, all of which face away from the window, away from the view, to a giant television screen where one can listen to park regulation and safety lectures and, more importantly, watch the video representation of the park; infinitely preferable, it seems, to turning one’s head around.
It takes a few hours to travel by the small, distinctive Panniqtuuq boats from the community to Kekerton Island. Now a territorial historic park, the island was for decades a major focus of Qallunaat whaling activity. In a sense, the Inuit of Panniqtuuq can lay claim to having had some of the longest sustained interaction with Qallunaat, compared to other Inuit in Canada, though in the nineteenth century the limited ability of Qallunaat to withstand Arctic conditions—quite inhospitable, to their way of thinking—meant that Inuit were in a better position to control or at least influence the interaction. Kekerton was enough of a hub of activity that when the fledgling Canadian government wanted to do something to assert its sovereignty over the High Arctic, a sovereignty passed on to it by Orderin-Council from Great Britain in 1880, they sent representatives to ‘plant the flag’ there. William Wakeham, a fisheries patrol commander, wrote in his journal for August 17, 1897:
Landed and hoisted the Union Jack in presence of the agent, a number of our own officers and crew, and the Esquimaux, formally declaring in their presence that the flag was hoisted as an evidence that Baffin’s Land with all the territories, islands and dependencies adjacent to it were now, as they always had been since their first discovery, under the exclusive sovereignty of Great Britain.6
The Union Jack remains hoisted on the high lookout hill, once a marker of colonial dominance, now a reminder of colonial history. Kekerton Island is also the place where Franz Boas conducted the research that would lead to, among his many other publications, The Central Eskimo. If we accept Boas’s place in the canon of anthropological inquiry, it can be argued that the whole practice of fieldwork so central to contemporary professional anthropology, and indeed perhaps even to the concept of cultural relativism, was invented in this place, with the participation of the great-grandparents of Panniqtuuq Inuit.
To visit Kekerton today is to visit a spectral landscape, a landscape of traces from the past, only partly contained by the relatively minimal newer boardwalk and site-explanation devices. No structures remain, though the outlines of buildings and tent frames remain clearly visible. Scattered bits of machinery and other ancient refuse litter a relatively small area where the old station was located. One reconstructed whalebone tent frame is now the most prominent structure, a large pile of rusted barrel rings the most prominent pile of debris. On the climb up the hill, to look out as in older times for whales, or to look at Wakeham’s flag in its latest incarnation, or just to look out at the view, one passes usually by accident the most striking feature of the park. Around the outskirts of the old station are Inuit burial sites: old barrels and wooden coffins, covered sometimes with just a few stones, unmarked, scattered in no discernable order except that they have been placed outside what was once the site of settlement. One stumbles across these almost always by accident, finding oneself suddenly haunted, in the presence of death, sometimes surrounded by coffins: once you spot one, others become visible and they are all around. No crosses. No inscriptions. No names, and none are necessary since these are passed on to the next generation. Marked only by themselves.
There are Qallunaat in Panniqtuuq, many of them small-business owners, on the frontier of capital accumulation, making their way through the maze of government tenders and the high-risk business opportunities that exist: store owners or managers, a private fishing company owner, construction company owners, and the like. For the most part, the men are not soft-spoken; they swear as easily as breathe, a colourful language where polite forms stand out like an Inukshuk in a southern city. They know the community well and are happy to share their knowledge. The Qallunaat women tend to come in the stereotypical roles of nurses, teachers, and welfare workers. Hugh Brody’s chapters on ‘whites’ in The People’s Land remain quite appropriate. Writing in the early seventies, Brody remarked that “the Whites of the far north are class-conscious to a remarkable degree, and the nature and minutiae of their social life are informed by that consciousness.”7 In Panniqtuuq the Qallunaat frequently speak of the ‘troubles’ in the community: alcohol addiction, drug addiction, violence, family violence, assault, sexual assault. In this world view the community is a kind of rural ghetto where, borrowing their idiom, ‘these people’— Inuit—are not succeeding at the painful process of adjusting to modernism. They are at pains to reveal this to me, the naive southern researcher, to ensure that I ‘see’ this ‘reality’, and to save me from the danger of idealizing or sentimentalizing. Although they do have a much deeper understanding of the community than I can hope to, the kind of understanding that only comes from duration, from lived experience, a kind of understanding I have great respect for, and although they also, each in his own way, have admiration and genuine care for their Inuit employees, co-workers, friends, clients, yet, over and over again, their description of the community is exhausted by a litany of horrors, each example, each story, more revealing of inner weakness, more revealing of trauma and failure, than the next. To them, I respond: “All right. I see it. And I see something else, too. Since you are so capable of telling the one story, it is this ‘something else’ that I’ve chosen to write about.” There are other kinds of Qallunaat as well, who have stayed even longer, established more permanent connections, maintained a degree of empathy, interest, excitement; their well-told stories also deserve careful attention.
In the Angmarlik Centre, one book of photographs features “Our Qallunaat Friends,” photos of whalers, police officers, missionaries, and others who spent sometimes large parts of their lives in Panniqtuuq. There are Qallunaat friends living in Panniqtuuq today, including the businessmen, those in the ‘helping’ professions, and many Qallunaat visitors, including researchers, including me, taking up time and space. There are many Qallunaat who live in or visit Panniqtuuq and want to ‘give something back’ to the community. But that is not as easy as we would wish it.
Watching and reading through the record of the more open-ended portions of hamlet council meetings in Panniqtuuq is a study in micropolitics. The open-ended portions of the meetings are where non-agenda items can be raised, usually through two mechanisms: a regular agenda item that allows ‘delegates’—anyone from the community, as well as guests who come in some official capacity—to make a statement before the council; and a regular agenda item called “council concerns” that allows councillors to raise any issue of their choice. Reading through council minutes from the past few years, more often than not these two agenda items reflect in an unusual context what Anthony Giddens once referred to, in relation to modernism, as “this unique conjunction of the banal and the apocalyptic”8 and reveal a good deal about the internal political dynamic of Panniqtuuq.
Delegates to Panniqtuuq Hamlet Council meetings frequently include everyday citizens coming to speak their minds on a wide range of issues, from the mundane to the profound. A select sample from the year 1992 is illustrative. At the January 6, 1992, meeting, one of the three delegates is Mosesee Nakashuk, who says, in the language of the minutes,
this has been on my thought for some time now, we the people of Pangnirtung elect our leaders of this community, there have been job opportunities that I have tried for, I only see that we the locals are put aside when the applicants are selected it seems only out of town people get hired. Cr. Sowdloapik answers why weren’t they acknowledge by letter for their interest in the job. Council wishes to conduct interview as a whole, sometimes Finance committee is delegated to conduct interviews and report to council. Mosesee is appreciated for coming to council.
The initial gesture should not go unnoticed: Mosesee begins by berating the leaders with an appeal in classic democratic rhetorical style—”we the people of Pangnirtung elect our leaders”—before going on to lodge a serious complaint. The recorded response is a discussion of a more minor, technical aspect of the problem, but the council deferentially thanks the citizen for coming forward with his comments.
Rumours of complaints circulate as freely as other stories. A representative to the Baffin Regional Health Board, Leah Akpalialuk, in her regular report to council as one often different delegates on March 16, 1992, is recorded as saying: “we were told to make people more aware of cigarette cancer. We were also informed from Arctic Bay, when they sended a dead body down south for autopsy, the body was sent back in a garbage bag, when they should not do that. . . .” An unusual combination to report: a following through, perhaps, with the official form of reporting what you are told to report embodied in the cancer warning, followed by what was really interesting that was heard, a story that ends with a moral imperative—”they should not do that”—a story testifying at least to a perception of the everyday brutality of racism, something of a distant, colonial echo to Benjamin’s warning that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”9 The command, dutifully carried out, is directly followed by criticism, as if somehow one calls forth the other, cannot be left to stand alone; there is something here too of the overturning logic of the supplement.
Very serious issues sometimes are brought forward by delegates, reflecting concern about the deep social problems in the community and perhaps a belief that somehow, by talking about these issues, by raising them in the public forum, in some way this talk—a public version of the ‘talking cure’ that psychoanalysis posits for private, personal, individual psychic illness—will effect something mysterious but desirable called “healing.” At the November 30, 1992, meeting the first delegate lucidly confronts the problem of mental illness:
Meeka Arnaquq—Mental Health Committee: Meeka has had a concern, for a long time, about the terminally ill patients sent home from the hospitals, and their families. It can get stressful on the families caring for the patient 24 hours a day. The intentions of people who offer help is good but when there are people there all the time, they have to realize the patient and family needs peace and quiet sometimes. Families sometimes end up caring for a patient up to a year and this can take its toll on families, b) Also there’s an increase in mental illnesses, not just stress or hard times but actual illnesses. Health isn’t doing much for these people.
Once again, as with Mosesee Nakashuk, who said, “This has been on my thought for some time now,” and Michael Kilabuk, another delegate who “wanted to come here before, but never did till now,” Meeka Arnaquq stresses the gravity of the problem as something that “she has had a concern, for a long time, about.” It is tempting to read the last statement, which refers to the Department of Health, in its more general valence: “health isn’t doing much for these people,” their health alone will not help them from the debilitations brought on by social problems. Or perhaps it can be read allegorically as a reflection of the almost classic working-class attitude that health is not worth guarding when life offers so little: “health isn’t doing much for these people.” Her concerns, about the support network for terminally ill people and about the increase in mental illness, are not easily addressed:
Council discusses strategies to improve terminal patient care and to work with other organizations like the Member of Legislative Assembly, Baffin Regional Council and Baffin Regional Health Board and that they will persist with this issue until Health has some solution.
The response reflects a registration process, a registering or acknowledgement that the problem has been noted, that renewed efforts will be made, that “they will persist with this issue until Health has some solution.” Through this process a concern is noted, an affirmation is provided; speech and response take place in the political forum. Finding no resolution, the talk, the conversation, will continue and perhaps it itself, mere speech, will remind and cajole, reflect and project, startle and distract, persist, persist, persist, “until Health,” perhaps health itself, “until Health has some solution.”
Often, delegates presenting at a meeting are the councillors themselves, who “remove themselves from council” in order to represent some other interest from the community. However, the councillors also have an opportunity for open speech in a “council concerns” agenda item. A reading through the same sample year, 1992, reveals a similar overlay of discussions, reflecting the micropolitics of the community. An eclectic range of local problems gets raised, as in this list from the October 19 meeting: “A. Evic wants the Garbage drivers to pick up garbage more often. A. Dialla thinks it would be a good idea to get a alarm system for the Post Office. I. Kilabuk is concern about the dogs being loose around town, he is wondering if they can be shot on sight.” The concern about loose dogs, according to the first Senior Administrative Officer, Bill Bennett, whom I interviewed in 1993, was the most frequent, raised repeatedly by delegates and councillors alike. It is also peculiarly ironic, given that the most common reason for the community’s coming into being was an epidemic that killed dogs and forced people off the land. They were relocated as a result of an absence of dogs to a place where the continued existence of dogs would prove one of the most persistent problems of everyday life.
Sometimes, what seem to be simple problems prove intractable, revealing in their very existence the difficulty Inuit have fitting their life ways into the structures determined by outside forces. The following council concern, from the November 30 meeting, is a case in point: “Councillor Ipeelie Kilabuk—Education Representative—Qammaqa [snow houses] are used at the schools as part of education. GNWT Dept. of Safety has put all kinds of regulations on their operation, like they have to have two exits, and this is causing problems. Cr. Qaqasiq doesn’t think this is good.” Councillor Qaqasiq’s wry comment is equally a warning and a reflection of a sense of uneasiness. This issue—not being able to teach children about Inuit cultural ways as embodied in snow houses because ‘buildings’ have to conform to fire regulations that stipulate the necessity for two exits (just as, in residential schools, children could not be brought wild food from local trappers for use in the cafeterias, because such food would not conform to safety standards)—unfolds the whole tissue of rules, presupposing values, imposed by outsiders, the Qallunaat, on Inuit. This issue, one of extraordinary urgency, is addressed frequently and directly by the council, particularly in its discussions of law and the administration of justice, the arena of rule formation par excellence.
The embodiment of the repressive State apparatus in Panniqtuuq is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with whom the council had an uneasy relationship in 1992. What is interesting about the council’s record in this matter is the way in which the council tries to exert its influence in an area where it has no ‘official’ jurisdiction or power. The RCMP officers frequently appear at council meetings as delegates to ‘give reports’ about the community. At the March 16, 1992, meeting, a tense, highly charged exchange takes place, beginning with the officer’s report:
B.L., RCMP read his report for the month of February, he said it was the most violent month since his 3 years up here. These were alcohol related, charges have been laid, there was an attack on his house, and someone broke his window. He is concern about the safety of his family, and he is asking council if he can work with them.
A dramatic appeal, but one that does not find a sympathetic response. One of the council’s most consistent concerns is that of overly strict law enforcement, leading to a too-high-frequency incarceration rate of Panniqtuuq Inuit. A councillor, Sakiasie Sowdloapik, responds by confronting this latter issue, which other councillors raise in different contexts through the course of the year:
Cr. Sowdloapik tells him that he is just grabbing too many young people from coming in from out of town. Most of the young people don’t want to go out of town anymore, even to work. Also the one who broke your window, I think he was provoked by you, you just grabbed him, he was coming in from work. You are also hurting the airlines, I talked to your headquarters in Iqaluit, they told me you just can’t grab anyone without reasonable grounds to search. I want to work with you B., but you are over doing it.
The appeal here reveals, firstly, that Sowdloapik knows who is responsible for breaking the window—a peculiarly ‘ideological crime’, directed as it is at the embodiment of State repressive power—but, secondly, will not reveal or divulge that information and, thirdly, has sympathy with the miscreant.
At subsequent meetings in 1992, officers other than B.L. presented the RCMP reports, as in the case of the July 8 meeting when “RCMP D.F. gave the June/92 report noting that it was a quiet month with few offenses reported. Concern was raised about the Centre operation. Council thanked Mr. F. for his report.” A much more benign discussion. At the September 28 meeting, a new officer introduces himself:
RCMP Corporal S. has been in the service for 16 years, 6 years in the North. He is looking forward to meeting all. He read the monthly report for September. There has been complaints about pellet guns, when they are suppose to be prohibited. In his report, cpl. S. stated that the Centre is open too late. J. Veevee tells him that Recreation Committee will deal with the Centre’s hour at the next meeting.
In this instance, interestingly, the council does seem prepared to work with the officer, operating not on the basis of the structure, but rather of a face-to-face ethic: the ‘new man’ will be given a fair opportunity.
The politics of policing are intricate in Panniqtuuq; a local ordinance against drinking is deployed by police with great intensity, providing an excuse for them to engage the machinery of disciplinary power that founds them. The heavy-handed administration of justice is a frequently addressed concern of the council, which has limited ability to act but nevertheless uses its influence and apparently with some effect. The council in a state of being against the State, as a State against the State, on this plane of community politics. But the question of law and justice plays itself out on other planes, as well.
A special meeting of council was held on August 24, 1992, for the purpose of discussing the issue of justice. Members of the community, including elders and community activists, were invited to the meeting to express their views. Special guests at the meeting were the Baffin Regional Judge, Beverly Brown, and Justice Scott Cooper, a prosecutor with the Department of Justice. The language of the minutes for this meeting is particularly ambiguous, untidy, incomplete, resisting grammatical structure almost as if it were reflecting resistance to the rules and law it addresses. The intent of the meeting seems to have been to consult with community members about the administration of justice and to establish a justice committee in order to promote ongoing consultation.
After the preliminaries, the issue is joined by councillor Sakiasie Sowdloapik:
Juridical system is not working for the Community and a lot of parents seen that their children are going through the system. Creates a lot of stress for the whole families and that elders present stressed that they were able to solve and counsel the persons problem.
—has lost a lot of traditional knowledge and has not been able to utilize the white Society. Court system does not use the forgive and help life style looking at all the Committee present have a lot of resources a program in the Community.
The stress here, as elsewhere, is on using Inuit mechanisms to deal with problems, rather than the imposed legal system. Other councillors add comments, one noting that he had not even seen a police officer in the first years of his life: in those days none were needed.
Having duly allowed the elected representatives to speak, establishing the tone and direction of the meeting, other guests intervene. An important elder, Aksayuk Etuangat, notes that there was “No alcohol in our days. Alcohol and drugs play a major part in getting into problems in the Community.” Another elder, Pauloosie Angmarlik (both these elders were adopted children of the whaler Angmarlik), returns to the issue of traditional justice, which becomes a theme for much of the rest of the meeting:
Traditional knowledge passed on from one generation to the next, we did not have the white mans system and they have created more problems and expect them to be able to correct their problem and parents are expected to pay their children’s fines or restitution payments we need to understand what would be the best alternative to solving these problems.
This puts the question rather directly: Qallunaat have created a problem they now want Inuit to resolve. Sakiasie Sowdloapik follows soon after, referring the issue back to policing:
Police have no knowledge of Inuit life style— Laws are so thick and follow these Laws and Inuit must understand these laws and you don’t understand these principals. We need to work together in solving problems. We need to understand the nature of crime and researchers dealt with. Studies have been done and it shows that white society do not allow us to make changes to the present Laws.
The “thickness” of the Law, an unusual but appropriate metaphor to explain the difficulty Inuit have in understanding and following Qallunaat law, though Sowdloapik also notes that Qallunaat “don’t understand these principals” of Inuit law as well. The elder, Pauloosie Angmarlik, speaks again, soon after: “Laws have been written by the white society and Inuit have verbal laws and these laws would never have been over ridden by the written laws— White society are responsible for the Crimes being committed and we are not saying that have stop in sentencing criminal.” Even through these layers of mediation, Angmarlik and Sowdloapik both speaking in Inuktitut, their comments hurriedly translated and roughly recorded in minutes, it is still clear that they are saying something about the difference between Qallunaat law and Inuit law, something about the difficulty Qallunaat and Inuit have in understanding each other’s law, something about the difficulties created by the imposition of one law over another.
As a result of the discussion, that which was aimed for in its initiation is achieved, a justice committee is established. The committee, which will come to serve in an advisory capacity assisting in the sentencing process, meets three times by September 28, and provides regular reports to Council thereafter. One of these involves the following exchange at the November 30 meeting:
Cr. Evic asked if the Judicial Committee could do something about the time frame of incidents and the charge being laid. There are charges getting laid for incidents that happened years ago. Cr. Veevee responded, saying that the time frame is of Federal jurisdiction and that only they have authority to change it. Cr. Kilabuk suggest that an option for the defendant would be to approach the committee before going to the RCMP to lay the charges. Cr. Papatsie ended his report telling Council, the Committee will need all the support it can get.
Once again, the imposed legal order establishes a structure that community members cannot easily circumvent in the name of their own conception of justice.
The discussion is entirely revealing of the conflict between the imposed Qallunaat system of law and that which lives in the memories of elders and in the culture of Inuit. In this instance, Panniqtuuq provides a microcosm for the whole debate about the continued existence of Aboriginal culture in Canada. The nature of the legal structure that underlies social structure is not an incidental aspect of this debate. In Panniqtuuq, most frequently the conflict is embodied in the removal of people from the community to distant discipline centres for distant reasons. The prisons where offenders are sent allow them to make connections with gangs and more often than not become training grounds for criminals: prisons as colleges of crime. Community leaders and elders have a clear, lived sense of the dimensions of the problem, and in this demonstrate a far-sightedness, a nuanced vision of the intricate layers and sedimentations of cultural imposition, an alter-native ordering of the temporality of justice.
During my reading of the minutes of the special hamlet council meeting of August 24, 1992, one statement stood out, or struck me, as particularly resonant. This was made by the elder Pauloosie Angmarlik, who had said, “Laws have been written by the white society and Inuit have verbal laws and these laws would never have been over ridden by the written laws. . . . White society,” he added, “are responsible for the Crimes being committed.” This notion of the fact that Qallunaat laws are ‘written’ and that this allows them to verride Inuit ‘verbal laws’, creating a responsibility, seemed an allegory for the whole process of colonial imposition.
I decided during my 1993 visit that I would like to speak to Pauloosie Angmarlik. My research assistant, Kayrene Kilabuk, assured me that he was a very respected elder, a “wise old man,” and that we would have little difficulty finding him. On the morning of August 4, 1993,1 met with him in his small house, one of the older houses in the downtown part of the community. It was the first of many meetings, interviews, and conversations. He was a small man with a full head of white hair, and was wearing a light blue T-shirt with dark blue pants held up with red clip-on suspenders. Kayrene simply asked if he was willing to be interviewed and he said, without hesitation and through welcoming smiles, that we could go ahead. I ask one question, about if he remembers his comments to the special council meeting at about this time last year, and his eyes widen, eyebrows moving up in the expressive Inuit facial gesture that means an emphatic “yes!” He goes to a nylon jacket hanging over a chair near the sink, pulls out a neatly folded piece of paper, on which is written, in Inuktitut syllabics, his speech on justice, which he proceeds to read to me.
In Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss used “A Writing Lesson” to unfold a whole theory on the dynamics of State power. He wrote, in part, that “the only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes.”10 Derrida uses a reading of this passage as one of the signature gestures of deconstruction, deconstructing the opposition between speech and writing and challenging the ethnocentric presumption that there are societies without writing: “to say that a people do not know how to write because one can translate the word which they use to designate the act of inscribing as ‘drawing lines’, is that not as if one should refuse them ‘speech’ by translating the equivalent word by ‘to cry’, ‘to sing’, ‘to sigh’? Indeed ‘to stammer’.”11 Derrida’s comments are usually taken as dismissive of Levi-Strauss’s association of writing with the State and power, but if we read closely, we find in Derrida the trace of a more nuanced account. It is possible to construct an argument whose lineaments suggest there are different modalities of inscription, some that are associated with State power, some, like the writing on the body that Pierre Clastres theorizes, may be writings against the State. Clastres suggests that a society against the State “dictates its laws to its members. It inscribes the text of the law on the surface of their bodies”12 and, it should be added, on that other body, the landscape. For Clastres, “in its severity, the law is at the same time writing. Writing is on the side of law; the law lives in writing and knowing the one means that unfamiliarity with the other is no longer possible. Hence all law is written; all writing is an index of law.”13
Unlike Clastres, Angmarlik stresses the opposition between speech and writing. But Pauloosie Angmarlik’s writings, it seems to me, may also be seen as writings against the State, which is itself nothing other than a certain kind of writing, the kind that overrides or imposes itself. In Angmarlik’s view, it seems clear that Inuit law, which existed in speech and memory, occupied a space that appeared empty to the Qallunaat colonizers, a space that could then be overridden by a certain kind of writing, the writing of Qallunaat law. In response, in his small house in Panniqtuuq, Pauloosie Angmarlik prepares or composes another kind of inscription, one reflecting the outlines of something called Inuit law, so that this time, it cannot be written over.
Angmarlik’s speech is similarly a complex praxis. My interviews with him were so tentative. At times, by accident, I ask a question that elicits a lengthy treatise; at times I ask questions that elicit a bafflement that seems to say, “of what possible relevance could that be?” Confusion on my part is the main, structuring element of our talk, but talk takes place. When I listen to these tapes now, more than any others, I find myself thinking, why didn’t I ask something to pursue that point further! and regretting directions not taken. And yet, in the midst of my confusion, Angmarlik has a great deal to say. One of his themes is the disastrous consequence that derives from delaying trials: on May 12, 1994, he said through Kayrene, who works as a legal interpreter and was familiar with Pauloosie, having frequently interpreted his statements in court,
he’s never agreed with the white man’s law before because it does not work for him. For someone that is supposed to go to court and his court date is usually moved to another date, that is usually the case up here and some people tend to commit suicide because they tend to get worried and think that they’ll go to jail and all that, and he said that is one of the factors for people committing suicide nowadays because suicide is a problem up here.
The same theme, virtually, is repeated and elaborated by Angmarlik on August 10, 1994:
there’s sometimes delays—like that person’s scheduled to be in court today and the judge said that the trial date would have to be set to another date—it would be delayed and all that and it’s kept in someone’s mind that they have done something wrong and he [Angmarlik] feels that they should be dealt with right away and not try and say so many hurtful things to that person because somehow it’s destroying his mind and his inner self and sometimes when court dates are delayed there’s often suicides done by young people and he [Angmarlik] feels that it’s not very good because if it was dealt with right away some people would not commit suicide, he said that’s a factor.
The fact that twice, both times at length, he makes this connection between deferral of justice and suicide, the second time using the most vivid kind of language to try to convey the interiority of mental anguish the delay creates—”it’s destroying his mind and his inner self—is a clear indication of the importance Angmarlik gives this particular subject. Here, the face-to-face circumstances of the community demand that justice not be deferred; here, again, another problem with the temporality of justice emerges.
There are other themes that repeat themselves in Pauloosie Angmarlik’s speech. This, from the May interview:
he was saying that nowadays people are going through the court system and people who did something wrong are sent to jail. How he would handle it, how it would have been handled in the past, was that those two people, or more than that, they would be brought together and there would be a discussion with those two people or other people and they would try and find out solutions to their problems. The Qallunaat law and the Inuit law are two very different laws and they cannot seem to work together and he’s never agreed with the white mans law before because it does not work for him.
Interestingly, the Inuit law is not seen by Angmarlik as more flexible because it involves resolution of conflict through discussion, but rather as more structured: “He’s stating that the Inuit way of life seemed more structured in the past because there were discussion groups of where the hunting was going to take place and if there were conflicts in the camp people were brought in together to discuss the problems.” The purpose of the law, in Angmarlik’s view, is to help the people resolve conflict: Inuit law as a process of conflict resolution through discussion. Hence, the consistent concern that imprisoning people is not achieving anything, not helping anyone, not solving any problem, but, rather, creating new problems. “The Inuit law it was to help out other people that needed help. I’ll give an example: if someone was fixing something and that person was not too good at fixing it someone else would teach him how to fix it. These days that’s not the case, so it’s the person that can fix something better will just watch and not try and help out.” Imprisoning does not ‘fix’ anything because it doesn’t teach anything. There is a remarkably consistent and powerful world view embodied in these reflections; strikingly, it moves from the everyday to the abstract, from people being taken out of the community to serve sentences or delays in trials leading to suicides, to the question of the purpose of law, to provide a set of strictures that must constantly be enforced or to continually contribute to the formation of community by centring the process of discussion.
Another consistent theme of Angmarlik’s is that of the relation of law to writing.
The Qalhmaat law is written. Some non-Natives make it look as if it’s the only law to follow. That is not the case up here. Inuit have always had their own laws which are not written, since paper was not available and used to write in the past. The Inuit law is kept in memory and the Qallunaat law, since it’s written it’s—I’ll give an example of my house, if I was following the Qallunaat law my law books could catch on fire if my house burned down and there would be nothing else. The Inuit law has been passed on from my ancestors and the only way the Inuit law will not be available is when I pass away.
This is an issue I was particularly interested in; what drew me to Angmarlik in the first instance were his comments to the judge about the overlay of Qallunaat law on Inuit law. On August 9 he added:
The Inuit law was not written because papers and pens were not available that time and the Inuit used to keep things in their mind. They always remembered what was told to them and the Qallunaat law was written and given to the Inuit not thinking about the Inuit law at all, they thought the Qallunaat law would be suitable for the Inuit too.
I asked him about the relation between Inuit law and Qallunaat law several different times and in several different ways. Among his replies,
The Inuit law is stronger and it would have worked if it still existed, well, if it was written. It would make it seem that the Qallunaat law would not step up on the Inuit law and nothing could take over the Inuit law, because it kept going in one direction and the Qallunaat law takes all different turns and curves and all that because that’s how I see it, it doesn’t seem to work for the people up here.
[. . . .]
The Inuit law and the Qallunaat law are very different and they cannot seem to work together. It seems as if there’s always a blockage between those two and if the Inuit law was written the Qallunaat law would not go on top of it.
While he saw the possibility of Inuit and Qallunaat law working side by side, especially if Inuit law were written down, he also said that “the Qallunaat law should be used by the Qallunaat and the Inuit law should be used by the Inuit.”
When I pursue this, when I chase down the specifics of Inuit law—give me an example, I ask, or, how did it work? or, what did it say?—I consistently draw a blank, it eludes me. Angmarlik sketches an outline of the law, which consists of insisting that the law—Inuit law—exists, and very little more. The written Inuit law posed against the written Qallunaat law does not consist of an alternative sequence of injunctions, lists of crimes and punishments, intricate mechanisms for specifying how particular problems will be dealt with, but rather of just that: that Inuit law is, just as Inuit are, and now that this much has been written, the space is no longer so clear for Qallunaat law to operate unimpeded. So, too, Inuksuit, literally “resembling people”—rocks piled to mark a trail or look human-like in order to scare animals—marked the land, a writing on the land that may indicate nothing but the fact that the land is occupied, like the word “Panniqtuuq” inscribed on the hillside, the being of Inuit placed in a new writing, one that this time, I hope, the Qallunaat will be able to read. “We are here.”
I interviewed Pauloosie Angmarlik three times. The subsequent interviews, referred to above, took place in the spring and late summer of 1994, and were in the Angmarlik Centre. In these interviews, Pauloosie used all the means of expression at his command to stress the seriousness of the issue of law, the problems that sprang from this overriding of Inuit law by the written Qallunaat law. Listening to the tape recordings of these interviews some months later, I can hear something else. My questions, Kayrene’s interpretation, Pauloosie’s Inuktitut answers, and, in the latter two interviews, Kayrene’s new son, named Imo after her father, his cries on occasion overriding our conversation, inarticulate, seemingly formless, but clearly demanding, in a language only his mother can understand. With me in this small room, an elder, a younger Inuit woman, her new child, thrown together in the enterprise of understanding Inuit law.
A conversation can be staged in many ways. It is clear that, sometimes, the books one reads have a bearing on the things one sees and hears. The reverse, of course, is equally true. This conversation, between some of the books I read and some of the people I talked to, may perhaps strike sparks. Whose authority legitimates whose here? Readers of Derrida may learn to listen to Angmarlik, just as readers of Angmarlik may learn to listen to Derrida. In any event, it is clear that the conversation has happened.
Pauloosie Angmarlik, August 24, 1992:
Laws have been written by the white society and Inuit have verbal laws and these laws would never have been over ridden by the written laws— White society are responsible for the Crimes being committed and we are not saying that have stop in sentencing criminal.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology:
If writing is no longer understood in the narrow sense of linear and phonetic notation, it should be possible to say that all societies capable of producing, that is to say obliterating, their proper names, and of bringing classificatory difference into play, practice writing in general. No reality or concept would therefore correspond to the expression ‘society without writing’. This expression is dependent on ethnocentric oneirism, upon the vulgar, that is to say ethnocentric, misconception of writing. (109)
Pauloosie Angmarlik, May 3, 1994:
It seemed as if the Inuit law kept going in one direction, the right direction, the Qallunaat law seems to go in different curves and all that. . . . I never knew if anything else was added on, I knew that it kept going in one direction and there were no curves or whatever. . . . The Inuit law is stronger and it would have worked if it still existed, well if it was written, it would make it seem that the Qallunaat law would not step up on the Inuit law and nothing could take over the Inuit law, because it kept going in one direction and the Qallunaat law takes all different turns and curves and all that . . . it doesn’t seem to work for the people up here. . . . The Inuit law and the Qallunaat law are very different and they cannot seem to work together. It seems as if there’s always a blockage between those two and if the Inuit law was written the Qallunaat law would not go on top of it. . . . If the Inuit law was written they could have worked together if their minds were similar if they had similar ideas on certain issues they could work, but in some cases they would not be able to work together because of the differences.
Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”:
Tonight I have agreed by contract to address, in English, a problem, that is to go straight toward it and straight toward you, thematically and without detour, in addressing myself to you in your language. Between law or right, the rectitude of address, direction and uprightness, we should be able to find a direct line of communication and to find ourselves on the right track. Why does deconstruction have the reputation, justified or not, of treating things obliquely, indirectly, with ‘quotation marks’, and of always asking whether things arrive at the indicated address? (15-16)
Pauloosie Angmarlik, August 9, 1994:
Whatever was passed on to me, I remember it as being straight-forward. The Inuit law being straightforward and being another point that I just mentioned was that Aksayak, he’s older, and we both know how the Inuit law works: it’s more straightforward than the Qallunaat law. . . . The Qallunaat law does not work for me because I had known another law before the Qallunaat law was introduced. I work with the court party now and I try to somehow make the two laws work together but at times there is certain laws that do not connect together and its hard on me sometimes in my mind because I know that another law, how to handle a situation. Another thing is that the court party says you have to do it this way and I feel that the Qallunaat law has a lot of curves and the Inuit law is straightforward. . . . I feel that I have an idea why [the Qallunaat law is] crooked. That the laws are, I see them as being so strict and mean towards the Inuit. . . .
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx:
The perversion of that which, out of joint, does not work well, does not walk straight, or goes askew (de travers, then, rather than a Penvers) can easily be seen to oppose itself as does the oblique, twisted, wrong, and crooked to the good direction of that which goes right, straight, to the spirit of that which orients or founds the law (le droit)—and sets off directly, without detour, toward the right address and so forth. (20)
The dialogue continues, indefinitely, without end.
You are walking down a dusty gravel road. It’s a grey day, with spitting rain and just enough fog to block the view. Your hands are weighed down with grocery bags, the plastic handles biting into your skin. You trudge along, enumerating worries for the future, regrets from the past, and present miseries to yourself in a feast of mental self-punishment. Ahead, in the periphery of your vision, someone approaches. In the city you ignore them and walk on by. In a small town you wave hello, or nod or smile curdy, or exchange a few words. In Panniqtuuq, you give the biggest and brightest smile you can manage. And you get one in return. Those offered by the elderly people, in particular, never fail to lift your spirits.
The “smiling” Inuit: one of the dominant images that circulates in the south. And one that has a basis in Inuit practice, though it does not mean that everyone is happy all the time! There is, still observable today, a certain smile, a certain presenting of a face that is happy to greet the other, a certain leaving of troubles behind. When you encounter people walking along the road, especially older people, a smile will always be greeted with a broad smile in reply, a smile over the burdens that are being carried. This is, in Inuit communities, a protocol of everyday life, a gesture that builds the community because it says “I am happy to see you” and it says this even if the name, language, or face of the other are unfamiliar. The first step in building familiarity and friendship is to express pleasure at encountering an other. There is a world of wisdom in those smiles that carry those faces above their troubles, that offer to share only happiness, that refuse to pass on their burdens, that greet the meeting in pleasure.
Walking with Kayrene Kilabuk to Meeka Arnaqaq’s home for an interview, she tells me that a twelve-year-old boy is missing in her home community of Broughton Island (now Qiqiqtarjuak). He had been adopted by his grandparents but now his grandmother is also dead and his absence was therefore not noticed until yesterday. Earlier that day she had heard about two suicides in another Inuit community, Clyde River. Walking, telling me this story, smiling, “So you see, there are lots of things happening in our communities. . . .” Smiling.
In two of my visits to Panniqtuuq, I boarded with Hannah Tautuajuk. She was born a Nakashuk, and married an older man, a hunter, who had died some years before. She has three children, one in Yellowknife, one who had lived in Ottawa for many years before moving back to Panniqtuuq, and a daughter, Julie, the youth representative on the hamlet council, who, with her young daughter Tina, lives with Hannah. Hannah is the perfect hostess, accommodating, stretching her English to its limits to be able to talk, teaching the odd bit of Inuktitut, baking bannock, cooking char, ensuring I felt at home in her house.
The first time I stayed at her place, she was out on the land when I arrived. I had come on a Saturday, and she returned from her hunting trip early Sunday evening. She had been on her snowmobile, far across the frozen fiord, hunting the small Baffin caribou. She came into the house like any worker returning home, with big, expressive movements, stamping, warming up, sitting on the couch to take her ankle-high boots off, bringing with her the smell of far-off winds and the aura of pride in a welldone job, a successful trip. Her group had gotten five caribou. She herself had gotten one. She thought nothing of it, it was one of many for this hunting woman whose activity would unravel many an anthropological theory.
When one sets out to deliberately engage in a sustained exchange, dialogue, or conversation with a particular elder, one almost inevitably puts oneself in a situation of intense affect. Rosie Okpik had cancer. By the last years of the twentieth century, it had eaten away much of her life. In the summer of 1997,1 went to visit her; she had been out of Panniqtuuq, receiving medical treatment, for much of the time when I was in town. When I heard she was back, I made sure to take the time to visit her. The house was bustling with visitors and relatives, but I recognized Rosie’s sharp, rasping voice as soon as I entered. We sat at the table with tea and pulauga, chatting. I was soon to be leaving town for another year. When it was time for me to leave, she got up and went to the window, leaning on the sill with a cigarette. I slowly put my boots on, leaning against the doorframe, half bent over, tugging on the heels, then the laces; finally ready. We looked across the room at each other. She was lit in sunlight at the window as if a figure from a Vermeer painting, but the look she gave me was something else, filled with sadness, finality, resignation. I have only ever come close to seeing it in Robert Mapplethorpe’s final self-portrait, the one where, holding a skull-cane, he gives us and history the look with which he faced his impending death. It was a look that told me all I needed to know. We would not see each other again. Her words to me, thrown under the look as our eyes held each other for a moment—”goodbye, Peter”—were also somehow resonant beyond the words themselves. She knew, I knew, how final that goodbye was, perhaps one of a chain of final goodbyes she was making. But it is the look that stays with me. Goodbye, Rosie.
Gathering country food is work unlike any other, with enough rewards to ensure that it is an embodied deconstruction of the binary opposition between work and leisure. Kayrene Kilabuk ensured that, late in the summer of 1993,1 had an opportunity to go out with her father-in-law, Ipelee Kilabuk, who would later be on the hamlet council and had already served a term in the NWT government. The day begins early, we are loaded into the boat—Ipelee, his marriage partner Aittaina, their adopted grandson Ben, Kayrene, my good friend Julia, and myself—and on our way by 6:45 in the morning. The boat is one of the typical Panniqtuuq sea boats, just over five metres long, with a small cabin and open back and a 110-horsepower motor driving it. It’s a very cold, hour-long boat ride, across the Pangnirtung Fiord and down the coast of Cumberland Sound, threading our way through huge, floating chunks of ice to a small, shallow bay called Avataqtu.
Avataqtu is a place where fish are plentiful. This I discover as soon as my hook reaches the water, about two minutes after stopping, as tea is being heated to warm us up, bang, an Arctic char. Everyone in the boat, every single person, child included, catches char. We fill up a fish box with char. Through the morning, about four other boats arrive, all with the same intent. I can see char swarming for my hook when I cast out, and fishing is a matter of nudging the hook towards the biggest-looking char. A few hours go by deliriously, as we rake in the fish. A second box begins to fill. Suddenly, a shout. What is it? A seal. Someone has spotted a seal. We’re all looking up, scanning the bay for the telltale ripples that indicate a seal, but before I can spot it—bang—this time a shot, and the seal goes down. While I was distractedly going, “oh, how nice, a seal, where is it?” the others had business in mind. The boats all converge on the spot; it turns out there was a second seal and we move out of the bay, searching intently, rifles at the ready, waiting for it to come up. No luck, this time. After a bit more fishing, we go back to the bay, now our gaze turned down into the shallow water, searching the bottom for the seal that was hit. All the boats are engaged in this; we circle around, trolling for fish, watching for the seal on the bottom.
This takes a long time, but eventually the seal is found. It’s hauled up with grappling hooks, and the boats are tied to a large, floating chunk of ice where the seal is laid out. Everyone gets out of their boats, stretches, and the seal is methodically butchered, the meat and innards distributed; each of the families receives a share. Virtually all of the seal is put to use; even the intestine is cleared and wound up, the liver is prized. By now it’s mid-afternoon, both fish boxes are full, the boats leave in a convoy that slowly spreads out, and, against fairly heavy winds in the open stretch of Cumberland Sound, we make the cold ride back.
The boat is unloaded and the char placed near it. Aittaina begins to clean, working fast with her ulu, the traditional woman’s ‘moon knife’. Kayrene starts to help, so I join in as well, fumbling and much slower with my Qallunaat knife, as does Julia. Here, it seems, the cleaning is woman’s work—Ipelee casts a bemused look in my direction—but nothing is said and we feel that we must do our share for the ten char that Julia and I will keep. Later, a few of those ten char will go towards encouraging a new intake of Inuit students at Trent University to visit my home, where we plan and set up an Inuit Students Group. But then, walking up to the house we were staying in, sinking exhausted after the fresh air, cold, and work, I had that same feeling, a job well done, and pimaatisiwin.