In the Empire of Ice (19 page)

While these amenities certainly eased a difficult life, it corrupted the seasonal round of subsistence living. Families congregated closer and closer to the Hudson’s Bay store, and soon enough, the game nearby was hunted out. Dependency on the fur trade increased, but when the fox-fur craze came to a sudden end in the 1940s, the hunters faced starvation again. They had lost track of the cycle of game as well as the skills and “second sight” of the great hunters who had come before them.

But all was not lost. According to the Danish explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, who came to Igloolik in 1923, shamans and elders flocked to him, telling him stories. “The ‘old days’ were not that long ago,” John MacDonald reminds me. In village after village, camp after camp, Rasmussen talked to anyone who would talk to him, and most did, and took meticulous notes—3,000 pages of them.

They told Rasmussen that in all living things were forces that rendered them sensitive to the rules of life, and that these forces were found in names and in the soul. The soul gave the particular appearance to each being. In humans, the soul was a tiny human being, in the caribou, it was a tiny caribou, and so on. The
inusia,
the soul, was situated in a bubble of air in the groin. Any offense against the soul became an evil spirit. Evil spirits could be used by shamans to harm people who had disobeyed the rules.

Shamans were male and female, and sometimes couples who jumped easily between the spirit, animal, and human realms. They could cause death or they could cure, they could find out where the animals were, and they could find people who had gone missing on the land “by turning into spirits and go looking for them,” one elder said. She begged Rasmussen to take her with him as he traveled from camp to camp by dogsled. She jumped on his sled and would not get off, and ended up living for a year with Rasmussen and his lover, Anarulunguaq, and her cousin, Miteq.

“We used to believe that animals all have spirits. Birds, lemmings, seals, caribou, all kinds of animals have spirits. Even weasels and foxes have spirit and shaman could move into animals’ bodies,” one of Rasmussen’s informants said. Among the people, songs, amulets, and strict taboos were the spiritual and social tools to maintain a thriving society; modesty in front of the weather, animals, and one’s relatives was mandatory.

The human alone was weak and powerless. There were ruling powers that could take or give life. Sila was the spirit of weather and intelligence, of consciousness and nature. Nuliajuk, or Arnaluk Takanaluk, was “the woman down there,” who controlled the marine mammals and the seas. She was pictured in a drawing by one of Rasmussen’s informants as a tiny, pear-shaped being with long, spiked hair sticking straight up.

The Iglulingmiut and the Avilingmiut believed that some of them were marked by Sila and held its power within them. Those born on days of good weather were called either
silatiariktut
, good-weather souls, or
silaluktut,
bad-weather souls. Those who carried the spirit could influence weather by going outside naked, walking around, and crying,
“Silaga nauk, ungass, ungaa?”
(“Where is my weather, where is my weather?”) It would then begin to snow.

Wind had a spirit, and when it blew too hard, the shaman wrapped himself tightly in his clothes so the wind couldn’t blow anymore. The spirit of the snowdrift was called Oqalorak. It ruled the sharp edges. The harder a blizzard blew, the more the spirit was delighted. Oqalorak sent storms down onto hunters and laughed at them.

The moon spirit was Tarqip. He lived with his sister, Seqineq, the sun. As a result of an incestuous relationship, in which Tarqip accidentally slept with Seqineq, the brother and sister lived in a double house in the land of the dead.

Helping spirits could be almost anything. One called Nartoq had a nose that protruded from its forehead, a lower jaw that was part of its chest. Its threatening behavior was meant to remind its “owner” that he was too easily angered. Another helper named Igtuk, meaning “boomer,” made the sound of thunder in the mountains. “No one knows where he stays,” Rasmussen’s informant said. “He is made otherwise than all other living things: his legs and arms are on the back of his body, his great eye is just level with his arms, whilst his nose is hidden in his mouth. On the chin is a tuft of thick hair and below it, on a line with his eye, are his ears. The mouth opens and discloses a dark abyss, and when the jaws move one can hear booming out in the country.”

Shamans talked to these and other spirits using special words called
irinaliutit
. The words could be bought and sold, handed down, or communicated as a legacy before death. The shamans, using these words, could cause dead things to come back to life. They could make frost appear. They could create life out of dead things and make clothes come to life. Nature and culture were bound together tightly, no seams between. Everything was alive, walking, hunting, singing, talking, listening, behaving, and “together-living,” Rasmussen’s informants told him.

George Aggiaq Kappianaq, born in 1917 near Igloolik, remembers meeting Rasmussen. He referred to him as a “half-breed white man” and recalled that Rasmussen’s living quarters were very bright. “On the table there were cookies in a tin. I believe I might have helped myself as much as I could,” he said. He was six years old at the time.

George was a frequent contributor to the Oral History Project. He wanted to pass on all that he knew and remembered of life out on the land. There were suicides even then, he said, and remembers finding a man who had shot himself because “he had too much in his head.” He brought the man’s head to his mother, who was one of many local shamans, so she could “wash it out.”

George’s life was filled with spirit helpers: “I remember seeing the helping spirit as a bird. It was this high [he raises his arm], and there was an aura. I could see it walking around, back and forth across the porch. To become a shaman you fast for five days—no food, no water. Then the person will make the sound of a bird.

“My mother became a shaman. Her helping spirit was that of a white man from the ship. She said she could see his aura as a bright thing from that person. Even in the dark she said that it became bright as day. A woman can be even stronger than a male shaman. Very much so. Some women were able to be a lot more powerful than men in shamanism. That’s because of their mental state. They are more reluctant to harm others. For this reason they are more powerful.”

George had a spiritual bent as well. He said: “I could see a beast right through the wall [of the igloo]—maybe a polar bear or a dog. I could even see the stars.” He remembers doing what he called “going out with something other than a woman”—having sex with a dog, a caribou, or a seal. “I personally started to do it. If I had not confessed, I would be long dead,” he said. “You have to confess to a shaman, because if you hide anything, you will get cancer and die.”

About converting to Christianity, he said, “It’s hard to tell if this religion is truly a good religion, because it leads to hate and despising. One must have love and practice it. One must not get too occupied with the forces you are expected to despise.”

He was sure that the old ways still percolated through Inuit society, no matter how much they changed. He said: “There are still shamans around and always will be.”

In 1923, Rasmussen said to those who doubted: “If in these myths are things which seem to be contrary to common sense, it is merely because the later generation is unable to grasp everything that, to their forebears, were obvious truths.”

WITH PRIESTS AND TRADERS came schoolteachers and more missionaries, as well as “southern” medicines. After World War II the Canadian government decided to develop the far north less out of concern for the well-being of its Inuit citizens than concern that assimilation take place and Canadian sovereignty be firmly established.

When it was discovered that TB was ravaging the Inuit populace, a ship was sent to take people to sanatoriums for treatment. But it seemed more like kidnapping, a continual effort to subjugate these wild people. “They came for us at night,” a former TB patient said. “We didn’t know where we were going or if we would see our families ever again.”

Sheila Watt-Cloutier recalls: “During the TB scare, people were moved out of their villages on a hospital ship. As a convenience the government gave every Canadian Inuk an identifying number, engraved on dog tags. Numbers were used instead of our real names. I’m EA3582. They were trying to erase us, and we didn’t like it. Finally they put what they called Operation Surname into effect, giving us all Christian names and dropping the Inuit names by which we were known to each other.”

In the 1950s residential schools were added to the litany of demands on these once self-sufficient subsistence hunters and their families. The eldest boy or girl of each family was sent away to one of two boarding schools—one in Chesterfield Inlet and one in Churchill, both run by priests.

Sheila recalled life in Nunavik, northern Quebec, before she was sent off: “I remember in my life a sense of groundedness and peace. Of control, of trying to capture the spirit of the old ways. The historical trauma that changed the course of the hunter and the wounding of the Inuit hunter has changed him to one who is struggling to find his place in a world of institutions.”

“I was ten when I was sent away to school. They came for us in the middle of the night and we were put on chartered airplanes. Classes at these schools were taught in English. Inuktitut was not allowed in or out of the classroom. The curriculum was southern, with no reference at all to Inuit culture. We all had a number and a bottle of lice medicine. We were being reprogrammed. Many of the children, especially the boys, were subjected to sexual abuse. I didn’t come home for five years. I grew up on a dogsled. I came home to a Ski-Doo.”

Theo Ikkumek said that as a child he and his family were nomadic. “The first six years of your life are the most important. They determine how a child will be in the future. My education started in my first moment in an igloo. In the summers and falls we lived in skin tents and sod houses. These were my memories. Then I was sent to residential school at Chesterfield Inlet when I was seven. A few years later my brother Emil had a vision that kept me from going further with education. He kept me back to teach me what he knew. His vision held me here.

“At that school we were abused sexually. But getting some education enabled me to step forward. Some never came into the stream of things. Quite a few Inuit leaders have come out of these schools. Chesterfield was Catholic. I burned the pictures I had of those days. They knocked the school down.”

Leah Otak says “healing has to be deep. In Igloolik we have lots of hurt people. I was married to one of them. The ones sent away to school at an early age to Chesterfield were abused, not just sexually, but also culturally. Now they are getting compensation checks. Big amounts. And they don’t know what to do with the money. Family members hang around asking for things. We were never like that. There is so much sickness.
Qallunaat
sickness—white man’s sickness. The healing should take place here, not at alcohol and drug treatment centers in Ottawa, because when they go there, they never come back.”

Theo remembers the summer he returned from residential school and his older brother, Emil, took him out onto the land to teach him the old ways. He had to prove he had learned his way around. “I was 12 when I went out on the land by myself with the dog team and built an igloo, spent many nights, and went hunting for my food. The notion of boredom didn’t exist. Even now, it’s hard to comprehend. But the life can change too fast. We’re lost now. Who am I? A Canadian? Just that question says it all. And most answer, ‘Yes.’”

In the 1960s permanent towns were established: Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet, and Igloolik, where education, medical care, religion, and welfare were force-fed to all who came and stayed. Day schools were built and attendance was made mandatory. Outpost families were forced to send their children to town for education. The children lived in boarding houses, but the families, so unused to being apart, couldn’t stand the separation. Small, uninsulated houses with oil heaters, water tanks, and electric lights were provided. To pay rent, they were forced to accept welfare in the form of “Family Allowance,” and still do today.

Seduction, need, fear of the consequences of refusal, and assimilative actions that were really enforcement—these small nations of subsistence hunters that had thrived for 4,000 years at the top of Foxe Basin and Baffin Island were suddenly confined, sedentary, overcrowded, overregulated, and hooked into a cash economy from which there is still no release.

The final blow came when the the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), first stationed in Pond Inlet but now with a post in Igloolik, began slaughtering at least some, if not most, of the sled dogs. Without dogs, the hunters’ imprisonment was complete; without dogsleds there could be no hunting, no outlying camps, no seasonal movements that followed the migration of walruses, seals, birds, fish, and whales.

DOGS WERE ONCE a part of everyday life across the Arctic. Though they did not always pull sleds, they were brought from Siberia to Alaska 10,000 years ago. Lucien Ukaliannuk recalled for the Oral History Project: “Litters born in the winter were kept inside so they would not die from the cold. We are alive today because there were dogs to help our ancestors to survive. They depended solely on their dogs to secure food and meet their needs. Indeed, I remember those days when we depended on dogs.”

Women were often asked to raise and feed the young dogs. “They have the know-how, just like they have the experience of rearing children. She feeds them just right—small pieces at a time, not feeding constantly.

“Dogs are very knowledgeable. They might be hungry because there was no way to get game animals, like if there was no floe edge. So the dogs were
niriujaaq
—expecting something. Also, they can take you home. In those days, my dogs were a lot more observant than I was. There were times when I lost my direction, but my dogs knew where to go that would take me home. This was particularly true during a blizzard, a heavy snowfall, or poor visibility. When you stop your team the dogs will get down and settle. One among them will get up and
niugarsaq
—rub his back on the snow. The reason he is niugarsaq is that he’s anxious to get home, he knows the way, so you put the longest trace line on him so he can lead the way.”