In the Empire of Ice (4 page)

The name Kingetkin, once Cape Prince of Wales and now simply Wales, means “an elevated area.” “But not very,” Joe mumbles, since the front row of houses are not more than a few feet above sea level. The village is also the westernmost on the North American continent. Houses are spread along an arm of sand, bent at the elbow, facing the Bering Sea. Two protective bulbs of rock resembling two whales’ heads enclose it. “That’s how passing whales know this is a place where they are welcome,” Joe tells me.

Behind the gravelly coast rise a rocky upland and the mountains that divide Wales from Nome. A small river cuts the village in half. Wales was once two separate villages. A sizable lagoon is a welcome resting place for migrating geese, birds, and eider ducks in the spring. The cemetery is on the mountainside, far above the wave-battered beach.

On a clear day Little Diomede Island is visible from the village, and Big Diomede, across the invisible boundary line with Russia, lies just beyond. They are stepping stones that lead to the eastern tip of the Chukchi Peninsula.

Geologically, Alaska is part of Asia. Beringia, the thousand-mile-wide grassland steppe that, in the last ice age, connected North America and Asia between latitudes 64° and 70° N, was the bridge by which the first “colonists” came to America, bringing plants and animals, diseases and languages, food and watercraft. These were the origin points of the Inuit people on their transpolar drift across Arctic America all the way to Greenland.

Now the watery strait that divides what is now Alaska and Chukotka is only 50 miles wide but remains a passageway for marine mammals and hunting people. What’s left of the Bering Land Bridge is a submerged shallow shelf that reaches all the way up the coast and across to Siberia: perfect habitat for walruses, as long as there is ice.

Arctic culture is marked by continuity and subtle, precise differences: A single language, Inuktitut, spans more than half the Arctic world, from the north coast of Siberia to the east coast of Greenland, and with it go the same legends and the ice-driven culture. The hunters in today’s Greenland still harpoon narwhal from kayaks as they did off King Island thousands of years ago. And each evening, in a tent on the ice or under a rocky cliff, an Inuit hunter in, say, Siorapaluk, Greenland, tells his grandchild the same orphan story of a mistreated boy who becomes a shaman as the hunter in Wales, Alaska. Yet there are many distinct dialects; hundreds of variations in the traditional tools for hunting, shelter, and cooking; and ceremonial differences. A shaman’s drum in Greenland is a small oval covered in bearded seal intestine, while the same kind of drum in Wales, Alaska, is a large round covered with the stretched gut of a walrus.

“LONG AGO people did not live like we do today. You knew how something was connected to the center and therefore together,” an elder from down the coast said. The “center” was spread wide to the edges of the world and the margins were part of the center. It was impossible to talk about hunting or animals without talking of watercraft, shamans, and spirits; the
umiaq
(kayak) and harpoon; trade fairs and whale dances; thought, weather, and sentient beings. It was also “a dark and unforgiving world,” Herb Anungazuk said. “We knew the sea and the seasons and how the sea moved into new seasons.” Death and life braided together on moving ice and tormented seas, on winter storms and in summer fogs through which no one could see.

The villages on the Bering Strait were not isolated outposts. Wales was a sentinel and capital of sorts, with smaller villages dotting the Saniq coast north of Wales along its wind-battered sand spits and sheltered inlets. Miffitagvik, Ikpek, Sinnazaat, Kigiqtaq, Sifuk, Qividluaq, Sinik, Ikpizaaq, and Espenberg were some of the villages whose people were joined by a common language and culture, by feasts and trade, but differentiated one from the other by subdialects, decorative designs, and songs.

Sea mammal hunting had come into being by the first millennium
B.C
., followed by the invention of the toggle-head harpoon, which detached from the shaft when an animal was hit and hooked into the flesh so that the animal could not pull away. By
A.D
. 900, bowhead-whale hunting was an art.

Trade was structured and intercontinental. Coastal people traded fish and marine mammals for caribou. The umiaq was seaworthy, allowing trips south to St. Lawrence Island, north to Point Hope, and east to East Cape, Siberia. Some traveled up the Colville River to trade with people on the north coast, where Barrow now is.

Summer fairs were eagerly anticipated. The inland Nunamiut traded with maritime people. Siberians traded with Americans. The people of Wainwright and Point Hope used dogs to pull
umiat
(the plural of umiaq) on rivers and traveled south to the Kobuk, down the Utokak, portaging over the Noatak to Kotzebue. There, they waited for the rivers to freeze, then returned by dogsled on river ice.

Siberians brought pieces of iron to trade. Because the Alaskans’ ivory harpoon points and knife blades broke easily, animals got away. They could make the same implements with iron tips and blades that did not break, and the lust for iron grew.

Feuds broke out between the two groups. There were robberies, and in retaliation, women and children were sometimes stolen by the Chukchi. “We were a warring people,” Joe told me. The Wales hunters wore armor—chest shields made of walrus-ivory slats tied together with sealskin sinew. Chukchi hunters wore iron-plated armor. Both groups were fierce. When anyone approached King Island, armor was donned by all, even if no war was imminent, and on leaving, the invited guests put the armor back on.

“Perhaps the antipathy started long ago when groups of Inuit people were pushed from Siberia. Maybe it was a time of bad weather and there wasn’t enough to eat; or it could have been overpopulation. Maybe those resentments held on over the years,” Joe says.

The north coast of Siberia had plenty of walrus and polar bear, but Wales was rich in fur-bearing animals, both kinds of bears, fish, seabirds and ducks, greens, and berries. The corresponding culture reflected that wealth. There were deer-antler mallets; whalebone snow beaters to get snow off boots; bone shovels; wooden fire drills to make a spark; fox-jaw amulets threaded on sealskin thongs; loon-skin and eagle-feather wands; sealskin finger masks and walrus-stomach drums; ivory belt fasteners with seal-human faces; bone, driftwood, and bead earrings; and labrets of jade and green jasper, to name just a few.

“We lacked for nothing. Every detail had been thought of. We made what we needed and we needed nothing more,” Joe says.

Rituals were practiced to show respect to the hunted animals and to the rich life in the oceans and seas. “Our world was already a very special place, long before the newcomers began showing intense interest upon our land,” Herb said.

A walrus gave its meat for food, its skin for houses, umiaq and kayak covers, thread, and ropes; its ivory was used for knives, harpoon points, and jewelry; its blubber was rendered for heat and light, which in turn fostered social ties and survival.

A whale could carry a small village for a year. Its meat and
mataaq
(skin and blubber) supplied minerals and vitamin C; its ribs were used as house frames and rafters; its skin was braided into sinew for sewing; and its baleen was cut into lines used for fishing. A single seal provided meat for one family and their sled dogs for a day.

Ugruk
—bearded seal—was abundant off Wales. The animals slept with their heads above water in rough seas and were hunted from kayaks with spears. Their meat and hides were essential, and the almost translucent skin of their guts was used variously as material for raincoats, spray skirts to keep water out of kayaks, vessels, and windows. “The ancient hunter learned to strive for total perfection in the environment he shared with his prey,” Herb Anungazuk said.

The women split walrus hides in half and soaked them for weeks to soften them enough to be stretched over driftwood boat frames. Villages were places of activity: Boatmaking and the sewing of dog harnesses and skin clothing, including anoraks, pants, mukluks, and mittens, was constant. Young people had an opportunity to learn from their elders until they, in turn, could teach those who came after. Extended families shared food. These were the common threads of the society.

Hunters wore double-legged caribou pants with the fur turned inside, and over them was a sealskin pant with the hair out. Under caribou parkas trimmed in muskrat and marten, they wore emperor-goose shirts, and over it all they could wear gut-skin rain shirts in stormy weather. Personal decoration for men consisted of labrets made of ivory and jasper inserted and locked into a hole just below the lower lip, as if to mimic the tusks of the walruses they hunted. Women were tattooed on chin and arms—sometimes long geometric designs, using soot from the seal oil lamp, extended all the way to the breast.

As soon as Aagruuk, the morning star, could be seen, the hunters went out by dogsled to hunt polar bears and seals with long-handled spears. January was called the month of new light. Four hours of daylight stretched to seven. Sod houses were cleaned: The walrus-gut skylight was lifted and the house’s single room was aired out. New wicks made of moss were laid on seal-oil lamps, and in the ceremonial room, local shamans appeased the goddess of the sea and mediated between the polar bear, whale spirits, and the hunters. Part of the fun was to compose new songs, stage wrestling matches, and hold masked dances where the soul of, say, a seal showed through the mouth of a half-seal, half-human face, reminding villagers that both humans and the animals with whom they lived and depended upon had “personhood.”

By March the whaling captains had begun working on their skin boats, carving harpoon shafts and cutting bearded sealskin trace lines for whips and dog harnesses. Old walrus-hide coverings were removed from the umiat, and in April new ones were stretched across the driftwood frames. Ice cellars were cleaned out, partly as a gesture of welcome to passing whales, and for practical reasons of space as well.

May was the heart of whaling season. When a whale was caught, its head was cut off and sent out to sea so the spirit could return home. The pressure ice was shifting, river ice melting, and seals of all kinds hauled out on the frozen slabs to bask in the sun. June was a month of celebration for the harvest.
Nalukataq
—the blanket toss in which people are thrown into the air from a stiff blanket made of sewn-together sealskins—and feasting went on. Meat was shared, and afterward families went off to traditional camps to enjoy the brief summer’s warmth and the physical freedom from howling winds and snow. Seabird eggs were gathered and there was fishing. In the fall there was sometimes another, shorter whaling hunt, but by October the ice had come in, and darkness began to spread across the horizon. In December the skies were black nearly all day and all night, a darkened theater in which the shaman’s drum could be heard.

Animals were sentient. They could talk and hear. Men could marry women who were polar bears or seals; children could be taken away by dwarfs. Dancers wore powerful masks that sometimes adhered to their faces with no strings. Wearing them was a way of creating passages beyond the conventional mind. Shamans had special words used only in the ceremonial house—the
qasig
—and with those words interceded between spirits, animals, and humans. Shamans could fly and dive under the ice; they could become the animal spirit, and call on others to join in; they could heal.

“We were a part of that universe because we lived within our realm, unchanged, and without damaging the delicate land,” Joe says, walking from window to window, trying to get his bearings in the government building with linoleum floors and fluorescent lights. “When you lose your language, you can’t find your way.”

The plane that brought us earlier leaves, cutting into a sky gauzy with blowing snow. Afterward, the airport light strobes across an expanse of white as if registering a loss. “This is the new part of town,” Joe says. “It wasn’t here 17 years ago.”

We sit in silence. He makes another pot of coffee. “Not like it used to be here with the wood stove roaring and everything done by kerosene lamp,” Joe says. The sky is dark: Is it midnight or morning? It doesn’t matter. Soon enough people will find out he’s here and they’ll come visiting, because no matter how long he’s been gone, he’s still one of them, and now, in his 60s, he’s considered an elder.

We look at artifacts in a glass case taken from two middens in the middle of the village: a driftwood mask, a harpoon point, a carved image of a dog. “Life here 10,000 years ago wasn’t much different than it was for my grandfather,” Joe says, humming softly and waiting for his
kuupiaq
(coffee) to boil. “When white people started coming on strong up here, that’s when we started to die.”

EVENING. Davis Ongtowasrok comes to take us to his mother’s house for dinner. She is one of three elders left in Wales. Davis is in his early 40s and still single. Toothless and gaunt, he looks like an older man, testimony to the rural health care system. When his father died, he dutifully moved in with his mother, Faye.

“Mom used to be the bilingual teacher,” he tells us as we put on mittens, parkas, and beaver hats. With the wind chill it’s nearly 40 below. “Her education went to the fourth grade, Dad’s to the eighth. Now the only time we hear Inupiat being spoken is when the elders come around with visiting dance groups. I can only understand the basics. No one young talks our language anymore.”

The ride to Faye’s house is snow blasted. I sit in back of Davis, and Joe rides in the sled pulled behind. “How can you see where you’re going?” I ask Davis. He gives me a toothless smile: “I can’t, but the ‘snow-go’ knows the way.” We flail through deep snowdrifts and quickly arrive at Faye’s hidden entryway. Blowing snow sears my face. Impossible to see. On the way to the house, Joe and I fall, yelping, laughing, and gulping snow. We’re like newborn seals with no feet and closed eyes.