In the Empire of Ice (9 page)

“Summers are hotter too. Our water supply went down to nothing. Now we’re getting sick from the water. We have dragonflies. Never had those before. And robins, porpoise, sharks, and orca. Real strange. It’ll come a time when the migrations of eider ducks and walrus and whales get so mixed up that they’ll come at the wrong time and weather. The wind and the currents and the coming and going of ice will go against them.

“These days there’s either too much ice or not enough. You can hardly forecast weather the Inupiat way. The elders taught us signs about how to know the weather. Like a wind cap over the mountain at the southern end of the village meant high winds coming. The clouds never lie.

“I’m on the International Whaling Commission,” Luther goes on. “We have to tell people that we aren’t commercial whalers. We’re just feeding ourselves like we’ve done for 10,000 years. The oil companies neglect the subsistence whalers. We tell them they can’t use big ships in the migration route. They’re supposed to stop during migration, but they don’t. In Kaktovik, at the top of Alaska, the whales are going further out because of the oil industry activity. A lot of things are going haywire.

“Fall time, the whales return later. Now it’s the end of November, beginning of December. Bowheads go south a bit; humpbacks go to Hawaii; grays to Baja. It’s not just right here that we are concerned with. What happens here with the ice affects everywhere, just like that,” Luther says and snaps his fingers. As he does so, all the lights in the village go out.

OUR PLANE LIFTS OFF in a snowstorm. We head east from Wales to Nome. The pilot is young but he knows the way. It’s minus 22 degrees with a light wind. To the south, down the nose of the Bering Strait, is King Island, a chunk of granite sticking up out of a tormented sea.

The King Islanders, the Aseuluk, were forced off their island by the government and had to move to Nome, 90 miles away. “So Wales people and King Island people were bunched together as two outsider groups,” Joe says, looking at the island in the distance. Its sides are so steep it’s hard to imagine anyone living there at all.

They say that King Island came into being when a giant fish was harpooned by a hunter who cut a hole through the fish’s snout to tow it back to shore behind his kayak. A storm came up and the hunter had to leave the fish behind. The fish turned into an upended stone and became the island of Ukiovak—King Island. The name means “a place for winter.” The island and the Arctic culture that arose on its vertiginous cliffs are deeply expressive of the interaction of humans and their environment—in this case a plug of rock sticking out of the ocean. Against all odds, humans thrived in this difficult and unlikely place.

At two and a half miles long and almost two thousand feet high, King Island has no harbor and no landing place but once had a hanging village of driftwood houses on stilts tied to the precipice with half-inch braided walrus-hide thongs. Each cantilevered platform held two separate houses, their frames overhung with walrus hides. “An Eskimo duplex,” Joes says, jokingly.

The houses were small, about ten feet by ten feet, with a storage shed in front for kayaks, paddles, skins, harpoons, and spears. The ceilings were insulated with dried moss and the walls were stuffed with grass. “Eskimo wallpaper,” as Joe called it, was sealskin. The roof was laid with split logs. Window and door coverings were made of walrus intestine that served to let in light and also functioned as lighthouses for homeward-bound hunters.

A deep cave near waterline with permafrost walls served as a cold storage for the islanders’ food. Walrus ropes were used to help climb up from the cave to the houses. Women carried huge loads of meat up and down the cliff in walrus-hide backpacks.

Before a hunt, the villagers climbed on top of the dance house roof at dawn, lit a small fire, and sang as the men went out. The men’s skin kayaks and umiat were often strapped together for safety. These were not ice hunters—they harpooned walruses in open water.

When meat was scarce, the men climbed bird cliffs wearing walrus-hide harnesses. “Straight up among screaming birds, they captured cormorants and stole murre eggs,” Joe tells me. The residents of King Island were not unlike birds themselves, as they lived perched on cliffs in houses that shook with the winter winds. The women tanned hides with their own urine, and men made tools with whatever materials were at hand. Baleen strips were used for fishing line, odd-shaped rocks were used as hooks, water was carried inside a pouch made of walrus intestine, snow goggles were carved from driftwood, shovels were fashioned from the shoulder blades of walruses, knives were flint or jade. The flat tops of the houses were used in good weather for open-air work spaces.

December was called the Month of Drumming. When the spirit of Sila was appeased, dance competitions were held, new songs were composed, and shamans went to work keeping whatever social problems had erupted under control. There was ritual, storytelling, and dancing. Even in this tiny, hanging village, there were four dance houses on the island. Families belonged to individually named dance houses, and friendly competitions were held among them. The long winter entranceway was cold and narrow. Like a mole, a person crawled along, then popped up through a hole in the floor and entered the dance house. Driftwood beams were supported by four poles, and benches lined the walls.

Winter could be a time of hunger if the stores of food from previous seasons ran out. Extra hides were always put aside: From them, nutritious broth could be made to get people through until spring. If hunger became extreme, villagers moved in with each other to share food and warmth. Nothing was hoarded, even if it meant that everyone died.

King Islanders were maritime travelers: By kayak and umiaq they went south to St. Michael Island, north to East Cape, Siberia, northeast to Point Hope, Kotzebue, and Wales. Their dogs were weather forecasters: They were trained to sit in the bow of the boat, sniffing the air and feeling the currents, barking if there were shifts in the ice. Moving ice could crush a boat or break off and carry away an umiaq and its crew.

Joe’s mentor in Nome, Paul Tiulana, was from King Island. Paul learned to listen for the haunting mating song of the bearded seal by sticking his paddle down into the water and holding it to his ear. He knew the sound of spirits as well. “If a spirit wanted to come into the house, there was a big bang on the roof. Then fog entered the room and the seal-oil lamp flickered. Medicine men and women in the village cured the sick, found lost objects, and danced for good weather. They knew when villagers were in danger out on the ice.”

He recalled a story from 1949, when three men drifted out from the island. One was his cousin, whose parents, upon hearing a loud crack under their house, knew he was dead. Another man on the ice was named Ayek. His mother knew that if the man’s extra pair of mukluks stopped moving back and forth during the night, he was dead. The mukluks kept swaying, and after drifting for 17 days in the Chukchi Sea, Ayek was found alive. Now, two generations later, his grandson Sylvester Ayek, an internationally recognized artist in his 50s, returns to King Island every summer to make his Calder-like sculptures.

When the prey was polar bear, there was a dance to honor the animal. Food, rawhide, and furs were given away. Both men and women composed their own songs. In any time of plenty, there were large dances to which people from such far-flung villages as Wales, 30 miles to the northeast, were invited. There were cross-dressing dances in which men dressed as women; bench dances when the entire dance was performed sitting down; and competition dances when each dance group competed with another for a prize—perhaps a dance fan made from the chin whiskers of caribou. Men and women changed mates in a dance called the Yugaisug. A man would throw a bearded-seal rope over his desired “exchange wife,” go off with her for sex, and return her by morning.

A contemporary King Islander referred to one ancient source of entertainment as Eskimo TV: A large wooden dish would be filled with seawater and a gut-skin parka draped around it, using the neck hole as a “lens” to look into the water. There, they could “see” if hunters who had gone out were safe. “But now, when looking into a bowl of water, all that is seen is a tiny sparkle of light, a very tiny one. Nothing else.”

WE APPROACH NOME in falling snow. No visibility until the runway lights show, the altimeter like a clock winding backward from heaven to earth, then forward again as if to reflect the jolting leaps between old and new in this ancient culture.

In the winter gloom there are Christmas tree lights, even though it’s January. One young man has been “replanting” discarded Christmas trees. They stand in a single line out on the sea ice with a sign: “NOME’S NATIONAL FOREST.”

In 1924, after having traveled for three and a half years by dogsled across the Northwest Passage, the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen and his Inuit lover, Anarulunguaq, arrived in Nome from Kotzebue on a mail schooner. He wrote: “Nome lies on a grassy plain with a fine range of fertile hills in the background.”

Thirty years before he arrived, the population of Nome was negligible. There were a few Inuit marine mammal hunters and their families. Then the 1900 gold rush swelled the population to 10,000 people. Rasmussen was astonished by the array of native peoples from northwestern Alaska in one place: “The entire population of King Island, the Ukiuvangmiut; the inland Eskimos from the Seward Peninsula, the Qavjasamiut; the Kingingmiut from Cape Prince of Wales; the Ungalardlermiut from Norton Sound and the mouth of the Yukon; the Siorarmiut from St. Lawrence Island; and the natives from Nunivak Island are here,” he wrote in his expedition notes. The newly arrived hunters and their families lived in tents flanking both ends of town and made carvings to sell to tourists and gold rushers.

It was here that Rasmussen encountered his first taste of American racism. When he and Anarulunguaq entered a restaurant together, they were refused service. Rasmussen was shocked. They went back to their hotel, changed out of their skins, and put on what he called “white man’s clothes.” Finally, they were let in to eat.

Rasmussen and Anarulunguaq had a child midway through their journey from Greenland to Alaska, born on King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. Knud was married to a bright, wealthy Danish woman who helped raise funds for his many expeditions. To bring his Inuit “wife” and their child home to Copenhagen was unthinkable. Same problem for Anarulunguaq, whose husband-to-be was waiting for her on Qerqertarsuaq, an island near present-day Qaanaaq, Greenland. What must have been a heartbreaking decision was made: They would give the child to a young Inuit couple in Nome who had no children of their own.

At the Polar Café, Joe introduces himself to an older man—an Inuk, a native Alaskan—sitting alone by a window that looks out on the frozen sea. His name is Miseq, also known as Roy Tobuk. “My name means ‘wet tundra,’” he tells us. Joe invites him to eat with us.

Miseq grew up with the Athabascans. They called him Iqiliq, which means “lice people” or “Indian,” because they didn’t know he was an Inuk. He tells us of the old wars between the Athabascans and the Inuit, and the times they captured Inuit women and took them south to the Yukon River village, where they were forced to live the rest of their lives.

Roy moved to Nome in 1945 and worked for Alaska Airlines. Eventually the street where he lives was named after him: Tobuk Alley. We try to pay for his breakfast, but he refuses. “I’m 80 years old, but I can still pay my own way,” he says. Joe tells Tobuk that he looks young for his age, and Tobuk replies: “Yeah, but you should see the inside.”

MINUS 22 DEGREES. Early fog cleared by a light breeze. Arctic travel is mostly waiting. We are in Nome’s one-room terminal again, waiting for a flight to the village of Shishmaref. The coast of the Seward Peninsula sticks into the Chukchi Sea like the blade of an ax. Wales is at one end of the blade, and Shishmaref is in the middle. It’s absurd that we have had to fly all the way back to Nome to then fly to a village only a few miles up the coast from where we started, but our attempts to find a snowmobile ride failed.

As we walk across snowy tarmac to the small plane, the young pilot calls out: “I’ve got dead reindeer to the ceiling in here. Sorry, you’ll have to catch the next plane.” First time I’ve been bumped for dead reindeer, I tell Joe. We go back to town to visit Joe’s aunt Esther. She greets us at the door with the pink pot holder she was knitting in her hand. Half the height of Joe, she hugs his waist. Vigorous at 78, she moved with her family from Wales to Nome by skin boat. “No compass or nothing,” she says brightly. “Just looked at the sun and got our direction that way.”

She tells us she was born on a dogsled during a trip along the coast. Her family stopped at a village, but there wasn’t time to get the midwife. “Mom told Dad, ‘My baby wants to get out real bad.’ So she let me come out, right there on the sled. The midwife came down to the ice and she cut the cord and said, ‘It’s a girl.’ That was how I was born.”

She says there were no radios then and school went only through fourth grade. “I always wanted to be at camp. I did everything with my dad, seal hunting and fishing too. In December, when the moon started to get round, before daylight had returned, our family went over there to that river called Maiqtaatugvik, meaning, ‘the place where one gets up to follow,’ to check and see if there are any flounder there. They used their
kagiak,
their spear. Didn’t even have to lie down, just had to stick it in the water and get one. Up that river, they were big and got fancy eggs. Boy, were they good!

“When I lived in Wales, we used to see a little light. It appeared sometimes behind the middle village and traveled down and disappeared in the ocean. We saw it at the horizon, then it was gone. They don’t see it anymore. Not since Christianity. There were still
anakgoks,
shamans, but we were told not to tell anyone about them, and they stopped talking to us too. Their words stopped when the lights stopped shining.”