During our conversation, the elder asked me this question: “Last year American seals killed Osama bin Laden—how?”
The elder knew about actual seals, but not about Navy SEALS, so he didn’t understand how my nation’s pinnipeds could have managed a journey to an inland country like Pakistan.
A Danish tour operator took me to Ikateq in his fiberglass outboard motorboat. Along the way, we saw several ringed seals and one bearded seal, but not a single Navy SEAL.
In Ikateq, there were no Navy SEALS, either. But I did see evidence of the American military’s World War II airbase, named Bluie East Two, in the form of rusted oil drums and rusted boilers.
Whatever you might think of the U.S. military’s activities in foreign parts, one thing is true: it refuses to clean up after itself.
The village had indeed been abandoned … not only by American soldiers, but also by Greenlanders, most of whose houses seemed to be in a state of collapse. A few houses had rotting dogsleds in front of them.
I searched around for signs of a tupilak attack—perhaps a yanked-off arm here, perhaps a partially eaten intestine there.
A middle-aged Greenlander came out of one of the few intact houses (his summer house, it turned out) and asked me what I was looking for. Signs of a tupilak attack, I said.
The man laughed. “The only tupilak attacks you’ll find nowadays are in video games,” he told me.
Then what about all the empty houses? “The people here moved to the big city [Tassilaq] mostly because they wanted TV reception,” the Greenlander said, adding: “and, of course, they wanted Wi-Fi, too.”
On the trip back to Tassilaq, I had the following thought: an attack by a tupilak is a much healthier way to make a village one with Ninevah and Troy than the absence of Wi-Fi.
33
When I was last in Tasiilaq in the late 1980s, there were no cafés of any sort, much less Internet cafés. Nor did I hear anyone utter the word qarassasiaq (a computer, lit. “little artificial brain”) during any of my previous visits.
Now there was an Internet café. I went into it, sat down in front of a little artificial brain, and googled “Ikateq.” Among my first hits was “Get Ikateq Greenland Prayer Times.”
In the same Internet café, a woman—the daughter of a man from whom I once collected old stories—showed me photos that she’d taken with her cell phone camera of the snow-capped mountains across Tasiilaq Fjord. I could look out the café’s window and see those same mountains.
A Greenlandic kid seated at the computer next to me was eagerly working on his avatar—a tall, blond white guy who seemed to like killing short, non-blond guys.…
“Wi-fi seems to have killed off all the tupilaks,” I remarked to Robert Peroni, an Italian living in Tasiilaq.
“But it hasn’t killed off the qivitoqs,” Robert said, then told me about a reputed qivitoq attack on a house just down the road from where he lived. The qivitoq had smashed through a window and attempted to make off with a young child.
A qivitoq is a mountain hermit who possesses the ability to fly as well as the ability to change himself into a polar bear at a moment’s notice. He likes to eat children, presumably because their flesh is far less tough than the flesh of adults.
In this instance, the qivitoq ended up flying back to his mountain home … without the child. So why didn’t he stick around and try to get another child?
“Because—even though he liked to eat humans—he couldn’t stand their company,” Robert smiled. “He preferred the company of mountains.”
Toward the end of my trip, the following incident occurred: a Greenlandic teenager was sitting on the shore just outside Tasiilaq and texting when she was approached by a polar bear. At the last minute, the girl saw the bear and screamed, and the bear loped away.
A person. A screen. The person lost in that screen. Along comes Nature in the form of a polar bear. “Ignore me at your own peril,” Nature says. The person survives by recognizing Nature.
The incident carried with it this message: you can’t write about the Belcher murders without also writing about the screen-driven lives around you. Each represents a particular world coming to an end.…
Presto! the dust vanished from my notebook.
34
Shortly after I got back from East Greenland, I was seated in a train rumbling over Boston’s fog-shrouded Charles River. It was a scene worthy of Winslow Homer, but twelve people seated in a row were oblivious to it—they were bent over their iDevices as if in prayer.
“I fear technology will surpass our human interaction.” Albert Einstein once observed. “The world will have a generation of idiots.”
Screened devices > ease of use > mental torpor > mental decline > idiocy.
An example of idiocy: for some reason, a Cyberian ventures out-of-doors, happens to see a bird, mammal, or reptile, and wonders what video game it escaped from.
In the not-so-distant future, the only recognizable mouse will belong to a computer. A mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle? Too weird!
Even now, a number of Cyberians are more likely to recognize Cloud as a computer term than to identify a type of cloud. Cirrocumulus? What’s that?
I gave a talk about the Belcher murders at a small college in New Hampshire. During this talk, a student raised her hand and said: “I just found Ernie Riddell on Facebook—he’s now a member of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.”
Ernie Riddell had been dead since 1989.
The teacher told me: “During a class last week, I conducted an experiment and told my students to put away their computers and iDevices. After they put them away, I saw their fingers working imaginary keyboards and imaginary mice, and by the end of the class, two of them seemed to be hyperventilating.”
I mentioned taking the students on detox field trips to some natural setting as a possible remedy against digital overdoses. “A weekend away from a computer?” the teacher said, shaking his head. “That’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Cyberia’s inhabitants aren’t just young people. In a New York restaurant, I saw four so-called senior citizens affixed to their iDevices. They weren’t talking or even grunting at each other like our Austalopithecus ancestors presumably did.
Nor were they eating the food on their table. Had they replaced food with digital technology?
A man in his late seventies, the father of a friend, told me that he wakes up five or six times during the night, and each time he checks his emails.
Cyberia’s inhabitants aren’t just seniors and young people. On a Boston street, a middle-aged man talking into his Bluetooth accidentally whacked me with one of his wildly gyrating arms, then gave me an astonished look that seemed to say: And here I thought I was the only person on this planet!
Increasingly, I dream about relocating to Ikateq, where, instead of the low-flying satellites that bring Internet reception, there are low-flying northern wheatears (Oenanthe oenanthe) …
… and where, yes, there might be rusting man-made artifacts, but there are also sculptures of frost-cleft gneiss as well as hummocks blanketed with Cladonia lichen and arctic heather, not to mention wispy, creeping Northern Lights, the night sky’s own systole and diastole.
35
The first of the Belcher trials began without incident.
Example of an incident: In an earlier Arctic trial, an Inuk shouted kiliariat [narwhals], and the Inuit attending the trial quickly ran for their rifles. The judge heard only the word “kill,” and he tried to hide under the Union Jack–draped table, lest he be killed.
In his opening address to the court, Judge Plaxton observed: “A people must naturally be viewed in the light of their environment, and the conditions under which they have lived.”
The judge followed this seemingly enlightened statement with another in which he appeared to be defending the accused Inuit: “The somber gloom of these island tundras is not conducive to excessive gentleness.”
Well put, Your Lordsh
ip, I might have thought if I happened to be a liberal outsider attending the trial …
… but if I was a local Inuk, I might have disagreed with the phrase “somber gloom,” which is a lot like Monsieur de Poncsins’s “brown monotony” quoted earlier. For if a person has developed an intimate relationship with a tundra habitat, it would not seem sombre, gloomy, or in fact monotonous.
“Lonely and lost was this land”, wrote explorer-author Hassoldt Davis about one of the remote places he’d visited, “but it was like a room of one’s own.”
An example of “somber gloom:” Markassie had been flown to Montreal for what turned out to be only a slightly irregular heartbeat. When he first saw Montreal, he said, he wanted to go back immediately to the Belchers, since there was so much concrete and so little (in his words) “unkilled land.”
Like the judge, Crown Prosecutor R. Olmstead wanted to put the Qiqiqtarmiut in their proper context. In his own opening address, he stated: “I contend that it is unfair to treat as equals these members of an aboriginal race who, up to 25 years ago … had never seen a white man.”
Translation: The Belcher Inuit aren’t as intelligent as white people, but now that they’ve encountered us, they will start advancing up the mental ladder.
Later the crown prosecutor informed the court, “The Eskimo is still a child.”
I asked Taliriktuk what he would do if I called him a child. “I would send you to an eye doctor,” he laughed. At the same question, Simeonie was not quite as amused. “I would call you a tukikangitok [a fool or a retard],” he told me.
36
In the first trial, Aleck Apawkok and Akeenik were accused of killing Sara because she was Satan. The court asked them whether they really thought she was Satan. At the time, ee [yes], they replied, but not anymore.
A man named Jonasie, Sara’s brother, complained that Sara didn’t do “any kind of work around the snowhouse,” doubtless, he observed, because she was under Satan’s influence.
Do you still think she was under Satan’s influence? the court asked Jonasie. He paused for a moment, then said, “I now think she was just lazy.”
Judge Plaxton started speaking like the crown prosecutor, referring to the Qiqiqtarmiut as “childlike, “primitive,” and “of low mental growth by our standards.”
After the judge observed that neither Aleck or Akeeniak had had “religious guidance,” the jury retired. Some of the Qiqiqtarmiut misinterpreted their departure and thought they headed out to go goose hunting. They had to be restrained from leaving the tent to go goose hunting themselves.
A short time later, the foreman returned with these verdicts: “Aleck Apawkok and Akeenik, not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.”
The verdicts were translated into Inuktitut, but the “man-birds” probably wouldn’t have understood a verdict of “temporary insanity” any more than they would have understood why Judge Plaxton wore a wig.
I asked the old woman what she thought of the temporary insanity verdicts. “I don’t remember,” she said, shaking her head. She possessed the virtue of being elderly.
In a wooded area outside Boston, I recently found a Forked Bluecurl (Trichostema dichotomum), a plant in the mint family whose smell, Thoreau said, fed his spirit and “endeared the earth” to him.
When I told a botanist friend at a Boston university about finding the T. dichotomum, he shook his head and pointed to his computer. “I don’t need to remember Latin binomials anymore because I’ve got this baby,” he smiled.
The baby-owning botanist did not possess the virtue of being elderly.
“If there’s a major storm … and your Internet connection is out and the batteries on your computer and iPhone have run down, do you know anything?” wrote Naomi Baron in Words Onscreen.
An uncomfortable piece of information: Those who spend excessive amounts of time seated at their computers can expect a 15–25 percent shrinkage in the area of the brain that processes memory, speech, and sensory information.
According to Jared Diamond, the Fore of New Guinea can identify 1,400 plant and animal species … without the aid of a computer.
In Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, I once did a fungal inventory, and an Inuk brought me a specimen. “We have this,” I told him. He pointed to the hairs on the stem, which in fact indicated that this was a species we didn’t have.
The Inuk knew nothing about fungal taxonomy, but he possessed the ability to observe.
Mosquitoes don’t need to be observed—they can always be discerned by their bite—and since August is a prime mosquito month in the Belchers, I can imagine the judicial visitors slapping at these tiny celebrants of warm-blooded life and saying to themselves, This is a trial in more ways than one.
How many of Mina’s shrieks and cries might have come from the fact that she was strapped to a stretcher and unable to slap at the mosquitoes biting her?
37
Next came the trials of Qarak, Adlaytok, and Ouyerack.
The first witness was Mosee, Mina’s husband. He said Ouyerack had told him to kill Ikpak, since he, Ikpak, was Satan. “But I didn’t want to kill a person like myself,” Mosee stated.
Ouyerack told the court that he did not think of Satan as a person like himself. Rather, Satan was an “ijuruq [ghost or phantom] who can jump into anyone, even a piaraq [baby].”
Since the atiq (soul) of an animal, any animal, can also jump into a person, even a baby, Satan’s jumping abilities were hardly unique.
Adlaytok, who had killed Keytowieack, admitted that he knew very little about Satan, except that he, Satan, was “piunngituq [very bad].”
Before Keytowieack’s Bible readings, none of the other Qiqiqtarmiut knew about Satan, either. But they had their own very bad beings, such as …
… the kukulingiat, which emerge from the ground to slash at people with their myriad claws, and the ever-hungry katintayuuk, a creature that boasts a huge head and, in lieu of a mouth, a female vulva that swallows unwary members of our species. Let’s not forget man-eating eider ducks, either.
Such creatures carry with them this underlying message: do not underestimate the power of Nature.…
Judge Plaxton seemed to understand the risk of having a diabolic being in one’s camp. If you think another person is Satan, he told the court, “then by doing away with him, you are doing away with a wrongful thing.”
Satan’s jumping ability would seem to include video games. At a recent creationist conference in Phoenix, Arizona, Christian video game developers blamed Satan for the failure of their products. They tried to perform an exorcism at the conference, but failed.
Satan hasn’t interfered with video games in Singapore, where 90 percent of the children are myopic because they spend so much time playing video games.
“My son spends the whole day playing video games,” a woman told me. She was from New Haven, Connecticut, not Singapore.
I told the woman with the video game–playing son about the Belcher murders. “Terrible,” she said while texting someone.
I also told the texter’s husband about the Belcher murders. Immediately, he googled “Belcher + murder,” then proceeded to read me a story about the Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, who in 2012 killed his girlfriend, then himself.
Qarak was accused of killing Ikpak with bullets “borrowed from Jesus.” This caused a titter among several of the jurors.
The crown prosecutor asked Qarak whether he still believed Ikpak was Satan. He shook his head. He said that the Rev. Neilsen had made him see the manirtaq (light, lit. “lamp wick”).
When I mentioned Qarak’s name to a Cyberian friend, she laughed. “Qarak is a popular video game character called the Dark Wanderer.”
But Qarak didn’t become any sort of wanderer, dark or otherwise. The jury gave him a suspended sentence. He was such a good hunter that, in the words of the Judge Plaxton, “he will hunt for the families of the other prisoners if his sentence is remitted.”
“Ayeeh!” shouted Qarak wh
en he learned that he wasn’t going to be executed by the qallunaat or—just as bad—exiled away from the Belcher Islands.
Adlaytok was a considerably less successful hunter than Qarak, so the court sentenced him to a year’s imprisonment with hard labor at one of the RCMP garrisons on the mainland.
Almost nothing is known about Adlaytok’s life from that point on … except that, according to the Mountie records, he had a very difficult time living away from the Belchers.
38
At the beginning of his trial, Ouyerack wore Peter Sala’s bowler hat, presumably to make a good impression on Canada’s legal representatives, but the judge asked him to remove it.
Inuit testimony indicated that Ouyerack believed that he was not only Jesus Christ, but also the Holy Ghost. Upon being asked who the Holy Ghost was, Ouyerack replied, “Some friend of Jesus.”
“My body was Ouyerack, but my thoughts were Jesus,” Ouyerack told the court, adding, “I was very happy being Jesus.”
Jesus, like Satan, seems to have been a talented jumper. “Anything, even Jesus, can take possession of your insides,” one of the witnesses informed the court.
“Did you give Adlaytok a bullet so he could shoot Keytowieack?” the court asked Ouyerack. Yes, he admitted … because he thought Keytowieack was Satan. He did not think Keytowieack was Satan now.
Such a plethora of Satans! the qallunaat visitors to the Belchers must have thought.
By comparison, the Salem witchcraft trials could claim only one Satan, described by the pivotal accuser, a Native American woman named Tituba, as a well-dressed, white-haired man from Boston, then later as a dark-haired man from Maine.
In an article for the Toronto Star, William Kimmon, a journalist who was one of the jurors, wrote that the Belcher murders were like “a new regime wiping out the old, because Keytowieack was ‘the former religious boss on the islands.’”
At the End of the World Page 7