Wayfinding

by M. R. O'Connor

  * * *

  Shortly into my hunting trip with Taukie I began to encounter a common problem for people unused to traveling on the Arctic landscape: my eyes seemed to lose the ability to perceive scale and therefore distance. Living in the eastern United States, I was accustomed to my visual field being filled with tall objects—trees, buildings, lampposts—which my brain unconsciously interpreted as reference points to tell how much space existed between me and places on the landscape. Up in the Arctic the tallest trees were twelve-inch willows, more like bonsai trees than the oaks and pines I was used to. Hills and mountains can be reference points, but once we entered the tundra, the biggest objects were rocks. At times I thought a rock was hundreds of yards in the distance but it turned out to be only a few yards away. The monotony of the landscape was scrambling my brain. Taukie didn’t have this problem. “It may look all the same to you, but it’s very detailed in our heads,” he said. “When we’re taking in details in our head, we try to look at the little stuff. When we travel past something we look behind us because it looks different from that angle. Every detail we are trying to put into our heads.”

  Even while driving at fifty miles an hour Taukie methodically scanned the landscape for any flashes of ptarmigan while simultaneously paying attention to looming rocks and crevices ahead that threatened to overturn the snowmobile. I tried to keep track of our route in my head, but I soon became disoriented. I was further distracted by the drop in air temperature as we climbed in elevation; my face began to freeze, and I pushed the front of my coat up over my nose. If I left my hands ungloved for longer than a minute, my fingers started to ache. After a while Taukie slowed the snowmobile and then stopped to point at the ground. “I use these to tell direction,” he said. I looked closely and noticed a few rocks. “See the snow behind the rocks?” said Taukie. “It shows you where the dominant wind is coming from.” Sure enough, on the lee side of the rocks was a ridge of snow. Broad at the base, it narrowed to a point, shaped by the blowing wind hitting the rocks and then wrapping itself around the obstruction. This was another kind of sastrugi, not uqalurait—the tongue-shaped formations found on sea ice—but qimugiuk, a tapered ridge found behind protrusions in the ground. In this area the dominant wind was coming from the northwest, and each of the ridges showed that it came from that direction. As we continued on the snowmobile I started to notice that qimugiuk were everywhere. Even a small rock that could fit in my palm had a small ridge pointing southeast. We passed a large hill to our right and I realized that it, too, had a giant qimugiuk behind it. A whole mountain, it seemed, could have a qimugiuk the size of a fallen skyscraper. I looked at the placement of the sun; this time of year it was rising in the south and setting late at night in the north. Between the qimugiuk and the sun, I suddenly realized that I now knew exactly where Iqaluit was and what direction we were going, no matter how many twists and turns we took on the snowmobile. In these near-perfect conditions, it seemed nearly impossible to get lost. For the first time, I felt as though I was reading the landscape.

  Eventually we came up the steep side of a slope and rested on the top: we were on the lip of a gentle bowl, and below us was an enormous flat plain covered in snow. This was Crazy Lake, frozen solid. We followed along the rim until we both saw in the distance a distinct pile of stones—an inuksuk. Taukie drove the snowmobile up beside it, and we got off to look more closely. Just under three feet high, it was made of half a dozen cantaloupe-sized rocks upon which a single rectangular rock, perhaps two feet long, was placed. Its bottom side was nested into the smaller rocks, while its top was flat and gently sloped. On the very top, snugly fit so that it could not be moved without great force, was a thick pinkish-hued stone. Taukie took his hands and began to feel the flat rock, seeking its shape tactilely. He noted that it was an older inuksuk because of the patches of lichen growing over it, growth that takes decades in the Arctic climate. “You can tell the middle rock, the shape of it is pointing.” Sure enough, I could see how the rock narrowed slightly on one end and pointed toward the southwest. This was vaguely in the direction of Iqaluit. The inuksuk likely predated the permanent settlement of the town, so maybe it was pointing to the direction of the coast; we couldn’t know for sure.

  Norman Hallendy, an Arctic researcher who spent decades studying inuksuit, describes them as stones that act as mnemonics for travelers. He documented eighteen kinds in southern Baffin Island alone, each with a different name and use. An aluqarrik marks a spot to kill caribou, and an aulaqqut is for frightening caribou. Some indicate the depth of snow, the location of a food cache, dangerous ice, a fish spawning spot, or sites for mining pyrites or soapstone. Some hunters built entire fences of inuksuit that would guide the caribou herds toward their spears. Other inuksuit were designed with hanging bones to catch the wind and send sound across the land to distant travelers.

  One of the important purposes of inuksuit is to help with navigation. The rocks are compiled in order to indicate the best way to get home, or the direction of the mainland from an island, or a place that is below the horizon, or where seasonal animals are located. To this end, they can have very different designs. A turaarut points to something, while a niungvaliruluk has a window that a person can look through to align themselves with a distant goal. Another kind of inuksuk is called nalunaikkutaq, which translates into English as “deconfuser.” Hallendy has written that for the Inuit, “the faculty of visualization—being able to record in the mind every detail of the landscape and the objects upon it—used to be essential to survival.… Part of this skill was the ability to memorize the location of places in relation to one another, and in stretches of featureless landscape, an inuksuk was a great helper. Skilled hunters memorized the shapes of all the inuksuit known to the elders, as well as their locations and the reasons they had been put there. Without these three essential pieces of information, the messages the inuksuit contained were incomplete.”

  For piles of rock, inuksuit can be remarkably durable. In northern Baffin Island near Pond Inlet, Carleton University archaeologist Sylvie LeBlanc has studied a chain of inuksuit—around one hundred stone objects marking a route from a lake to the mouth of the bay, likely used by people representing every Arctic culture from Pre-Dorset to Thule to Inuit. Measuring ten kilometers in length, it is thought to be the longest navigational system of its kind ever documented and at least forty-five hundred years old.

  There is no Rosetta Stone for decoding inuksuit. Each one is unique, assembled by a person who studied the rocks available to them, examining their shape and weight, and then joined them together to create a message. To decipher them, you have to infer the intelligence at work, projecting yourself into the mind of the object’s creator. Where were they going? What did they want? What were they trying to say through the stone? Taukie said he implicitly trusts the wisdom of the people who created them, even if it can take him some time to discern their intent. Many times he’s been able to infer a better route by studying their placement. Others who travel on the land told me the sight of an inuksuk has brought a profound mental comfort and relief even if it is not used as a directional or hunting aid. The sight of a pile of rocks indicates someone has simply been here before even if it was hundreds of years ago. One Iqaluit resident told me they traveled sixteen days from Iqaluit to Pangnirtung by dogsled on a trail that included some four hundred inuksuit. Others described how in whiteout conditions, inuksuit had an uncanny tendency to appear just as they began to experience the dread that they had surely lost their way.

  * * *

  Back on the snowmobile I pointed out stones to Taukie. “Inuksuik?” I’d ask. “No, I think that’s just some rocks,” he’d say politely. It was trickier than I realized to distinguish the work of a human mind from the vagaries of nature: wind, snow, physics, chance, and time created their own quirky designs, a bigger stone precariously balanced atop a smaller one, for instance. Part of discriminating between what might be a simple inuksuk and nature’s creations was trying
to glean the riddle of human ingenuity—subtle, rational, peculiar—in the landscape.

  Taukie hadn’t seen any ptarmigan and was determined to shoot some, so we headed farther east, deeper into the interior and along the valley floors that run on a north-south axis into the bay, constantly scanning the hillsides for the flutter of white wings. Twice I called out “ptarmigan!” only to realize a second later that what I was seeing was the enormous wingspan of snowy owls drifting close to the ground as they, too, hunted. “That explains why we’re not seeing any birds,” Taukie said, disappointed. I was thrilled. We saw a snow bunting flit across a narrow trail in front of us, and I remembered that Harold Gatty had written about an explorer who marveled that his Greenlandic travel companions found their way home through fog by identifying the songs of the male snow bunting.

  In the late afternoon we stopped to drink tea in a valley floor. The snow had begun to melt there, and the tundra was run through with rivulets of fresh water. We sat in a soft field of crowberry bushes and picked some of the small purple berries, plump with moisture from the thaw. Not far from us was an old tent circle, the discarded stones left by previous generations of Inuit travelers. We discussed Taukie’s membership in a core group of hunters in Iqaluit, for whom hunting is not just a weekend pastime but a livelihood, practice, and daily interaction with Inuit tradition. But making a living as a hunter today is challenging. Harvested animals are traditionally viewed as gifts that offer themselves to the hunters based on their skill and integrity. Meat is the property of the community rather than the individual, and hunters often support a network of elders and families, providing fresh seal and fish to them for free. By sharing rather than selling their meat, hunters sometimes have to go on welfare or hunt less in order to work; the subsequent lack of traditional food in Nunavut has been cited as a contributing reason for the territory’s persistent food insecurity.

  “Right now hunters go out and bring back their harvest and just give it away. That’s great except there is no way to make that an economically sustainable chain,” said Will Hyndman, a consultant to Nunavut’s Department of Economic Development and Transportation, in a later conversation. “In the past you’d share, but part of your harvest would be to feed your dogs and use those materials to go back hunting again. Now … you come back with three hundred pounds of fish, but you have no way of repairing your snowmobile.… Here all the best hunters have the shittiest gear. It’s tough, you can’t earn a livelihood as a hunter.” There are some signs that the resistance to selling meat for cash has eased. For instance, there is a Facebook group called Iqaluit Swap/Share with twenty thousand members, where freshly harvested meat is often posted for sale alongside handmade children’s clothes or used appliances.

  Taukie and I smoked cigarettes and then packed up our thermoses. After a few more hours of traveling toward the coast, we decided to forgo the hunt when we came upon a high hill crossed with snowmobile tracks. Taukie gunned the snowmobile up its steep face then turned it sharply around at the top. For a moment the snowmobile lost contact with the ground and the g-force made our stomachs lurch. We landed with a WOMPF, laughing on the way back to the bottom before catching our breath and doing it all over again. At the end of a valley where the land met the sea, we tried to find a way down the steep cliffs and onto the ice before retreating back through the tundra. I saw an Arctic fox in the distance, traipsing in the shadow of some rocks, pausing periodically to stop and look at us looking at her. When we finally pulled up behind the apartment we were hungry. Taukie put a piece of cardboard on the kitchen floor and began slicing cubes of raw caribou fat and strips of red steak from a previous hunt. The fat was like butter delicately flavored with musk. Windburned and exhausted from the cold, I went home to sleep through the lingering twilight that is night in the Arctic spring.

  * * *

  The next day I walked half a mile to downtown Iqaluit to visit the offices of the Inuit Heritage Trust, an organization launched in 1994 following Nunavut’s independence as a territory with the mission of protecting Inuit identity through the preservation of archaeological sites and ethnological research. One of its mandates is to record the traditional Inuktitut place-names so that they can undergo an official process and be included on all future maps generated by the Canadian government. Inside the offices I sat down with Lynn Peplinski, the manager of the place-names project. Tall and enthusiastic, Peplinski is a veteran dogsledder, and her work requires her to visit far-flung communities across the territory and spend hundreds of hours poring over maps with elders and hunters. So far the Trust has produced ten thousand traditional place-names, and they haven’t finished yet.

  Place-names are an intrinsic aspect of Inuit wayfinding: learning them helps travelers know where they are and remember the sequence of routes on land and along coastlines. And the Inuit were prolific namers who focused on the fine details of topography: inlets, hills, rivers, streams, valleys, cliffs, campsites, and lakes. In contrast, Peplinski explained to me that Europeans like Frobisher focused on naming entire landmasses for the purpose of mapping and conquest, often after individuals. “For the explorer, they want to map the area, and they need to name the landmass that blocks the waterway,” she said. “For the Inuit who want to use the land, [that way] doesn’t make sense.”

  Some of these descriptors were very specific. An island might be called “shaped like an animal’s heart,” while another would be called “point of a parka hood.” The pictorial descriptions helped people recognize places they might never have been to before. “If you are an Inuk who understands the language,” said Peplinski, “chances are you’ll be able to have a mental image of what that place looks like from the name.” In testimony from the three-volume report prepared in the 1970s that became the basis of Nunavut’s land claim, one woman explained how place-names work: “Sometimes we name them on account of their size or because of their shape. The names of places, of camps and of lakes are all important to us, for that is the way we travel—with names,” said Dominique Tungilik. “We could go anywhere, even to a strange place, simply because places are named.… Most of the names you come across when you are traveling are very old. Our ancestors named them because that is where they travelled.”

  Peplinski and her team only record names that are still “alive,” meaning they come from the firsthand knowledge of elders who inherited them orally. But future generations of Inuit may very well inherit many of these place-names from the official government maps or Google. Right now, searching Baffin Island on Google Maps reveals a view of the territory not very different from the colonizing Europeans: it’s mostly blank. Of course the coastlines are represented in minute detail thanks to the exacting accuracy of satellite imagery, but the land itself appears to be barren except for tiny islands of habitation in towns like Iqaluit. The place-names project will change that. Once the territory’s legislature stamps the names compiled by Peplinski and her team, Google will be legally obligated to include them. Baffin Island and the rest of the eastern Canadian Arctic will be seen for what it is: a landscape traversed for thousands of years by people.

  There is both a symbolic and practical importance to making these names official in the twenty-first century: it not only recognizes the fundamental legitimacy of Inuit knowledge and tradition, but it also guarantees that even those young people equipped with smartphones and gadgets can still learn the names their ancestors used to navigate. Ideally they might learn in the same way that Awa and Taukie did: on the land, directly through experience. Awa told me that learning from maps and in the classroom can only go so far in sustaining wayfinding practices. Getting out on the land, cultivating an independent relationship to it and a memory of its geography, is how traditions will stay alive. Awa thinks that the shift in education practices (more than snowmobiles or GPS arguably) has disrupted wayfinding skills in the younger generation. “People who are not taught the right way tend to get lost,” Awa said. “If you want to learn how to navigate, go out there.”
r />   The resilience and fate of Inuit traditions is a topic that came up repeatedly during my time in Iqaluit. Like so many Native American and First Nation communities, the Inuit have higher rates of alcoholism, diabetes, depression, and domestic violence than other populations do. The land claim agreement enshrined the Inuit right to self-determination in law, but the consequences of colonialism, forced relocation, and residential schools, which divorced a generation of children from their culture, are still felt.

  Many people told me that the traditional wayfinding skills that hunters and the Inuit had mastered so completely would soon be gone, if they weren’t already functionally extinct, the victims of permanent settlements and technology. When I arrived in town, everyone was still talking about the most recent search-and-rescue operation for three hunters who were found one hundred miles south of Iqaluit. This was puzzling because they had been originally traveling to Pangnirtung on a route that goes north. The hunters’ explanation was that they had become disoriented by bad weather and bunkered down in an abandoned cabin. Then they followed their smartphones’ GPS for two days in the wrong direction before realizing that it wasn’t working properly, a shocking mistake that might have cost them their lives. The rescue operation cost over $340,000 CAN.

  Yet my experiences in Nunavut led me to doubt the many dire predictions I heard for Inuit cultural survival. Traditions have been modified, transformed, or adapted but seemed far from forgotten. One night I went to the Storehouse Bar in Iqaluit, a popular hangout with flatscreen TVs and pool tables. It was impressively packed for a Wednesday; women and men of all ages danced under a splay of red and blue lights to electronic music, and the line to buy drinks was so long that everyone bought them two at a time. I ordered Molsons and whiskey and sat at a table with Sean Noble-Nowdluk and his friend Tony. They had been best friends since they were little kids and went to the same schools. Now they hunted together; both had the tell-tale sign of many hours spent under the Arctic sun—dark tan lines around their eyes delineating the shape of their sunglasses.