Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  Back on the water the next day, I asked Billy what he thought about the whole cross episode. He didn’t say much at all, choosing instead to dig his paddle a little harder and scan the eddies for fish. Slowly, though, as we paddled on through the magnificent valley that his ancestors on his mother’s side had walked for generations, hunting caribou, muskox, wolf, hare, fox, and bear, we talked about how most Kugluktukmiut now have ancestry that intersects with white people—whalers, trappers, or traders, like his dad—in one way or another.

  In many places throughout Canada, I explained, the idea of blood quantum—how indigenous a person is on a genetic basis—was often a precondition to who could and who could not be included as signatories to land claim agreements. Was this something that got talked about in school or in town at all? “Not really,” he replied quietly. Then I asked him whether he identified more with his mother’s or his father’s side of the family. “I’m white,” he said. And that was the end of the conversation. With the obvious affection he had for his mother and her cultural work on the Inuit side of the family, I could only think that this response was a way to distance himself from the nasty story we had stumbled upon on this journey.

  The rhythm of paddling lets the mind wander to other journeys. A previous visit to see Frank Ipakohak in the winter of 2004 to do some ice fishing had brought similar tensions to the surface. On the way from the airport to his house on the back of his snow machine, Frank had stopped en route to show me the charred ruin of Our Lady of the Light Catholic Church, which had mysteriously burned down.

  He knew this had been a favourite place of mine since my first visit in the 1970s, when I had been captivated by the sealskin tapestries around the walls of the sanctuary depicting the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. Although the figures in the wall hangings were Semitic-looking, the way they had been rendered in different shades and textures of animal hides was distinctly northern and uniquely Inuit, as if the church had come some way in bridging the gap between the disastrous first contact of Fathers Rouvière and LeRoux and the present. But in the place of the church in my memory was a black hole that smelled vaguely of varnish and wet ash, inside a white picket fence and snow-covered yard.

  “Was anyone hurt in the fire?” I asked.

  “Not in the original fire,” Frank replied. “But a week or so after the building burned, a local man committed suicide in the ruin. He stabbed himself and then lit himself and the rest of the building on fire with gasoline.” That news hit with a thump on my chest, to think that for one poor soul, life had come to a place as dark as that.

  During the Coppermine River trip, chatting around the campfire, I learned that the man who had died in the second church fire was Angut Pedersen’s cousin.

  The Atanigi Expedition arrived in Kugluktuk triumphant, in the middle of a storm front. As dreary as the day was, the gravel beach by the town’s freshwater intake was illuminated by the glowing faces of family who had come out with no regard for the weather. Long before the canoes made it to shore, we could hear shouts of greeting and congratulation drifting over the whitecaps with the wind. Billy’s mother and father and grandmother were there. Kenny’s partner, Darlene, was there with their three children, who ran to their dad and wouldn’t let go. Red Pedersen, Angut’s Danish grandfather, who had arrived as a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader in 1952, was there. And many others too from the community of 1,300, rain dripping off multicoloured coats, hoodies, and ball caps, who knew that this really was a historic moment.

  Within seconds, or so it seemed, the expedition was swallowed by hugs and we disappeared in a flotilla of all-terrain vehicles and dirty pickup trucks. Kenny and Darlene invited Craig Parkinson and me to billet at their place. “The baby sleeps in our room anyway,” he said. The other two young ones would sleep on the couch while we inhabited their room. Amid the welcoming clutter of family photos, toys, coverlets, baby shoes, and baby blankets, Kenny turned back to the topic of the expedition, with his middle daughter on his knee and his son on the floor at his feet.

  “This is an amazing thing for these kids to have done,” he explained. “So many of the young people in this town are caught because they have to live simultaneously in two worlds. And for many of them—you’ve heard some of the stories and statistics—that’s often almost impossible to do with the land, Inuit culture, and their language on one side and iPods, English, and all the other stuff they see on TV and on the Net on the other. It’s hard just being, for many of them, when they don’t know what to be, if they don’t know how to connect to either world.”

  I asked him, “Why now? Why has it taken until 2010 for the first people ever to arrive in town via the river that was its namesake?”

  “Why not now?” He was standing at the sink in his kitchen, scraping remains of ketchup and caribou stew off plates that had just fed the whole crew in his crowded living room. Half the window in front of him was covered with duct tape, cardboard, and plywood, waiting for a new one to arrive via sealift. The wraparound sunglasses he had worn every day of the trip had left him looking like a raccoon, with a light band around the eyes over sun-darkened nose and cheeks. But his eyes danced and his face shone with the joy of travel and homecoming.

  “If these kids are going to survive and thrive, they need to learn to live in both worlds. But to do that they need confidence in who they are, and then they will realize what they can do. I think this trip helped them do that. Climate change is focusing attention on the North, and that’s certainly something that northerners will have to deal with. But, in the meantime, there are other things that need to get done, and done soon, like making more trips and exchanges like this one happen.”

  With a whoosh of dust from pickup trucks loaded with canoes, packs, and kids of all ages, we rumbled through town the next day to the airport. Amid a flood of tears and goodbyes at the tiny terminal, Billy was doing wheelies on his souped-up ATV in the parking lot. As I watched, it occurred to me that he wanted to be there, at the airport—to be a part of that—but didn’t really know how to say goodbye.

  21: BEARNESS

  The Arctic summer rolled on. Having flown east across the barrens into the Kivalliq Region of Nunavut, over routes of past canoe journeys, I was in a bright red folding sea kayak on Wager Bay in Ukkusiksalik National Park, north of Hudson Bay. With three other paddlers, I was headed for Repulse Bay, “the only North American community on the Arctic Circle.” (Clarence Alexander and the good people of FYU, who are closer to the actual line, might dispute that claim.) On that gloriously sunny day, with a brisk following wind, the others had been flying para-foil kites, which had pulled their boats almost out of view on the eastern horizon.

  Idling along on my own a couple of hundred metres offshore and just south of the Arctic Circle, there was time to daydream and soak up the day. I’d come here to get a fix on the natural and cultural features of the park, but it was also a chance to have a bit of an adventure. And all was idyllic until I spied a white lump on the shore, moving in the same direction and at about the same speed as I was paddling.

  Part of the promise for this part of the world was that in summer, a traveller could expect to encounter about eighty polar bears per thousand kilometres of coastline. Next to Churchill, Manitoba, in the fall, Polar Bear Pass on Ellesmere Island, and Coke coolers around the world, Wager Bay has one of the highest concentrations of polar bears anywhere. In my week or so of staying with an Inuit family (engaged by the founders of Sila Lodge, an ecotourism facility on the north shore of Wager Bay that struggled after its creation in the 1980s), we had seen plenty of bears in the water and on the land from big aluminum motorboats. But now we were on our own. This moving white lump presented a whole different scenario.

  During my undergraduate years in biology, my summer job at the University of Guelph had put me among researchers in an active marine biology research facility where a polar bear named Huxley was a resident. As I worked with the team investigating bear and seal vision, my friend and colleagu
e Robin Best was working on energetics. In fact, one of the reasons why Huxley was in Guelph was that after he had been run on a treadmill in the energetics lab at the old American air force base in Churchill, he had become habituated to humans—they didn’t scare him one bit, in spite of all the crazy stuff that had been done to him as part of the research project. He was too dangerous to be returned to the Churchill area, where he was born.

  Having had coffee with Robin many mornings and attended seminars he’d given as patterns were forming in his data, I knew that bears’ core temperature limited their ability to run and swim. But I also knew that one of the many beautiful things about bears was their incredible ability to regulate heat, especially when running hard or swimming. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I recalled that bears could swim at eight knots almost indefinitely and that it was not unusual to see them eighty kilometres from land or fast ice.

  Eight knots: that was faster than a kayak. Eighty kilometres: that was farther than our group would paddle in a day, even with a tailwind. At that point, however, with the bear ambling along the shore, it was more of a wildlife viewing opportunity than anything else. Just to be safe, though, I turned the kayak slightly to starboard and paddled just a little bit harder to see about putting a little more distance between the two of us. But what a sight it was, ambling along in the sunshine, its feet padding along the rocks on the shore and its musculature rippling through and under its splendid white coat.

  It was difficult to tell how big the bear was—at least as big as Huxley, who weighed in at four hundred kilos. And it was alone, so, given its size and the absence of cubs, I had to conclude that it was very likely a male. The good news was that, male or female, polar bears didn’t eat much in the summer. Their percentage of body fat was lowest at that season because without ice cover their open water hunting success rate was very low.

  Since those days in the mid-1970s, the summer season had lengthened because of climate change, and polar bear fat had become something of an indicator of change. The thinning of polar bear fat had been the cause of considerable worry because of its direct correlation with the shortening of the winter hunting season for ringed seal, their favourite prey. But what if this bear was tired of being hungry? And what if this thing flailing away with a double-bladed paddle out on the water looked even remotely sealish?

  With visions of Huxley’s massive black claws and gleaming canines and razor-sharp carnassials, I looked down at the flimsy red neoprene hull of my trusty kayak and thought that it wouldn’t take much for Br’er Bear to bite right through into the chewy flesh on the inside. That thought caused an involuntary flexion of my right leg, which pushed the rudder pedal and turned the boat on a steeper angle out to open water. And the image of white teeth poking through red neoprene had a similar effect on the vigour of my paddling. It was about that time, as I looked over my left shoulder, that I noticed the bear drop into the water with a visible splash, definitely heading my way.

  The churning in my guts at that point felt a little like the time in the Lab Animals Building at the University of Guelph when, after anaesthetizing Huxley to take blood and do some routine measurements, I thought I’d do some work on the electrical relays and switches on the roof of his cage while he was asleep. While I was up there, alone, he woke up and started pounding on the plate-steel door of the cage. I’d assumed he had no idea where the door actually was, because we opened it only when he was tranquilized. Apparently not!

  Looking over the top of the five-by-three-metre steel-barred cage, I saw the seventy-five-millimetre plate-steel door bending a little farther outward with each bang, as Huxley sat on his haunches, punching it repeatedly with his front paws. I’d had no idea, no idea at all how powerful he really was. I jumped from the roof of the cage, slipped on the wet cement floor, slammed my head into the corner of the food-prep table, and hotfooted it out the door in my rubber boots to get as many barriers as possible, as quickly as possible, between me and a loose bear in a U of G research suite.

  Of course Huxley didn’t break out that day. But he made his point. And that was about the time when my budding career as a marine biologist took an abrupt turn away from bears in cages and toward bears in the wild, and the people who knew them best, native northerners.

  Out on the bay, I had the ultimate chance to get up close and personal—just prior to being eaten. It was another of those moments when, as any shaman can tell you, time “becomes a substance of infinite elasticity.” Let’s just say that in those few heartbeats, when the bear hit the water and started swimming out toward my kayak, the world stood still.

  The only sensible conclusion to draw was that I had just become the object of a polar bear hunt. I had become prey. My understanding and appreciation of the whole idea of food chains, food webs, and the flow of energy through the Arctic aquatic ecosystems suddenly crystallized into one overriding and overwhelming powerful instinct: to flee. To release the freeze-frame pause button and paddle for dear life.

  After digging in mightily for a few dozen strokes, I began to wonder how much longer I had to live. Strangely, the bear was no closer. Flailing on, I turned again. To my great surprise and relief, it was actually farther away and paddling back toward the shore again. As the angels of deliverance began to take their places on the park benches of my overwrought imagination, I saw clearly what had happened and why the bear had plopped into the water in the first place.

  There was a sheer cliff, perhaps ten metres tall, dropping straight into the water at that exact point on the shore. Rather than heft that large beautiful carnivorous frame up and around the cliff, a route that would have required a bit of mountain climbing, he had just dropped into the water and swum around, to continue scavenging on the low ground at the water’s edge. He might not have even noticed I was there. Polar bears are, after all, marine mammals.

  By prior arrangement, the Wager Bay kayaking group connected with Joani Kringayark, an outfitter from Repulse Bay, in big wooden motor canoes at the mouth of Wager Bay to take us up Roes Welcome Sound and back to town. If we’d had more time, and more on-the-land intelligence about tides and fresh water, we might have paddled this ourselves, but it always enriches a trip such as this to connect with the local guides and outfitters to glean their knowledge. In the bay, wind had not been a huge problem, but as we tied our kayaks under tarps on the canvas-covered canoes, a wind came right out of the north and stayed with us for the 150-kilometre journey up the coast. As we huddled in the boats pounding north through the heavy seas, I was mighty glad that this support was available. There was no way we could have paddled against this wind—even with a bear in hot pursuit.

  As we crested the north end of Southampton Island, which had been a sliver of green on the eastern horizon for much of our journey, the wind mercifully dropped. Joani at the wheel didn’t have to hang on quite as tightly to keep the boat on course. With his .303 at the ready beside him at the helm, the quiet Inuk moved closer to shore, scanning for anything he could see with binoculars.

  Patience rewards. Two walruses were resting on a big rock on the shore. Two fast shots. And suddenly our kayaking backhaul to Repulse Bay had become a community hunting trip. In no time at all, with many hands pitching in, the animals were expertly butchered, the meat and blubber plopped onto blue Fabrene tarps in the boats, and we were back on our way, surrounded by happy hunters and the pungent smell of fresh blood and walrus. No sooner had we pulled up on the beach, unlashed our kayaks, and retrieved our gear than the proceeds of the hunt were leaving the beach in cardboard boxes on the back racks of a small herd of ATVs headed for houses all over town.

  Like all but one of the twenty-five communities in three time zones across Nunavut, Repulse Bay is a coastal community. Ongoing connection and activity on the sea in summer and on the sea ice in winter were indicated by a scattering of boats, komatiks, snow machines, sheds, and other hunting paraphernalia along shore. As in the rest of Nunavut, half the population of about a thousand was under twent
y. This fact was most evident when visitors arrived by land or sea because it was the children, on their bikes and running along in ones and twos, who were the welcoming committee. After weeks of solitude and a few hours of travel on the open sea, where conversation was not possible because of the roar of the outboards and the wind, we were surrounded by pint-sized ball caps, T-shirts, and questions flying everywhere.

  You would never know by their toothy smiles and innocence that these children lived in the most difficult circumstances of young people anywhere in the world—seven out of ten of them lived in houses without adequate food, fewer than one in ten would graduate from high school, and if they did finish high school and stay in town, they’d have to deal with the fact that only four in ten adults actually had jobs.

  Ten out of ten residents had already coped with the effects of alcohol and drug abuse and rates of family violence and violent crime that had affected each one of them directly—although Repulse stands out among Nunavut communities as one of the few places with a crime rate low enough to approach the national average. And they had to know and be affected by the fact that when they became teenagers, especially the boys, they would be forty times more likely to take their own lives than their counterparts in southern Canada.

  Nunavut is Canada’s newest territory and the circumpolar world’s grandest social experiment yet in self-government initiatives. It began with the splitting of the Northwest Territories in two and the signing of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement on July 9, 1993, which made the twenty-seven thousand Inuit of the central and eastern Arctic the largest private landowners in Canada. It was the largest Aboriginal land claim settlement in Canadian history, involving transfer of title to Inuit ownership of 350,000 square kilometres, of which 35,000 square kilometres included mineral rights (the total land area of Nunavut is 1.9 million square kilometres). The settlement also included a wide variety of provisions for transferring and devolving a host of responsibilities from the federal and territorial governments to the Inuit themselves. Parallel legislation that came into force on April 1, 1999, provided for the creation of a new territory with a public government, called Nunavut, that would serve all residents, 80 percent of whom were Inuit.