by James Raffan
The Nunavut land claim settlement also involved the transfer of $1.15 billion over fourteen years, which sounded like a lot—but the annual budget of Nunavut for 2013–14 was $1.7 billion, and 82 percent of that ($39,373 per capita) came in federal transfer payments. On just about every measure of success and social satisfaction—education, general health, life expectancy, substance abuse, employment, income, and housing—Nunavut was still at the bottom of the heap in Canada.
In the heady years between the signing of the land claim and the creation of Nunavut, there was hope in Repulse that the creation of a new national park around Wager Bay—Ukkusiksalik was one of four parks written into the land claim agreement—would be an economic driver for the community. Indeed, when I first went to Wager Bay, it was with the two Inuit businessmen from Rankin Inlet who were in the process of establishing Sila Lodge. The lodge did reasonably well for a decade or so but eventually collapsed due to “high operational costs.”
The park is rich in wildlife and spectacular scenery. But because of the still high incidence of polar bears (park literature recommended “hard-sided accommodations” for visitors, if one could imagine a kayaker pulling such a thing out of a waterproof hatch), the remoteness of the location, and the lack of infrastructural support, the park had not lived up to expectations, not so much in its mandate to protect important natural and cultural resources but as a source of tourism dollars on which to build the local economy. There was a park office in town that got the odd project going, providing various types of short- and long-term employment, but the dream that the park would one day be an economic boon for Repulse Bay had yet to be realized.
There was potential for new mines in the area to become part of the Repulse economy, but there too problems arose. Gold and diamonds have both been found in commercially viable deposits. Meadowbank, the first of several potential gold mines nearby, opened in June 2010. But in April 2012, Denis Gourde, general manager of Meadowbank, told the Nunavut Mining Symposium in Iqaluit that his most persistent problems in making it profitable were absenteeism and high turnover within the Inuit workforce. “We have an average of twenty-two missing, not for the first half hour, but for the full day, twenty-two missing people. You can imagine the financial burden on the operation when you have that much absenteeism.” Apparently, it is an almost impossibly long way from walrus hunting to wage work following the tick-tock of a southern clock.
A renewable-resource-based industry that also brought people to town from time to time was big game hunting—walrus, caribou (when they are around), muskox, wolf, and polar bear—which, though contentious, did at least inject some cash into the local economy. But it too was fraught with issues, usually including collisions between southern expectations (instant electronic and telephone communication, weatherproof dates, and flexible airline scheduling) and northern realities.
For the last of the elders in Repulse and the other Nunavut communities—who in seventy or eighty years have gone from chatting among family in the star-spattered silence of the barrens to having satellite TV and Internet bombard their “hard-sided accommodations” with news and weather from around the world—the relocation from the land, residential schools, and the forced rethinking of the whole idea of economy and employment were things that, for better or worse, had been taken in stride. But life was accelerating. As elders took with them to icy graves Inuktitut words that would never again be spoken and as young people, in disturbingly unacceptable numbers, took with them to their early graves the promise of the future, life in the rest of the world went merrily on.
As my friend Ipak in Kugluktuk had often reminded me, “The thing that runs through it all is the land, and our connection to the land, and to the water, and to the animals, through who we are and how we live. Country food is what keeps us whole.” That night, some of those elders in Repulse Bay would be remembering all that with big pots of walrus stew.
Walking around the hamlet, getting our kayaks sorted out and arranging for our flight out, I passed a shed on which a full polar bear hide was nailed, drying in the sun and the wind. I thought of Terry Audla, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the pan-Canadian Inuit organization, and his dogged work, on behalf of the Inuit of Nunavut, Nunavik (northern Quebec), and Nunatsiavut (Labrador) as well as the Inuvialuit, to have the views and data of northerners valued and included in conversations about the world status of polar bear populations.
Polar bear hunting, especially as it came up against the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, was another hot political topic. As I looked at the inside of the hide, which covered almost a full wall of the shed, it occurred to me that one of the great differences between northerners and southerners was in how we see and interpret this iconic animal. With the memory of paddling for my life in Wager Bay still fresh, images from Felix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphael’s remarkable film Tungijuq (What We Eat) came to mind. The short film opens with a Cambridge Bay singer and actress, Tanya Tagaq, covered with the pelt of a wolf on an ethereal white background. Through the magic of animation and special affects, Tagaq morphed into a wolf that then hunted, chased, and killed a caribou, which was the woman herself once again. She then stepped in bare feet across a frozen ocean and dove into an open lead, where she underwent a third transformation, this time into a seal that was harpooned and eaten by a hunter and his wife, actor Zach Kunuk and Tagaq herself. With these cinematic images clicking by in memory against the stretched hide on the wall, I recalled the voice from Kyshik that said, “We were all bears once.”
On a fine day, regardless of where visitors were in the town or what they might be doing, it never took long for some of the beach kids, or maybe their older siblings, or even their parents, to present themselves to us with crafts, sewn items or carvings, to sell. Often the best parka makers, hat crocheters, and carvers had their work spoken for by outside dealers or through prior arrangements with the local co-op, so the kind of work for sale on the street was what was left over. The makers knew it could go to less knowledgeable, less discriminating buyers, but cash was cash.
Naming the national park Ukkusiksalik, meaning “where there is pot stone,” honoured a quarry in the area where soapstone for kudliks (seal-oil lamps) and other vessels was mined from talc-rich rock. I was hoping I might find a stone carving as a memento of my time at Wager Bay. The piece that ended up in my hands from a little girl on the dusty summer streets of Repulse Bay was a figure on all fours, with head low down, front legs walking and back legs, under ample rump, following along.
A bear. Perfect. But as I took it in my hands, I realized that there was a line like the curving hem of a traditional sealskin parka where the tail of a bear might be. Turning it over, I realized the front paws were actually hands, curled in mittens on the ground. Further, the bear had the face of a person.
A dealer would look at the imperfect lines and the rasp marks that hadn’t yet been sanded out and would pass on this work, for sure. But I was captivated by the idea of transformation, connection, and a world and a way long gone, or so I thought. The language was fading. The deep connection to the land was less strong. The shaman was buried (or hidden in plain sight) but maybe not that deeply, because here, in a piece of art, was an essential element of a way of thinking about the world that very much blurred the line between species, between organisms, between bears and people. Perhaps that was the essence of the power and the beauty that I was holding in my hands.
“Did you make it?”
“No, my uncle did. Twenty bucks.”
“Sold.”
And it sat on my desk as I wrote these words, still challenging me, still speaking to me about the “bearness” we’d do well to better appreciate and comprehend.
22: WALKING BACKWARDS INTO THE FUTURE
Later that summer I switched from a kayak to an ice-hardened ship called the Clipper Adventurer, working as an educator for Students on Ice (SOI), an Ottawa-based organization whose mission was to bring together youth from around
the world on expeditions to the Arctic, to build international connections and to explore change, climate change in particular, through experience. On this journey, we started in Kuujjuaq on Ungava Bay in Nunavik and sailed west into Hudson Bay, then along the south shore of Southampton Island, just around the corner from Wager Bay. Standing off the shore of Walrus Island in inflatable boats, we were treated to the sight of a polar bear sow and yearling cub feasting on the carcass of a massive male walrus. It was almost comical to see their white faces reddened by gorging on fresh meat, and even funnier to watch the mother pad down the beach and into the sea, apparently to wash off the blood and to encourage her young one to do the same.
It was only on closer inspection through high-powered binoculars that we saw the walrus had died not from four-legged predation but from a gunshot. Speculation among the SOI staff was that this was the remains of a sport hunting expedition, likely from Coral Harbour, which had taken the tusked and bewhiskered head of the magnificent animal and left the rest on the pebble beach. With eighty young people from around the world on board, including twenty-three Native youth from across the North, it was a surreal moment. The southern youth looked on, soaking up images of charismatic megafauna in the wild. The northern youth, on the other hand, were seeing a picnic of country food, be that bear or walrus. As with the Atanigi Expedition, it was this cross-cultural mix that gave Students on Ice its essential power and purpose as an organization, especially when we debriefed each day and explored these different perspectives aboard ship.
Joining the education staff for this expedition was CBC News anchor and chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge, who came with his teenage son, Will. Given the huge role that he played in keeping Canadians from coast to coast to coast connected to each other and to the world, going ashore with Mansbridge the following morning at Cape Dorset, on an island off the south coast of Baffin Island, was like being in the vanguard of a rock star. People had lined up on shore to meet him and have their hands shaken. Eager faces wanted T-shirts signed, babies kissed … babies signed. Mostly, they wanted to speak to the man and have their stories affirmed of how CBC radio and television stitched North to South.
As we milled about, a hunter appeared with a small ringed seal in a cardboard box on the back of an ATV. In no time, the seal was cut up, and our northern kids were chowing down on raw seal meat and encouraging the others to do the same. Local boys then set up an adjustable wooden stand for some games. Like the seal butchering, the games began as a demonstration but very quickly turned into fully participatory activities, with teenage boys from SOI competing to match the physical prowess and dexterity displayed by their local counterparts.
By and by, there was first feedback and then the crackling of voices on the public address system. Cary Merritt, mayor of Cape Dorset, said a few words of formal welcome to our group. Next came a couple of local young women throat singing and laughing. The other ships that occasionally drop anchor here don’t often have onboard throat singers, so the local women took the unusual opportunity to join with Inuit members of our crew in a joyous meeting of voices.
Peter Mansbridge was invited to say a few words. He told a rapt audience that were it not for the manager of the CBC station in Churchill, way back when, who’d heard his mellifluous voice announcing a flight when he was working as a ramp rat for a small northern airline, he might still be loading bags and trying to figure out what to do with his life. The biggest ovation, however, was reserved for another member of our education crew, Mary Simon, former broadcaster, former Canadian Arctic ambassador, and much loved former head of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami.
But then the whole northern community welcome ceremony went in an unexpected direction. After this delightful cultural program, suddenly climate change was centre stage, in the strangest way. Mayor Merritt announced that another group of visitors were in town that week, and he’d asked them to join the celebration and say a few words. Instead of speaking, they had asked to sing their message.
Three strapping lads in their late twenties or early thirties—a Fijian, a New Zealander, and a Solomon Islander—in surf shorts and singlets stepped into the centre of the circle and started strumming ukuleles and singing a song of the South Pacific. When their first number was done, they explained that through their church, NGOs like the Norwegian environmental organization GRID-Arendal, and the magic of digital communication, they had learned that many small island states around the planet were increasingly at risk of storms and rising sea levels, and they knew that many northern peoples had exactly the same concerns.
Their leader, a generously tattooed Maori, spoke: “We have come here to see what the people in Cape Dorset are doing. And it is our great pleasure to have come here and to learn and to share some of our stories and traditions as well. Our elders tell us that we should walk backwards into the future with humility, gentleness, and courage. We are learning that the traditions of the Inuit of Cape Dorset are similar to ours, but that we need all the help we can get in these changing times.” My mind flipped back to Maxime Duran and his cryptic observation about me walking backwards up a blue mountain on my way around the Arctic Circle. It was another strange and thought-provoking coincidence.
The clapping of the Cape Dorset audience brought me back to hear the visitors perform another song of the South Pacific that would have made Richard Rodgers proud. Then down went the ukuleles, off came the shirts, and out came acres of new body ink. Each man struck a stance that you might see the New Zealand All Blacks take at a championship rugby match. Then the three of them chanted a haka, screaming, beating their chests, and making menacing moves in unison, to squeals of delight from the crowd.
When welcome activities wound down, the youth and staff from the expedition drifted off into the village with various community members. I ended up joining a tour of the famous printmaking facilities here. Cape Dorset is probably the most well known of all Nunavut communities, having made its way onto southern radar through its printmakers and artists like Ningeokuluk Teevee and Kenojuak Ashevak.
Inside the facility, the prints that caught my eye were ones with unconventional imagery, the ones that had replaced or added to the traditional images—animals and fish, igloos and life on the land. I noticed a sampling of TV and Internet iconography, like stiletto heels and images of the space shuttle. “Our dealers in the South aren’t much interested in those,” said our guide. “They’d still much rather have the classic Eskimo stuff. That’s what sells.”
That night we said our goodbyes at Cape Dorset and sailed on. Mary Simon spoke in the main conference room of the ship that evening and helped put our Cape Dorset experience in a larger and more comprehensive frame than our one-day shore visit had allowed.
“I was born in the small village of Kangiqsualujjuaq on the eastern shore of Ungava Bay in Arctic Quebec,” she began. “My mother was Inuit and my father, originally from southern Canada, was a fur trader and started in Arctic Bay and moved on to different Hudson’s Bay posts. He ended up in Kangiqsualujjuaq as the post manager, and this is where he met my mother.” To an attentive audience, in her grandmotherly way, Simon talked about her experience in federal day school, about being punished for speaking Inuktitut, and how when she thought back on those times, two Inuktitut words came to mind: iliranaqtuq and kappianaqtuq, which described the combination of fear, respect, and nervous apprehension that Inuit felt at that time about southerners and southern institutions.
In the ensuing days, the group heard much from working researchers aboard the ship about the science of climate change, of the flora and fauna of the North and the ways in which rising temperatures and shifting ecological parameters are affecting their yearly cycles. What set SOI apart from so many other climate change education programs was that participants were able to join these same scientists in the field, on the land, and on the water, where we were able to touch and count, examine and behold the organisms at first hand, with our own hands, our own eyes. These raw encounters with the passion of
scientists were something to behold as well—who knew passion for herbaceous plants, mosses, lichen, and even phytoplankton from tow samples of the sea could be so incredibly captivating?
The elegance of science and its compelling nature seem all-consuming to those of us who look up from the middle latitudes. After exploration, which often places scientific interests in the forefront and encounters with Native peoples as a sidebar, science has been and remains the principal lens through which incomers view the North. Scientific expeditions and subsequent analysis of the data, especially when presented in four-colour maps and graphs showing trends and patterns, are in their own way both captivating and reassuring. Ethnographic inquiry, the gathering of cultural data and what is now referred to as traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK, is, when done properly, equally rigorous and replicable but often far more complicated, context bound, and conflicted than the findings of physical science.
It is far easier, more certain—and maybe safer as well—to measure ice and its decay than it is to measure decay of language or culture. The ice—the alluring and eminently measurable ice—is melting, and at the same time, as I learned at kitchen tables and hearths around the Arctic Circle, cultures—whole peoples—are melting away too, right in front of our eyes. What is interesting and perhaps sad about that is that both these phenomena are happening in real time and both are being affected and accelerated, in one way or another, by climate change.