Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  Scientific exploration has made a huge contribution to humanity’s understanding of the past. When the legendary glaciologist Dr. Fritz Koerner and his team started drilling into the Penny Ice Cap on Baffin Island in the 1950s, the assumption was that these ice cores would allow the past to be reconstructed with year-by-year, season-by-season certainty. It was fascinating to discover that climate had fluctuated quite dramatically over millennia. But as we became aware (thanks to St. Albert of Gore) that the fluctuations of our time were well beyond the expected deviations, it became apparent that careful analysis of ice caps and glaciers around the world could tell us not only about the past but about the present as well.

  New analytical techniques came along, including a variety of remote-sensing instruments mounted in aircraft and on satellites, which improved the acuity and precision of data collection and analysis. For example, laser airborne altimetry surveys, which precisely measure the height above sea level of any point on the earth’s surface, showed that mass loss (melting) on the Penny Ice Cap had tripled since 1995. Combined with other types of data and other clever and sophisticated analytical techniques employed by scientists around the world, these measurements showed that ice caps, on average, had shrunk by half in the past fifty years.

  For several decades following the Second World War, the majority of this research was happening in the relative isolation of particular disciplines or subdisciplines, and there was almost no crossover between the so-called natural sciences and the social sciences. So compartmentalized was science that when the idea of anthropogenic climate change first surfaced in public consciousness in the early 1990s, the naysayers got industry-financed traction and a substantial head start before science pulled itself together. Science eventually compiled its findings and presented what turned out to be incontrovertible proof that climate change was indeed happening, at a rate much faster than anything that had happened in the past, and that these wide-reaching changes were probably—and in very significant measure—caused by humans. It became common to hear scientists talking about the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch we live in, in which humanity is the biggest agent of change.

  The first comprehensively researched, exhaustively documented, and independently reviewed evaluation of the effects of climate change on the part of the world where the metrics of flux were most obvious was the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), organized by the Arctic Council and the International Arctic Science Committee and chaired by Robert Corell from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Three hundred scientists from every available discipline and throughout the circumpolar world took three years to create this document. A plain-language overview was released in 2004–5, followed by a more comprehensive and technical scientific report. Finally, after much chatter about whether global warming was real or a hoax brought about by government and business-unfriendly cranks, the ACIA presented ten key and incontrovertible findings:

  1. Arctic climate is now warming rapidly and much larger changes are projected.

  2. Arctic warming and its consequences have worldwide implications.

  3. Arctic vegetation zones are very likely to shift, causing wide-ranging impacts.

  4. Animal species’ diversity, ranges, and distribution will change.

  5. Many coastal communities and facilities face increasing exposure to storms.

  6. Reduced sea ice is very likely to increase marine transport and access to resources.

  7. Thawing ground will disrupt transportation, buildings, and other infrastructure.

  8. Indigenous communities are facing major economic and cultural impacts.

  9. Elevated ultraviolet radiation levels will affect people, plants, and animals.

  10. Multiple influences interact to cause impacts to people and ecosystems.

  Feeding into this comprehensive research process were indigenous people around the circumpolar world, who were only too happy to be asked and to use the funds that were made available to put their heads together about their sense of what was happening with climate change. Concurrent with the ACIA research process, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami collaborated with the Nasivvik Centre for Inuit Health and Changing Environments at Laval University and the Ajunnginiq Centre at the National Aboriginal Health Organization, along with regional land claim organizations across northern Canada, to produce in 2005 an important study called Unikkaaqatigiit: Putting the Human Face on Climate Change.

  As with the broadly based roundup of scientific findings in ACIA, Unikkaaqatigiit brought community voices to the wider world, talking about a wide range of concerns: changing ice and weather patterns, effects on drinking water sources, changes in access to and availability of country food sources, worries about the safety of hunters, and increased costs to get out on the land to fish and hunt. Sadly, what this important and elegant report did not say, at least in its main narrative, was that of all the priorities in their communities, climate change was not anywhere near the top of the list.

  A concluding paragraph in the executive summary does broach this topic:

  It is clear that Inuit have been adapting to the effects of climate change for some time. This puts Inuit in the rare position to teach the rest of the world about what may be to come. Inuit ingenuity and knowledge in adapting to local-scale environmental change can set an example for communities that may face these issues in the near and distant future. Regrettably, this ability to adapt has never been more important for Inuit than it is today. Environmental changes—of all kinds—are coming at a rate and to an extent that may exceed the threshold of Arctic peoples’ capacity to respond.

  And that painful honesty and achingly sad understatement was presaged, also somewhat parenthetically, in a foreword to the work by Jose Kusugak, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami at the time. He wrote, “Inuit across the Arctic and Canada have made tackling climate change a priority. But [we] don’t have the monetary, infrastructure, or human resource capacity to go it alone…. Our millennia-old traditions are already being altered because of the warming Arctic, and we face the possibility of having to completely reinvent what it means to be Inuit. This is a prospect that we fear.”

  In the following paragraph, in plain words, Kusugak told the world what he saw, in a refrain that I have seen and heard over and over and over again throughout the circumpolar world, but one that never seems to register with middle-latitudes dwellers: “We have already undergone immense changes as a result of colonization and modernization. We are still struggling to deal with these changes, and having to adapt our ways completely to a different world is not only far from ideal, it is unacceptable. I hope processes like the one that led to Unikkaaqatigiit, where Inuit and non-Inuit [worked] together to face the challenges of climate change, will continue on a larger scale with our full participation, because our very way of life is at stake.”

  Somewhere there was a fundamental disconnect that had to do with acknowledging the possible existence of other ways of knowing, other ways of viewing, interacting with, and interpreting the world, and trying to catalogue that knowledge with tools designed for the products of the Western intellectual tradition. When I was doing my doctoral research in the Barren Lands in the early 1990s, gathering stories to help the arbitrator John Parker draw the line that would divide the Northwest Territories from Nunavut, there was much talk about TEK and the importance of bringing indigenous voices to the table—although not, interestingly, about bringing science onto the land and into the camps and cabins of the people who live there. In addition to sorting out land claims, health, housing, justice, and wildlife management, the government of the Northwest Territories was working flat out at the time to get a handle on where indigenous knowledge overlapped or intersected with science. The territorial government struck a committee to wrangle a common definition of that term “traditional knowledge.” The committee considered this problem for two years and, at the conclusion of those deliberations, wrote:

  The lack of common understanding about the meaning of t
raditional knowledge is frustrating for those who advocate or attempt in practical ways to recognize and use traditional knowledge. For some, traditional knowledge is simply information which aboriginal peoples have about the land and animals with which they have a special relationship. But for aboriginal people, traditional knowledge is much more. One elder calls it “a common understanding of what life is about.”

  Knowledge is the condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association. The traditional knowledge of northern aboriginal peoples has roots based firmly in the northern landscape and a land-based life experience of thousands of years. Traditional knowledge offers a view of the world, aspirations, and an avenue to ‘truth,’ different from those held by non-aboriginal people whose knowledge is based largely on European philosophies.

  More recently, the great Inuit leader and organizer Rosemarie Kuptana clarified that traditional knowledge was a product, like science, but it was also a process. “Indigenous Knowledge is rarely communicated in a direct manner,” she wrote. “Instead, it is communicated in stories, events, dances, songs and dreams…. The very premise underpinning Inuit Indigenous Knowledge is that it must be shared; otherwise it is no longer knowledge…. There is a place for Indigenous Knowledge. It needs to be respected for what it is, a science, in its own right, that can work in concert with western science to solve the complex problems of the world. However, it must be respected and must be used to benefit the holders of this knowledge.” And we all nod in agreement and go to the subsistence harvesting and the cultural land use maps and then to Amazon.com to find the TEK encyclopedia so that we might write indigenous perspectives into our development plans.

  As I engaged with the scientists on the Clipper Adventurer through experiments and data gathering projects on the land and in the floating labs, I heard Jose Kusugak’s voice, from those times when we’d crossed paths in airports or at meetings in Iqaluit or Ottawa. He always seemed a little bit angry and always out of breath, but he always made his point: that the Inuit perspective mattered and must be heard, that the creation of Nunavut was an essential first step in the journey back to self-determination. I also heard the clipped voices of crouched women, tending children in tents and laughing, as they fed the family from pots over a sealskin lamp. I heard dogs barking as they bedded down on a line staked out in the snow, and sounds of men mudding sled runners and scraping them smooth for tomorrow’s journey. I heard throat singing. I heard drumming and stories. I heard the sounds of impending silence.

  What had we done? What were we doing? How was it that a way of life, or a cascade of ways of life around the circumpolar world, could disappear in front of our eyes, while we petted polar bears, venerated Western science, and turned a blind eye to the obvious?

  It should come as no surprise that no one seemed to notice that the northern indigenous youth in the SOI group—each of whom had overcome heavy odds just to be there—tended to get restless. Often they tuned out completely during the science lectures, choosing to nap on the cushions or on the floor at the back of the salon rather than hanging on each lecturer’s every word.

  Nevertheless, impromptu workshops on throat singing and drumming, led by the same northern youth who seemed intellectually adrift when faced with the science, became increasingly popular. Sometimes staff had to almost physically break up these sessions to bring the whole group to attention to introduce another presentation in the “polar fundamentals” curriculum.

  As I reflected on Mary Simon’s words about federal school, it became apparent that the exact same divide, in spite of our best educational intentions, was alive and well in this twenty-first-century floating school. The message seemed to be that there were many ways to learn, and many cultures, each with its own way of doing things, but that when it came to the serious business of school, it was all about science—physical science, natural science, empirical observation, measurement, analysis.

  The rest was, well, social context at best. The science of story, of relationship, of cultural upheaval, of residential schooling, of the struggle to maintain subsistence hunting on the land—all of this and more was deemed second-class, if it was science at all. The southern, Western educational agenda prevailed, in spite of dialogue and moving presentations to the contrary.

  One evening, after a full day wandering through the old settlement of Cape Wolstenholme, at the extreme northwest tip of Nunavik, where Mary’s grandmother had lived and was buried, the group was treated to a different type of presentation by David Serkoak, an Inuit elder teaching at a unique eight-month all-Inuit college program called Nunavut Sivuniksavut, based in Ottawa. David would be teaching us about drumming. Indeed, that’s what he did. But first, he said, he wanted to tell us a story.

  “My name is Hiquaq,” he began quietly. “Hiquaq is my only name. I was born in a tent at Hicks Lake. Hiquaq is a name given to me by my parents after an elder in our group. The government couldn’t keep track of us, so they gave me, like everyone else, a number, just like you give a dog. I was E1-602. I went from being a boy with a proud name, Hiquaq, to a person with a number, maybe just a number in the government’s eyes.”

  By now, the room was quiet as a cave. “Then, when the church came, we went to church and I was given another name, a so-called Christian name, by the Anglican minister. He said, ‘Father, you will be Silas. Mother, you will be Mary. Sister, you will be Winnie. Brother, you will be David. These are your new names. Don’t forget them.’ But Hiquaq is my only name.”

  Standing there in his fringed white summer parka with green seam binding and a coloured sash, he opted not to say anything more about the distant past. Instead, he turned to positive lessons, taught with his drum. On a flip chart page stuck to the lounge wall, he had posted a message in syllabics, and he spoke the words in Inuktitut for everyone to hear. It was important to Hiquaq to speak these words—and to have us hear them—in his own language.

  And then, with beguiling, engaging candour, he uncovered a second flip chart page where he had written an English translation of what he had just said and read it aloud: “The late Donald Suluk, a respected elder from Arviat, once said, ‘When I was a child I didn’t know the meaning of the songs. I thought they were just for fun and that they belonged to the shamans. Now I know they are not only for the shamans, they are for the world to enjoy.’”

  And with that, slowly, rhythmically, he began to strike his large flat drum, first on one side, then the other, his whole thick and aging body undulating with fluid movements punctuated by the resonant beating heart of all that had gone before, all that was yet to come.

  With the other drums he had brought, as he continued to sing and to move, he invited the audience, six at a time, to pick up a drum and join him, if only for a turn or two. When as many of the assembly with a yen to try had done so, Hiquaq scanned the room. Everyone, northern and southern students alike, was connected. Then he set down the drum and picked up his button accordion, and in no time the whole room was swirling in rhythm with the music.

  Early the following morning, the northern light streaming through my cabin window was too much to ignore, so I headed out on the aft deck to greet the day. Far off was the distant coastline of Baffin Island. From about forty kilometres offshore, high cliffs were reduced to a jagged thin white-on-black line that separated water from sky. Daydreaming about the drumming and the dancing that had taken place in the ship’s main lounge the night before, I looked back at gulls and fulmars wheeling in air currents created by the ship and marvelled as they dropped, scooping up the fish turned up in the churning wake. The thrum of the engine evoked Hiquaq’s drum, and the reedy bird cries were not unlike the notes of his magic accordion.

  Inside, drawn to the smell of fresh-brewed coffee in the ship’s library, I was delighted to see Hiquaq sitting in the five o’clock sun, enjoying a cup.

  “Good morning, Hiquaq. That was quite an evening last night. Thank you for your stories and your songs.”

  “You’r
e welcome,” he said, with a broad smile.

  “You mentioned last night you were born at Hicks Lake,” I said. “Would this be the Hicks Lake inland from Arviat?”

  “That’s the one,” he replied. “I grew up in a place called Hudson Bay Padlei.”

  “Are you one of the Ihalmiut?” I blurted out. “And did I read about you in Farley Mowat’s The Desperate People?”

  “I am. And yes, you did.”

  Shocked to be sitting down for a morning coffee with a character out of a book that I had read a number of times over the years, all I could muster by way of response was, “No shit!”

  “Yes,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. “I guess it was important for Farley Mowat to tell our story. But there were things he didn’t get right.”

  “Like what?”

  “I started making a list of things that I wanted to correct, things I wanted to say to him, starting with the fact that he got my name, age, and gender wrong. One day—I think I was teaching then—I saw an article in Maclean’s magazine that Farley Mowat had written, and it said that he was living in Port Hope, Ontario. So I called up directory assistance, got his number, and called him.”

  “Did he answer the phone?” I asked, still not really believing what I was hearing.

  “I had my list and I was very angry,” he replied. “Farley actually answered the phone. I explained who I was. And I started in with the items on my list, but before long we were just talking. The anger faded away and we just talked. We talked and talked.”

  Hiquaq was a babe in arms in the late 1940s when Mowat came through. And although my coffee companion’s version and the author’s version differ in many details, the broad strokes are the same. Diseases—influenza and diphtheria and tuberculosis—were brought into the Barren Lands by traders in the early years of the twentieth century. These germs, against which the Inuit had no natural immunity, combined with seasonal fluctuations in the movements of the caribou, their main food source, to result in a huge number of deaths from disease and from starvation. Hiquaq told me of vague memories of sucking on a bone for days because there was just nothing else to assuage his hunger.