by James Raffan
When the Canadian federal government responded to Mowat’s call and intervened with well-meaning but badly conceived programs to assist Hiquaq and his people, the community was being forcibly moved from one place to another, so that government programs might be more easily and universally applied. Hiquaq, in spite of the odds, ended up in Rankin Inlet and managed to survive. He became a teacher and had a family of his own.
“How do you feel about all that now?” I asked.
“There is still a lot of anger,” he said quietly, staring into the middle distance.
How that anger was expressed as part of his teaching on this expedition and in his life was perhaps the most poignant lesson of all. Instead of lashing out at the injustices that had been visited upon the Inuit by circumstance, by the government, by the mechanics and legacies of conquest that had usurped the Inuit’s power over their own lives, Hiquaq chose to teach through kindness, through inclusion, using music and storytelling as the vehicle. In this choice there was quiet pride and satisfaction.
His story, as I learned over coffee in the tranquility of the early morning, was there for the telling, for the listening, for anyone willing to ask. But Hiquaq’s goal in life, it seemed, was not to foist it upon anyone. Like the rest of us on board, he sat through trenchant treatises on climate change and issues of sovereignty in the circumpolar Arctic, topic after topic that all somehow missed the point.
The point was that in the sixty-plus years since the Ihalmiut were weakened by disease and nearly wiped out through starvation, the situation for the Inuit had changed substantively in many ways, but all was far from well. Nearly three quarters of Nunavutmiut, preschoolers, youth, and adults alike, still did not have secure access to food. Despite all the government programs designed to make things better, despite all the attempts to mix and blend Inuit culture with the dominant culture of the South, eight in ten Inuit throughout northern Canada were going hungry in 2010, which was just one of many indicators of cultural malaise.
I had been watching the young Inuit on this journey tune out during presentations. I had been conscious that when on the land, they had often just clustered among themselves instead of joining workshop stations on plant identification, pond sampling, rock analysis, or whatever else was being offered on the more scientific end of the educational spectrum. But I had also watched as Mary Simon and some of the other Inuit leaders aboard had taken these same youth, one by one, and started what looked to be heart-to-heart chats during free time in the program.
Toward the end of the expedition, word rippled through the staff that some of the Nunavik youth had received devastating news: one of their classmates back home had taken his own life. These young participants withdrew even more. It brought some measure of solace to me to see Mary Simon sitting in the back of the main lounge, long after curfew, with her arm around one or another of these young women, consoling them, talking to them, giving them strength by her example.
But nothing was said about any of this in the public opportunities for comment aboard ship. Throughout time, incomers had arrived on Arctic shores, bringing with them—bringing with us—economic possibilities, a hunger for northern resources, a hunger for trade and social intercourse. But we also brought disease and a Darwinian sense of privilege. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, northerners’ control of their own destiny has slipped from their hands.
Being Inuit, living in the harshest and most difficult climates and geographies on the planet, was never easy. It involved privation and starvation. But in this harsh and unforgiving place emerged a way, a beautiful, simple way that saw northern nomads build their culture and thrive in their own way of relating to each other, to the land, to the sea, to the cosmos. And all those skills and ways of adapting were ready to be brought to bear on today’s issues. But southerners entered the picture, controlling schools and northern policies with the best of intentions, and initiated a long slow slide into oblivion for the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic—a long slow slide that was so much more difficult to quantify than the physical, chemical, and barometric changes so well suited to scientific measurement.
Where did all that energy of doubt, that history of conquest, go, after it was internalized by those who were living it day by day?
Mary Simon had touched on the answer to this question in her talk after our Cape Dorset day when she spoke of challenges that must be overcome by Inuit if they were to make their way back to self-determination. She talked of food security, how young people were six times more likely to go hungry in the North than they were in the South. She talked about the high school dropout rate of 75 percent, and of social passing (students who did not meet academic standards being put into the next grade for the sole benefit of staying with their peers).
She talked of the few students who did graduate from northern high schools but who couldn’t really be competitive for places in post-secondary institutions with their counterparts from southern schools because their literacy and numeracy skills, as well as their general knowledge, were below par. And, ever so gently, she mentioned suicide and how “historical trauma” was a key social determinant across indigenous populations around the world, particularly the Inuit.
But even in the enlightened confines of the SOI expedition, these remarks were somehow peripheral, folded into a sociocultural agenda that by habit, if not by design, was considered less important than the main scientific learning objectives of the expedition. And so it went, as we continued with visits to communities and remote scientific research camps, with encounters with bears, seals, walruses, and whales in open water.
The community visits were all focused on traditional Inuit life. We would be treated to demonstrations of Inuit games, often with chances for members of the expedition to get involved. There would be feasts of local foods. Elders would speak about changes they’d noticed—insects, like biting flies and spiders, had come north with the warming weather; animal behaviour and patterns were different; ice was thinner, or non-existent, in places where they used to be able to go without worry. But no one, it seemed, would speak about the elephant in the room, the decay of culture and its heart-rending effects. This was a very difficult topic to broach, but not impossible. And the cross-cultural conversation was long overdue.
The Students on Ice Expedition ended happily: action plans were created and commitments were made to stay in touch on social media on various projects, including organizing a student delegation to the next meeting of the Arctic Council. Many of the northern youth left the expedition in Iqaluit, where the shipboard portion of the expedition terminated, but those from the western Arctic and farther afield in Nunavut, Nunavik, and Nunatsiavut came south with the rest of the staff and participants on a chartered flight to Ottawa, from where they would find their way home.
A group of perhaps thirty youth, including six or eight northerners, convened in a residence common room at Carleton University in Ottawa to see what everyone might like to do in the time together that was left. After three weeks of shared and intense experience aboard the ship and on stops in Arctic Quebec, Baffin Island, and smaller islands in northern Hudson Bay, this group had an intimacy, a familiarity with one another, and a level of trust that went well beyond anything we’d felt on the ship.
Bound by a common desire to decant, to process, to make sense of what had happened, without any prompting from the remaining staff, these young people started to talk about highlights of the expeditions, points of stress and challenge, and how different people had responded differently. Clear-eyed, sometimes with tears, some spoke about the life-changing intensity of friendship, of the remarkable intermixing of lives and dreams that had taken place aboard ship. Others spoke about their resolve to keep the feelings going, taking them into their schools, environment clubs, or home communities to raise awareness about climate change and expedite strategies to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Permission to speak was being passed, by
silent agreement, in a clockwise direction around the circle. Some people were on stacking chairs, others on the carpet, still others on couches. But with the greatest respect for space and the intensely personal nature of what was being shared, the group managed to hear from everybody who wanted to speak, one by one.
When it came time for the first of the northerners to speak, there was a pause, indicating that she was going to exercise her right to be silent. And in that pause, which drew itself out as tension increased, I thought that if there was ever a time for this group to experience the power of learning in this cross-cultural expeditionary setting, then this was it.
Finally, she spoke. “I have been hurting through this whole expedition,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave home. It was hard to leave home, even for a short time. I was homesick. I have never been this far away from home. Never been away for this long. And then, when we were in Kimmirut, I heard from my aunt that one of my friends had died. He had taken his own life.” With that, her head went down and her dark hair covered her face, as tears fell and the young woman beside her consoled her. But instead of continuing to collapse into her pain, she looked up through her hair and her tears at the circle of faces who were holding her, helping her to persist, with their eyes and their supportive body language.
“We have to start talking about this,” she stammered. “In my community alone, there have been more than one hundred suicides in the last few years, and most of the people who have died are young, mostly boys but all young. And why did they die? There is drinking. There are drugs. People break up. There are lots of reasons, but we have to stop being quiet about this. We have to talk about this. Many of us can’t say anything about climate change, we can’t do anything else, until we get other things in our lives figured out.”
And that started a flow of support and stories from the other northerners. I wished the whole expedition could have sat in and heard what they had to say. That was not to be, because in a bigger group, without this one’s intrinsically, organically organized go-round, conditions would likely not have been right for these brave young women to speak.
But what a truly remarkable moment it was, what an aweinspiring scene, to see the bright, motivated southern students on the expedition realize for the first time that the perspective they had brought to the expedition was just one way of looking at the world. It was an indelible lesson about parallel lives, worlds as separate as two ships on the open sea that for a moment came toward one another, giving up truths that, if nothing more, illustrate the importance of creating spaces to listen and learn.
23: GREENLAND LEADING THE WAY
Anytime I have been in or even over the waters of the Davis Strait between Canada and Greenland, a traditional sailor’s ritual has come flooding back to mind. I experienced it aboard the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent, heading north in July 2006. About twenty-four hours before we were to cross the Arctic Circle, Captain Anthony Potts handed personnel who had never previously crossed the line on a Coast Guard ship a raw white egg, signed and stamped with the ship’s postmark. “You’re to carry these on your person at all times,” intoned Captain Potts, “and when you’re called to report to various places on the ship over the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, you’re to bring your egg. Look after them.” The game was on.
Coached by a gaggle of off-duty officers and crew, we were all encouraged to make some kind of protective carrying case for our egg. Thinking I’d found the perfect waterproof, shockproof container for my egg in a small camera case, I popped in the egg and snapped the clasp shut. The shell cracked. “King Neptune will not be amused,” said the chief engineer, when I confided in him.
The egg was damaged but it wasn’t leaking. Over the next twenty-four hours, there were announcements at all hours that we had to report with our eggs to Monkey’s Island, Jack’s Mast, and a host of other obscure places on a five-engined 120-metre ship of 13,899 tonnes displacement. The first mate always had his pen and clipboard at the ready when we would eventually turn up, noting how long it had taken us to find the place and the condition of our egg. These tasks were set for the newbies to determine if we were fit to cross the Arctic Circle, as judged, apparently, by Neptune, king of the sea.
On the day of reckoning, we were all given a full physical by the ship’s doctor. Then we were dressed in old Coast Guard coveralls and locked in a paint locker off the flight deck. The door opened and one of the sailors was collared by a couple of large ordinary seamen and escorted out. Those of us inside the locker heard a mixture of cheering, screaming, and shouting. After a few minutes, the door opened again and the sailor was tossed back in the cell, soaking wet, with half of his hair missing. He also reeked of food compost and vinegar.
One by one, the others were escorted out but none came back. When it was my turn, the glorious details of the extended practical joke were revealed. I was blindfolded, hands tied behind my back, and walked along the flight deck and down a companionway to the boat deck below, where the commotion was louder and even more raucous than it had sounded from above.
First I was ushered onto a chair. Something touched my ear and I heard the unmistakable buzz of industrial hair clippers. I felt the vibration on my scalp as the clippers set into my hairline and over the curve of my head. My brain finally sorted out the sensation and I realized there was some kind of plastic guard on the actual blades of the clippers that allowed them to pass over my hair without cutting it. Very realistic. The demi-shaven sailor had been a plant! Phew.
Off came the blindfold and I found myself seated before King and Queen Neptune, who turned out to be Bob the bosun and Natalie the second engineer decked out in mop wigs and splendid costumes as rulers of the sea, complete with broom handles and tin foil to make a pair of royal tridents.
The king and queen had been fully apprised of my performance in the egg charade, including the fact that I’d come into the actual initiation bereft of my egg. “You have lost your egg,” the bosun boomed. “That will never do. You must pay in the belly of the whale.”
And with that I was blindfolded again, led around a corner rail on the boat deck, and told to make my way to the other end of the boat deck on my belly, as if swimming. Easy enough, or so I thought, except that for the week or so we had been at sea, every bit of old spaghetti, soup, mashed potatoes, sour milk, vegetable peelings, and other miscellaneous compostable liquids and food solids had been saved by the cooks, all to be dumped out now on the deck.
The belly of the whale, sure enough. “Swim through the belly of the whale,” the voices said. “Swim. Swim!” More mushy solids than liquid, at first it just seemed disgusting, but after a few minutes of flailing, the smell was evoking a gag reflex.
“You must be thirsty,” a voice said, as hands grabbed my arms and rescued me from the whale’s belly. “Drink this. It’s an iceworm cocktail.” Set up by the feel and smell of swimming through old food, I found this mixture of every condiment in the ship’s fridge—ketchup, mustard, vinegar, soy sauce, horseradish, wasabi, the lot—acidic, salty, and putrid. It came up almost as quickly as it had gone down.
Fully blindfolded, we continued through a series of physical and psychological trials until each of us in turn was locked into a set of old-fashioned head and hand stocks, blasted with an onboard fire-hose, and doused with buckets of sea water from the deck above.
Finally we were released to rewarm in the shower and put on new clothes. This grotty Arctic Circle initiation ended with a celebration in the officers’ mess, with drinks and a feed of finger food. Captain Potts presented each of us with a very official-looking Arctic Circle Certificate: “Be it known to all Narwhal, Walrus and Seal that Our Loyal Subject, James Raffan, hath this day crossed the Arctic Circle. Captain Anthony Potts, Master, Canadian Coast Guard Ship Louis S. St-Laurent.”
In days of yore, these lands at the northern end of the earth turned up on maps with that middle-latitudes perspective built right in. The Arctic was terra incognita, ma
re incognitum—unknown ground, unknown seas. And in mythical King Neptune’s Greco-Roman tradition, the Arctic was terra nullius, “land belonging to no one.” Little wonder, then, that explorers considered these northern lands unpeopled spaces that could be claimed by simple declaration or occupation with the planting of a national flag.
Years later, crossing the Arctic Circle in more or less the same spot in the Davis Strait where my initiation occurred, thinking of Frobisher, Parry, Ross, Franklin, and the rest, I couldn’t help but laugh. It was suddenly crystal clear to me that the whole idea of the earth’s grid—lines of latitude and longitude, parallels and meridians—was so ingrained in my own thinking that I had been oblivious to a big disconnect. I had told indigenous people around the circumpolar world that I was following the Arctic Circle, but the concept of the Circle was totally irrelevant in their own knowledge and traditions. The joke was on me.
Back aboard the Clipper Adventurer on another educational journey, sailing through the waters of the eastern Labrador Sea off Nuuk, Greenland, I found the sea alive with the scattering rays of a strengthening spring sun. Across the water, past lingering icebergs in the bay, there was a freshness and confidence to the rusts, reds, blues, perky yellows, and spectral greens of these classic Greenlandic houses, piled in good order on the frozen rock along the shore. Beyond these, adding to the decidedly Scandinavian feel of the world’s largest island, was Sermitsiaq, the 1,210-metre mountain beyond the town that looked a bit like snow-covered Stetind from the ocean.