by James Raffan
Greenlanders, like all their neighbours around the pole, still struggled with the legacies of colonialism. Greenland was not without its continuing social ills. Alcoholism, family violence, drug abuse, and suicide remained issues that demanded the attention of decision makers, from the heads of families to the heads of municipalities and regions, right up to the prime minister herself.
But with the control of fate came pride that was definitely starting to show itself. This pride and its consequences were continuing to set Greenland apart from its immediate neighbour Nunavut, across the Davis Strait, where infant mortality, for example—a measure of maternal, prenatal, and postnatal health but also of housing and other challenging circumstances—was twice Greenland’s and nearly four times the Canadian national average.
Greenlanders cut their average annual alcohol consumption by 50 percent. They instituted a national suicide prevention strategy. But most of all, they were talking to one another about what they needed to do to take back control of their lives. Without the help of the Danish government’s enlightened push toward self-determination, which in large measure was shaped by voters who actively wanted to make Greenland work, this would have not been possible at all.
What happened in Greenland is so far from what was happening in the fate control arena for any other indigenous group in the circumpolar world that the rest of the world must pay attention. Greenland had political parties of indigenous people competing for the ears and the votes of the nation. Nina Afanasyeva and her Sami colleagues in the Kola Peninsula would have found this almost impossible to fathom.
Greenlanders were governing themselves. Greenlandic was the language of their self-government. They had decision-making power, and they were working toward economic independence and intellectual control of education and public policy. There were lessons in Greenland for every other country around the circumpolar world, just as there were lessons in every country on the Arctic Circle for every other country in the world.
With the swirling summer mists of Greenland’s eastern shore astern, I thought of Sweden’s massive iron ore trove and its powerlessness to do anything other than capitulate when Hitler came looking for resources to fuel his expanding geopolitical aspirations. Although the wars of the future will very likely play out in the major stock markets of the world, the ability of northerners to secure and maintain control over their destiny remained tenuous. There were 57,000 Greenlanders. Greenland’s gross domestic product was US$1.3 billion. There were 1.3 billion Chinese, and China’s GDP was US$7.3 trillion, making its economy five thousand times bigger than Greenland’s. Anybody who has played the game of Risk knows who wins when the odds are stacked like that.
24: HOME STRETCH
On the home stretch in the Denmark Strait, as the Clipper Adventurer steamed just below the Arctic Circle toward Iceland, the close fog and thick scatterings of southbound ice gave way to open water, and we got a sense of being on something of a two-lane ocean highway. Along the Greenland shore, the East Greenland Current brings icy water south into the North Atlantic Ocean. And on the Icelandic side of the three-hundred-kilometre strait is the ice-free North Irminger Current, which is moving the relatively warm waters of the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift up toward the pole. Somewhere in the middle, in brilliant sunshine, I was sitting aft on the ship, looking back at the line I’d been following for thousands of kilometres, imagining the Arctic Circle curling back on itself on the Isle of Grímsey—that strange geographic monument made of drill pipe—and remembering.
In this monochromatic scene of Arctic water and sky, the odd raft of ice drifted by. I thought of the Coke bears, or the animated polar bear in Al Gore’s film, swimming into oblivion in a warming sea. And I thought of Huxley the bear and my time in the sciences, when personifying a research subject was absolutely taboo. My supervisor back in those days would chastise anyone in the lab who referred to Huxley as anything other than Bear 007 or Double Oh Seven. (Just like Hiquaq, the bears were numbered so that their activities were easier to administer.) But it was a natural thing to do, to honour a glorious beast like a full-grown male polar bear with a name.
As I was scanning the sea for drowning bears, Richard Sears, the ship’s resident whale expert, came breathlessly over the ship’s public address system to say that he was pretty sure he had sighted two blue whales off the port bow. Everyone scuttled to a rail to have a look.
Knowing that Richard would be where he had always been on this expedition, standing all bundled up on the flying bridge with his binoculars affixed to his face, I headed there instead. “That is the largest living organism on earth,” he said, as he pointed to a spout in the distance.
“How do you know they are blue whales?” I had to ask.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “They look like blues. You can tell by the size of the animals. By the small size of their dorsal fins. By the height and frequency of their blows. They could be bowheads, but I’m pretty sure they’re blues. If they get closer, we may see mottled colouring. Up close, we’ll get a better idea of size and I’ll know for sure.”
The ship slowed and steered to a place where it looked like these magnificent animals might come up if they continued their gently arcing course. On the flying bridge my conversation with Richard bounced all over the whale map: Of the estimates of perhaps a quarter million originally in two main populations, one in the northern hemisphere, one in the southern hemisphere. Of nineteenth-century humanity’s quest for baleen and meat and oil, mostly oil, and the wholesale slaughter of these and other species of whales to near extinction. And of the moratorium on hunting, with the slow recovery of the population. “You don’t get to see the greatest of the great whales very often,” said Richard. “Pay attention.”
For a time, it looked as though these two whales were playing with the ship or vamping for a very appreciative audience. With the ship more or less stopped in the water, they cruised around, often breathing in unison—one big, the size of a couple of school buses, and one smaller, so perhaps a male and a female or a cow and a calf. The sheer size and ease of movement in the cold ocean, the streamlined beauty of the twin nostrils of the blowhole, releasing air and drawing breath in one smooth movement, riding up out of the water and back down. After a while their backs arched more than before. I watched as they dived deep and disappeared, turning up the next time about ten minutes later far off the starboard bow.
Facts and figures were flying in the excitement that attended this remarkable sighting. “What effect does climate change have on these animals?” one of the students asked. Someone explained their diet and how the krill were affected by water quality and water temperature; this might be altering the whales’ distribution and fortunes.
Someone else reminded anyone who was listening about the increasing amount of fresh water that was entering the ocean from melting glaciers and sea ice, and how this was affecting the thermohaline conveyor, the deep ocean currents that move heat around the planet; these were thought to have some relationship to the whales’ migration patterns. Others talked of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the ocean and what we had learned about ocean acidification and its effect on the micro-life of the oceans, through the trophic exchanges that move energy up through the food chain. This too was a way in which humanity was affecting the whales.
A student said, “Their breath stinks!” I looked at her and laughed. “You’re one of a very select group of people on the planet who know that from personal experience. Count yourself lucky.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw an SOI expedition leader, Geoff Green, standing at the railing with his three-year-old son, Fletcher, in his arms so that he might see over the rail. He was pointing at the whales, by then far away, drawing attention to the spouting that was still visible out on the calm sea. “Fletcher, those are the biggest animals in the world,” said Green.
“I know, Dad, you said that already.”
I was now perhaps a hundred kilometres shy of the end of the 17,662-kilometre l
ine and a full circumnavigation of the world at the Arctic Circle. I’d heard Semjon’s stories in the Kola Peninsula that blurred the line between people and reindeer, and Slava’s story in Yakutsk about the man who became a wolf who became a man. I recalled several people who’d assured me that “we were bears once.” These perspectives were leading me to question the whole idea of the certainty of science and the front-brain ways we relate to the natural world as separate from human existence. What about Captain Ahab? What about Jonah? And what about the day Raven was out in his kayak and saw a great blue whale loafing on the ocean? It was an old Inuit story I’d heard along the way.
Raven saw the whale, said hello, and asked if he might have a peek inside to see what was going on in that massive body that was rolling through the sea. The whale was still thinking about an answer when Raven faked a big yawn. As so often happens, the whale yawned too, and Raven paddled into his mouth, hitched his kayak to one of the big baleen plates, and started to wander back toward the whale’s stomach.
Raven hadn’t gone more than a few steps into the whale’s esophagus when he heard drumming. He followed the sound and saw a circle of drummers playing and singing while a beautiful girl danced like no one he had ever seen dance before. Raven was totally captivated. In the centre of the circle was a kudlik, a seal-oil lamp, which cast shadows of the drums and the drummers and the girl onto the shiny white ribs.
When the beautiful girl danced slowly, the whale moved slowly. But when the drumbeats increased, she would dance more wildly and the whale would speed up, sometimes zooming right out of the water, sometimes turning in the air and crashing back into the blue ocean in time to the music.
As these massive blue whales moved slowly, smoothly, rhythmically through the Denmark Strait, I imagined the girl to be dancing unhurriedly, with precision and intention and almost hypnotically slow. Breathing in. Breathing out. Sliding through the sea.
But that day, as Raven watched the beautiful girl and her movements within the circle of light, he noticed that there were strings attaching her arms and legs to the whale’s heart, like a marionette. Raven told the girl that he was absolutely smitten with her beauty and wanted to take her home to be his wife. Of course, she politely declined, saying that she needed to be with the whale. He was welcome to stay, she explained, but she could not leave.
Raven being Raven—after all, he was the creator of the world and could do more or less whatever he pleased, or so he thought—he waited until the beautiful girl took a rest and the whale dozed. With the stealth of thousands of years of trickery, and with the quickness of a twitch of a caribou’s ear, he wrapped his wings around the girl, snapped her strings, and ran back the way he’d come in. He untied his kayak and quickly made it disappear. Stepping out of the sleeping whale’s mouth, he lifted into the air and flew to the beach with the girl in his talons.
Suddenly Raven had two problems on his hands. The whale started thrashing in the water, twisting and turning in agony until it ended up on the beach. And as the whale was taking its last breath, the beautiful girl got smaller and smaller in his hands until she disappeared altogether.
Raven was devastated. He sat down beside the dead whale and started to cry. He cried and cried. For weeks he cried. Then he began to sing. For weeks he sang. And then he danced. For weeks he danced, and finally he started to feel more like his old self. But he had learned a lesson.
And it was a lesson that Raven felt he had to share with everyone else on earth. He promised all the fish and the birds, all the insects and the animals, including the people, that he would continue to return to their world from his world as long as they would remember to look after each other and to honour the truth that everything must live and eventually everything must die, but all life is sacred.
And they say that the tears that Raven shed were the first tears, and that those songs and those dances were the first healing songs and the first dances of forgiveness.
When this journey began, the story of Raven and the whale, and countless others like it that are told and retold on radio, stage, and television and in ordinary family dwellings throughout the circumpolar world, registered as folk tales, as myths, as stories of indigenous origins—fictions. After 17,562 kilometres, I wasn’t so sure that they were any less true, any less profound, than the pronouncements of other arts or sciences.
Raven, my friend Raven, was the only living creature that was with me at every step of the way. It didn’t seem to matter where I went; Raven was there, literally, metaphorically, mythically—shape shifting, playing, calling, signalling, speaking of life and death, guiding some in healing, others in understanding. For others, like Clifford Weyiouanna in Shishmaref, ravens were the bane of his existence as a reindeer herder.
On the open sea between Greenland and Iceland, I looked east to see if the Nunni and her crew might be far out in western waters, and I thought of those two ravens—only two—who lived on Grímsey, who have always lived on Grímsey. Huginn and Muninn: the god Odin’s eyes and ears. Huginn and Muninn: thought and memory. The image of Odin’s two black birds with minds of their own stuck like a burr on my parka.
The idea came from the Old Norse Poetic Edda, written down in the thirteenth century but probably older than that. One stanza, verse 20, from “The Speech of the Masked One (Odin),” transcribed at the Culture House in Reykjavik, stands out. I’ve written and rewritten it into various journals along the way, to keep it close at hand:
Hugin ok Munin
fljúga hverjan dag
Jörmungrund yfir;
óumk ek of Hugin,
at hann aftr né komi-t,
þó sjámk meir of Munin.
Hugin and Munin
Fly every day
Over all the world;
I worry for Hugin
That he might not return
But I worry more for Munin.
These lines from the Poetic Edda had gone around and around in my mind, as I watched ravens do all the crazy things they did along my way. They were an enduring presence throughout the seasons and through nearly 360 degrees of longitude. And the more I researched and read and wrote, the more I was convinced of the deep relevance today of the wisdom of our ancestral elders.
One of the indigenous philosophers, Windhawk, said this: “Raven speaks of the process of death and birth. It guides us to healing, to an initiation that signals the end of one part of life and the beginning of something new. Out of the darkness, out of the Void of Creation we are guided by Raven to become that which we are destined to become. This, like all such pronouncements, is based on a host of teachings and an ocean of belief from a variety of cultures that science would be quick to point out are very difficult, if not impossible, to verify.”
In her book The Masks of Odin, Elsa-Brita Titchenell explored the lure of the material world and how humanity’s “cosmic purpose” was to choose to connect the here and now to “the divine source of their existence.” She wrote, “The critical choice is not made all at once; it is the cumulative effect of numberless small choices made through progressive stages of life. In the natural course of growth the soul unites each increment of experience with its divine source and so little by little merges with it.”
Thought can get diverted away from “cosmic purpose,” which, in many respects, describes exactly where we are today with the decisions we persist in making that are fundamentally changing the environment we occupy. And one of these diversions must surely be this: perhaps because we are so enamoured of our own ways and our own beings, we have chosen to ignore or disregard other ways and other beings, such as the residents of the circumpolar world, particularly the indigenous residents of the Arctic. We have become slaves to corporations, choosing to measure wealth in economic terms rather than by any of the host of other indicators of social well-being.
We have set up an elegant framework for assessing the wellness of northern peoples and communities: health and population; material well-being; education; cultural well-being
and cultural vitality; contact with nature; and, of course, fate control. But perhaps the way we gather information to assess these indices says as much about ourselves as about northerners. The Poetic Edda warned of this in the thirteenth century, and to my mind, the admonition reads as profoundly now as it might have done then. Thought—volition and the ability to choose—has disconnected us from balance and some key fundamental truths of our lives. When we lose touch with the contradictions of our own existence, Huginn fails to return, as Odin worried many years ago.
Odin worries about Huginn, but he worries more about Muninn, memory, failing to return. To lose memory would be far worse than to lose thought, if such a grand distinction can be made. We must walk backwards up the mountain.
Titchenell, a scholar of the Poetic Edda, interprets the end of the poem like this: “Hugin returns to Odin, bringing tidings of the manifest world. It is on the report of Munin that is built all attainment, as memory remains eternally as the foundation of future awareness.” Throughout my journey, everyone talked about remembering and why that might be important, even if the memory was from a past life or from a life that was yet to come.
Why does difference matter? In difference is memory. In the same way the pharmacologists went to the tropical rainforest to find drugs to treat the emerging diseases of the developed world, I went to the North hoping to find wisdom that could come to bear on the problems the earth is facing, particularly climate change. Again and again, I found at hearths and kitchen tables, in tents, yurangas, and chums from Siberia to Shishmaref and Reykjavik to Repulse Bay, northerners who understood change—particularly cultural change—and whose voices, views, and visions were not being heard.
What northerners know, where they have been, what they have endured, what they have loved, how they have lived and died, how they are living and how they are dying, is part of the great treasure trove of human knowledge, of thought and memory, of understanding.