In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  “We had good ice most of the time from December until the third week of June. Now, by mid-April or May the ice goes out, and we have years when there is almost none at all. Melting ice changes the salinity of the sea, and it’s affecting the phytoplankton and fish, and that in turn affects the migrations of birds and bowhead whales, walrus and seals, and little auks and eider ducks.”

  He knows an old woman from Little Diomede Island, directly across the Bering Strait from Wales, who said, “Our land is changing like an old woman changes. Things don’t work right anymore.”

  Herb lowers his head, then looks at me: “We were pretty much the same people as on Little Diomede. And we were all the same people as on the Russian side. Some Little Diomeders came from Big Diomede the night before the Iron Curtain closed them off from each other. For 40 years they didn’t see or hear from their relatives. Two generations passed before they met each other again. That’s how stupid wars are.”

  He fidgets, nervously twirling a cookie on the plate. Then he tells us that he’d been drafted and sent to Vietnam. “My brothers went too. They sat on the beach, but I was in the middle of things. A day doesn’t go by without my thinking of it,” he says.

  His wife brings in fresh coffee as Herb continues: “There were 11 in our family. Our house is still standing in the village. It’s not very big, but it didn’t have to be, because we were outside all the time. When we were born, we were named for the people who graced the lives of others, even if they weren’t in the family. One of my boys has eight names. When a person dies, you take that name and give it to one of your own and hope he lives in a way that would please them.

  “Spring in Kingetkin [the name for Wales in Inupiat, an Inuit dialect] was beautiful. There was always a northwesterly wind about five to ten knots. It played well with the migration of marine mammals. There’s a timeline for when the animals show up. The sea and the seasons have special laws, specific signs that are looked for, that tell you whether to go out hunting or not, and words for when the sea is moving into a new season.”

  He says that the walruses always came in about June 10 but that now they come earlier. Walruses, he says, usually eat mollusks found on the shallow ocean bottom, but some walruses were seal eaters. “I found a headless seal once floating on the water, all its insides sucked out by a walrus. Now they predate on seals even more because their ice for diving, resting on, and for hunting is gone. The drift ice is almost gone and the pack ice goes out beyond the continental shelf where it’s too deep for them to dive for food.

  “Walrus use their whiskers to rake the sandy ocean bottoms for scallops, clams, and other little shellfish. Once you try eating those clams from inside the walrus stomach, you’re hooked! It’s perfect food!”

  Joe reminds Herb that their fathers grew up eating seagulls whenever there was a food shortage. Herb recalls that the best eating were the young ones with brown feathers. “Up the coast in Shishmaref, they make ‘aged’ fish,” he says. “They put the fish they catch in a sealskin ‘poke’ in a pit lined with branches to age for a few months. They do the same with walrus meat, sew it up and leave it to rot. It’s called ussok. It sounds bad, but once you eat it…ah…that’s real food.”

  We look at drawings of walruses and seals, belugas and bowheads on his wall. “The names we give animals at different times of the year are very specific,” Herb says. “The walrus and the whale have multiple names. Like if one whale has a brother, or one was a yearling, or one is a bull, or a calf, or a mother with a calf. There is a name for each of them. What makes our culture special is that we have very articulate ways of describing the resources that are important to us. We knew the sea and the seasons and how the sea moved into new seasons. We knew the signs that told us when to go out hunting and whether we would die.”

  JANUARY 20. Anchorage to Nome. Nome to Wales. Pointed hills, curving valleys, and the sawtooth Kigluaik Range with oxbow rivers unwinding their white coils toward the sea. Joe and I are flying in a six-passenger Bering Air plane northwest from Nome to Joe’s home village of Kingetkin, population 150. This will be his first visit in 17 years.

  He looks out the tiny window nervously. Ahead is a cerulean wedge, the color of blue cheese—the almost dark sky into which we will be swallowed.

  Joe recalls flying in the opposite direction in 1951 when his father decided to move the family from their subsistence hunting life in Wales to the gold rush town of Nome. “I was ten years old,” Joe says. “There was no school beyond eighth grade in Wales. My father gave up his traditional hunting life, everything he knew about subsistence living and had to pass on to us, in order to give us five kids an education. Dad thought education was the future, not subsistence hunting. I’m still not sure.”

  Here and there threads of rotting ice are thrown between white-capped wind swells. The Seward Peninsula, stretching at an angle from just below the Arctic Circle, is shaped like the blade of an ax and forms the eastern core of the Pleistocene submerged continent of Beringia. In colder times the now immersed, 1,500-mile-wide land bridge linked Alaska to Siberia. Windswept barrier islands line the coast like linked arms. The beaches are treeless and gravelly, underlain by an apron of permafrost and shallow thaw ponds. The whole tundra-covered slab of continent faces the coast of northeastern Chukotka (Siberia) only 55 miles away.

  Below us and off to the left of the airplane, Norton Sound and the Bering Sea are all open water. “It should be frozen,” Joe says dolefully, remembering that his family often traveled to Teller by dogsled from Wales on the frozen sea. In some bays a cuticle of shore-fast ice is being battered loose by storm waves.

  IT WAS SEPTEMBER 1951 when Joe’s father called a local bush pilot to pick up the Senungetuk family and all their belongings and take them to Nome. Their tiny house in Wales brought $200. “When Dad finished paying for the bush plane, he had a thousand dollars left with which to start a completely new life for himself, his wife, and five children,” Joe tells me.

  In Nome Joe and his siblings joined the other “modern outcasts” from King Island who had been forced to relocate. “We were Eskimo hicks,” he says. Life in Nome was difficult. The children, still wearing skins and mukluks, were discriminated against. Joe’s father, Willy Senungetuk, a prominent hunter at home, took the only job available to him in Nome as a janitor at the local high school.

  Later, Joe’s older brother Ron, also now an artist, was sent to a residential school in Edgecumbe, where he and the others were forced to learn and speak English. “To defer to a second language is to reorder one’s mind. The internal links between topography, weather, way-finding, and spirit become lost horizons,” Joe tells me.

  Out the plane window we can see the small villages at Port Clarence and Brevig Mission. King Island and St. Lawrence Island are to the south and lost in “sea smoke” and clouds. A tentlike white cloud shrouds a pointed mountain, a sign of strong winds. Wind has been one of the indicators of climate change in the Arctic: “It blows every which way and we can’t tell where it’s coming from next,” an elder shouts over the engine roar into my ear.

  Around another headland, new ice has taken hold: Now the ocean is white and the land is powder blue, but the next bay is all open water stubbed with whitecaps. Open water turns the sea into a heat sink. That warmer water, in turn, heats the air, and the temperature rises, in turn, allowing for more open sea in what scientists call a positive feedback loop, which functions like a vicious circle, amplifying rather than balancing the heat.

  We land in a hard crosswind. Our short snowmobile ride to the multiuse community center where we’ll sleep is all white. Joe says that nothing looks familiar, but I say that’s because we can’t see. We crouch outside the locked door of the building in a howling chaos of snow until another snowmobile roars up.

  Ronnie dismounts and lets us in. She’s short and squared off, fast and fit. “You’re here about global warming?” she asks in a matter-of-fact voice. “We’ve got it. Had polar bears coming into the dump when th
e ice was bad. No one’s caught nothing. No whales off Gambell [St. Lawrence Island] this year. They usually get one or two. And we saw some strange lookin’ seals with long snouts and bluish skin and big eyes.” She shakes her head in dismay.

  “Senungetuk, huh? I know your brother,” she says to Joe. “Welcome to Wales.”

  As she heads out the door, she turns back, “Oh yeah, you can walk around, but no one is doing it now because it’s pretty much always a whiteout and in December there was a polar bear right behind here. And we’re keeping our dogs tied up because there are rabid foxes everywhere.”

  The door slams, but not before a small mountain of snow has blown in. Ronnie hadn’t even been born at the time Joe and his family left this village. She steps onto her snowmobile and roars away.

  Joe wanders around the rooms of the “multi” in a daze. He is tall and wide jawed, with inquiring eyes and a growing gut. A painting by his brother Ron hangs on the wall. Joe’s wife, Catherine, also an artist, has just been diagnosed with lung cancer and he’s reverberating from the shock. Coming “home” to Wales is even more poignant now.

  The name Kingetkin, once Cape Prince of Wales and now simply Wales, means “an elevated area.” “But not very,” Joe mumbles, since the front row of houses are not more than a few feet above sea level. The village is also the westernmost on the North American continent. Houses are spread along an arm of sand, bent at the elbow, facing the Bering Sea. Two protective bulbs of rock resembling two whales’ heads enclose it. “That’s how passing whales know this is a place where they are welcome,” Joe tells me.

  Behind the gravelly coast rise a rocky upland and the mountains that divide Wales from Nome. A small river cuts the village in half. Wales was once two separate villages. A sizable lagoon is a welcome resting place for migrating geese, birds, and eider ducks in the spring. The cemetery is on the mountainside, far above the wave-battered beach.

  On a clear day Little Diomede Island is visible from the village, and Big Diomede, across the invisible boundary line with Russia, lies just beyond. They are stepping stones that lead to the eastern tip of the Chukchi Peninsula.

  Geologically, Alaska is part of Asia. Beringia, the thousand-mile-wide grassland steppe that, in the last ice age, connected North America and Asia between latitudes 64° and 70° N, was the bridge by which the first “colonists” came to America, bringing plants and animals, diseases and languages, food and watercraft. These were the origin points of the Inuit people on their transpolar drift across Arctic America all the way to Greenland.

  Now the watery strait that divides what is now Alaska and Chukotka is only 50 miles wide but remains a passageway for marine mammals and hunting people. What’s left of the Bering Land Bridge is a submerged shallow shelf that reaches all the way up the coast and across to Siberia: perfect habitat for walruses, as long as there is ice.

  Arctic culture is marked by continuity and subtle, precise differences: A single language, Inuktitut, spans more than half the Arctic world, from the north coast of Siberia to the east coast of Greenland, and with it go the same legends and the ice-driven culture. The hunters in today’s Greenland still harpoon narwhal from kayaks as they did off King Island thousands of years ago. And each evening, in a tent on the ice or under a rocky cliff, an Inuit hunter in, say, Siorapaluk, Greenland, tells his grandchild the same orphan story of a mistreated boy who becomes a shaman as the hunter in Wales, Alaska. Yet there are many distinct dialects; hundreds of variations in the traditional tools for hunting, shelter, and cooking; and ceremonial differences. A shaman’s drum in Greenland is a small oval covered in bearded seal intestine, while the same kind of drum in Wales, Alaska, is a large round covered with the stretched gut of a walrus.

  “LONG AGO people did not live like we do today. You knew how something was connected to the center and therefore together,” an elder from down the coast said. The “center” was spread wide to the edges of the world and the margins were part of the center. It was impossible to talk about hunting or animals without talking of watercraft, shamans, and spirits; the umiaq (kayak) and harpoon; trade fairs and whale dances; thought, weather, and sentient beings. It was also “a dark and unforgiving world,” Herb Anungazuk said. “We knew the sea and the seasons and how the sea moved into new seasons.” Death and life braided together on moving ice and tormented seas, on winter storms and in summer fogs through which no one could see.

  The villages on the Bering Strait were not isolated outposts. Wales was a sentinel and capital of sorts, with smaller villages dotting the Saniq coast north of Wales along its wind-battered sand spits and sheltered inlets. Miffitagvik, Ikpek, Sinnazaat, Kigiqtaq, Sifuk, Qividluaq, Sinik, Ikpizaaq, and Espenberg were some of the villages whose people were joined by a common language and culture, by feasts and trade, but differentiated one from the other by subdialects, decorative designs, and songs.

  Sea mammal hunting had come into being by the first millennium B.C., followed by the invention of the toggle-head harpoon, which detached from the shaft when an animal was hit and hooked into the flesh so that the animal could not pull away. By A.D. 900, bowhead-whale hunting was an art.

  Trade was structured and intercontinental. Coastal people traded fish and marine mammals for caribou. The umiaq was seaworthy, allowing trips south to St. Lawrence Island, north to Point Hope, and east to East Cape, Siberia. Some traveled up the Colville River to trade with people on the north coast, where Barrow now is.

  Summer fairs were eagerly anticipated. The inland Nunamiut traded with maritime people. Siberians traded with Americans. The people of Wainwright and Point Hope used dogs to pull umiat (the plural of umiaq) on rivers and traveled south to the Kobuk, down the Utokak, portaging over the Noatak to Kotzebue. There, they waited for the rivers to freeze, then returned by dogsled on river ice.

  Siberians brought pieces of iron to trade. Because the Alaskans’ ivory harpoon points and knife blades broke easily, animals got away. They could make the same implements with iron tips and blades that did not break, and the lust for iron grew.

  Feuds broke out between the two groups. There were robberies, and in retaliation, women and children were sometimes stolen by the Chukchi. “We were a warring people,” Joe told me. The Wales hunters wore armor—chest shields made of walrus-ivory slats tied together with sealskin sinew. Chukchi hunters wore iron-plated armor. Both groups were fierce. When anyone approached King Island, armor was donned by all, even if no war was imminent, and on leaving, the invited guests put the armor back on.

  “Perhaps the antipathy started long ago when groups of Inuit people were pushed from Siberia. Maybe it was a time of bad weather and there wasn’t enough to eat; or it could have been overpopulation. Maybe those resentments held on over the years,” Joe says.

  The north coast of Siberia had plenty of walrus and polar bear, but Wales was rich in fur-bearing animals, both kinds of bears, fish, seabirds and ducks, greens, and berries. The corresponding culture reflected that wealth. There were deer-antler mallets; whalebone snow beaters to get snow off boots; bone shovels; wooden fire drills to make a spark; fox-jaw amulets threaded on sealskin thongs; loon-skin and eagle-feather wands; sealskin finger masks and walrus-stomach drums; ivory belt fasteners with seal-human faces; bone, driftwood, and bead earrings; and labrets of jade and green jasper, to name just a few.

  “We lacked for nothing. Every detail had been thought of. We made what we needed and we needed nothing more,” Joe says.

  Rituals were practiced to show respect to the hunted animals and to the rich life in the oceans and seas. “Our world was already a very special place, long before the newcomers began showing intense interest upon our land,” Herb said.

  A walrus gave its meat for food, its skin for houses, umiaq and kayak covers, thread, and ropes; its ivory was used for knives, harpoon points, and jewelry; its blubber was rendered for heat and light, which in turn fostered social ties and survival.

  A whale could carry a small village for a year. Its meat and
mataaq (skin and blubber) supplied minerals and vitamin C; its ribs were used as house frames and rafters; its skin was braided into sinew for sewing; and its baleen was cut into lines used for fishing. A single seal provided meat for one family and their sled dogs for a day.

  Ugruk—bearded seal—was abundant off Wales. The animals slept with their heads above water in rough seas and were hunted from kayaks with spears. Their meat and hides were essential, and the almost translucent skin of their guts was used variously as material for raincoats, spray skirts to keep water out of kayaks, vessels, and windows. “The ancient hunter learned to strive for total perfection in the environment he shared with his prey,” Herb Anungazuk said.

  The women split walrus hides in half and soaked them for weeks to soften them enough to be stretched over driftwood boat frames. Villages were places of activity: Boatmaking and the sewing of dog harnesses and skin clothing, including anoraks, pants, mukluks, and mittens, was constant. Young people had an opportunity to learn from their elders until they, in turn, could teach those who came after. Extended families shared food. These were the common threads of the society.

  Hunters wore double-legged caribou pants with the fur turned inside, and over them was a sealskin pant with the hair out. Under caribou parkas trimmed in muskrat and marten, they wore emperor-goose shirts, and over it all they could wear gut-skin rain shirts in stormy weather. Personal decoration for men consisted of labrets made of ivory and jasper inserted and locked into a hole just below the lower lip, as if to mimic the tusks of the walruses they hunted. Women were tattooed on chin and arms—sometimes long geometric designs, using soot from the seal oil lamp, extended all the way to the breast.