In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Now they have to travel by boat, because the water is open. In the dark time it’s hard to see. “On the ice, you can see everything,” he says. “In winter, it is our light.”

  Siorapaluk usually empties out in the winter. All the men go north up the coast to Etah and Humboldt Gletscher (Glacier), whose terminus is 75 miles wide, to hunt polar bears. “There’s a huge current up north that moves the ice around,” Otto says. “From year to year we could travel over to Canada, to Ellesmere Island, but that ice is gone now too. Many times I went there in the ’70s and ’80s. I used the drift ice to take me there. Now there’s a border patrolled by Twin Otter planes. The Canadians say it is theirs, but we are all the same people.”

  He says that so far, the migration of little auks is still the same. They still come to Siorapaluk, Neqe, and Etah on May 10, and the local families climb straight up the cliffs with long-handled bird nets and scoop them out of the air. In the old times, birds provided food in the season between ice and open water, and they are still a good source of food. Bird-skin parkas were meticulously sewn together from the tiny skins and worn as underwear.

  “We still have food, but if the weather keeps getting worse, even the future of Siorapaluk is uncertain,” Otto says. I mention an attempt years before to move north up the coast. “Maybe,” he says. “The weather used to be good up there, maybe it still is. But the current is stronger and the wind, and there’s lots of pressure ice. Even here, where we are protected inside the fjord, the sea current is bringing big waves that are eating away our land.”

  Pauline has finished the mittens. She hands them to me. “Would you like them?” She asks. I look at them. Her stitching is impeccable and they fit perfectly. I nod yes and lay a stack of kroner on the table. Otto throws his cold coffee out. He’s distracted and out of sorts. The usual humor isn’t apparent today.

  Their boys run in, grab a hunk of bread and run out again. “We have three boys, but their future as hunters is very uncertain,” Pauline says. “We no longer advise them to become hunters. The climate is taking the ice, there are more quotas on animals, and the prices of things are becoming so high. So we want them to get an education.”

  I ask if feeding the dogs was becoming a problem, and she says that the local kommune received 24,000 Danish kroner for dog food from Denmark. “But it’s only a short-term solution for a problem that will be getting worse every year.”

  Otto goes out. Down on the hill in front of the house he stands, looking at the ice. Pauline continues: “Many of us are behind with our debts. We are not so good in our moods now. I worry when Otto and the others go out on the ice now. It’s more dangerous than it used to be. Around here, it is depression and changing moods. We are becoming just like the ice.”

  Evening. I climb the hill to look for my dear friend, the ever elusive Ikuo Oshima. We met in the early 1990s out on the ice. I heard about him when I first arrived in Greenland because he was one of those outsiders—he’s Japanese—who immediately took to Greenlandic ways. In the first month here he mastered Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic language, and learned to drive dogs and hunt walruses and seals. That was in the 1970s. He was an accomplished hunter by the time we met again in 1996. He’d lost most of his dogs to distemper, and Jens was bringing him some puppies on our sled. He did a little jig on the ice in thanks.

  Ikuo came to Siorapaluk as part of an expedition team to support the climber Naomi Uemura while he trained for his solo walk to the North Pole. Uemara came and went; Ikuo never left Greenland. He married Otto Simigaq’s sister in Siorapaluk and had three children, who live nearby.

  Now Ikuo lives on his own and has just moved into a new house that he and his son built. Below is the skinning house, and that’s where I find him. His back is to me. I tiptoe up and put my hand on his shoulder. He turns, already smiling, and we hug hello.

  Ikuo is skinning an artic fox. Everything he does is artful and quick. His forearms are thickly muscled and smooth. He sits on a block of wood positioned on the seat of a chair so he doesn’t have to stand at the table to work. He’s lashing the fox’s tail to a stick with a reindeer thong. The radio is on and Sting is singing. Two young girls peer in shyly. “That’s Matthew Henson’s great-great-granddaughter,” Ikuo says, nodding at one of them. Matthew Henson was the African-American first mate who accompanied Robert Peary to the North Pole and, like Ikuo, quickly learned Greenlandic ways.

  After Sting, Ikuo spins toward me on his block of wood. “My son and I are thinking of moving someplace maybe in future years. We might consider moving north. It is terrible when the ice goes out and it’s too dark to hunt by boat. We are trained as ice hunters, and without ice it’s terrible. If global warming was coming gradually, maybe there would be some chance to adapt, but it’s so sudden, this coming of climate change, we are in a panic.

  “So I have to think, how can we survive? The game animals on the land are OK, so maybe we will have to be land hunters. But then we’ll need vegetables, because only marine mammals have all the vitamins and minerals we need. But vegetables don’t grow here. We’ve always gotten what we needed from the seals and whales.

  “Now fish are coming north. We found salmon in our seal nets. It is all very surprising. There are insects now—mosquitoes and black flies—and we never had them before. We have sickness in the animals, and back home in Japan bird diseases have started.

  “Maybe I’m coming old enough, and I’m thinking, we have enough work and food and we must be thankful for the day. When the ice is bad, I go trapping. I walk all the way up these canyons where the glaciers used to be. There’s a snowy owl living up there. Many beautiful things to see. But some of the young people are thinking only of tomorrow, that they can go get money somewhere, but it never happens. It takes many years and still you have no money,” he says laughing. He pulls the fox skin inside out, then hangs it up to dry.

  “I was maybe 25 or 26 when I first moved here. First time was 1972. Then left, but came again in 1974 and stayed forever. My nationality is Japanese because my mother is still alive, but she has never visited. I was studying engineering at a university in Tokyo, but I found it to be too organized—no freedom inside of it. See, it’s already fixed up for you, and you just have to choose some numbers to make the thing go together right. That’s not for me!

  “At the same time I found I liked nature more than mechanics. I climbed many mountains, and I still wanted to have some feeling of freedom. We can decide for ourselves how to live…. But maybe I want too much…. I don’t know.”

  He invites me to have coffee. “Look at this. It’s my new house. Maybe it helps me somewhat in my old age!” Laughter. In the basement are hundreds of skins tanned and hanging—arctic fox, arctic hare, and a musk ox skin.

  We climb back up to the porch and look out. It’s dark again, but the snow is bright. “There were polar bear tracks right there. It walked past the village in the night. We don’t want to stay outside much at night anymore because there are so many bears. They’ve come onto the land because the ice is so broken, and it’s dangerous. Maybe my house will protect me!” Laughter again.

  “More and more there are reindeer and musk ox. If there were a thousand last year, there are 4,000 this year. We hunt them because there is not enough food from the sea. On June 10, I’ll be 60. My mother will be 93. She’s still doing something every day and grows lots of flowers in the springtime. So I hope I will be that way too. Ten years ago I visited Japan. Oh, it was so terrible! All the houses and buildings had changed. I couldn’t find my house. I came into a kind of panic and thought, I’m a wild man. What am I doing here?

  “Here, we own no land. We only make an application to put a house on it. Maybe it’s better this way, because we use it for only a short time! My wife is ill, and she lives in Qaanaaq now. But my granddaughter was living with me for a year. She just left. This is the first month without her, and I miss her. Between us there was no need for words.”

  We drink our coffee in silence and look out
at the ice. I invite him to our house for dinner, and he accepts eagerly. Someone brings reindeer meat from a neighbor, and we make Scandinavian-style stew with dried fruit. I ask Ikuo again about the changing climate and the ice. He says, “I heard in Savissivik there have been many visits by polar bears. The ice condition is not good, and there are many bears in the village. The males and females without cubs are traveling about all winter. The season for polar bear hunting is from December to June, but only Greenland’s best hunters can hunt them. The ice is so bad only one bear has been killed in the entire northern district.

  “When we go to Humboldt Glacier to hunt nanoq, we need two days to cross the inland ice because the sea ice in front of the big glacier is still not good. Up there is a small island that’s closer to Greenland than to Canada, but the Canadian government wants to own it. They are planning to build an air force base. They want more power to protect the Northwest Passage, because the ice is melting all the way to Alaska. The world is peaceful on its own, if only we didn’t bother it. People don’t need power. When I look at our dogs running, that is their happiness, and for all of us, to eat enough, that is happiness as well.

  “Every year we go over the inland ice to Etah. We used to be able to travel up the coast a ways, then go over at Pitoravik. Now that is not possible. We have to go to the end of our own fjord and up onto the ice that way. That’s how bad the sea ice has become. It is becoming more and more difficult to travel. We used to get walrus up there. Now we get musk ox. But the meat of both animals is good. Oh, it’s so beautiful up there! Yes, I think we will survive somehow, maybe just on beauty.”

  BACK IN QAANAAQ I brood and walk. The poet Joseph Brodsky said that the purpose of evolution was beauty. Up top, the melting ice cap gleams. And rough ice between town and Herbert Island looks like Hiroshige-style frozen waves. Up on a hill I find Birthe. Her arms are crossed. “I’m so cold,” she says, as if she were dying. No one here ever complains about the cold. Heat—kiak—yes, but not cold. She tells me why: With so much open water, the mist that rises from it adds humidity, making the air feel cold. Now 40 or 50 below begins to seem unbearable, whereas in the “dry days” no one was bothered. “The soles of the hunters’ kamiks are always wet now,” she tells me.

  Together we gaze out at the ruined ice. Ruined or not, it is still beautiful. “We love it here. We never tire of watching the icebergs and the light. It changes all the time. It was always calm here. We always had calm minds too. That’s how we faced the weather. But now the weather is not right. Now the ice isn’t behaving.”

  Years ago, a group of people tried moving farther north to live in the old way without anything from the stores, without schools or medicine, but it failed, Jens told me earlier. When I asked why, he said, “They ran out of coffee and sugar!” I walk the narrow paths to the kommune office to see him. Walls of hard-packed snow lie against the west walls of the houses—remnants of the big blizzard. At Jens’s house Mamarut and Tecummeq are visiting, plus Ilaitsuk’s daughter, who has just had her fifth child. “It seems to be all she wants to do,” Ilaitsuk says. She’s a bold, broad-shouldered woman who doesn’t mince words. The daughter bears children; the grandparents—Jens and Ilaitsuk, who are only in their 40s—take care of them.

  Jens dandles the baby on his knee, so very gently. He’s a big man, and next to him the baby seems impossibly small. Until recently, no one but Hans at the Qaanaaq Hotel had a television. Now Jens and some others have them. Television in Greenland is perhaps a model of what it might be elsewhere, limited programming with a blank screen until evening. At night Danish news is followed by news from Greenland’s capital city, Nuuk, then there’s a movie from Europe or the United States, dubbed in Danish with subtitles in Greenlandic. “Before we had televisions, we had storytelling,” Jens says. “Now we just tell our ancestor stories out on the ice.”

  When the television goes off, there’s talk in the room of the economic plight of hunters who cannot get enough food, who cannot afford to buy a boat. Last year Greenland’s prime minister, Hans Enoksen, had come to talk to the hunters in Qaanaaq. He is from a village too, but farther south. The townspeople told him they had no jobs, and the hunting was not bringing enough food to live. Every Thursday they get 300 Danish kroner from the kommune office. “And three hours later, they’ve spent it,” Ilaitsuk says. “The prime minister listened, but after he left we never heard from him again.”

  Since the early 1990s the grocery store has quadrupled in size. Television, long-distance telephones, faxes, and Internet service became available for those who could afford it. And more recently a bar. “We didn’t need that. We didn’t need alcohol at all,” Ilaitsuk says.

  It has been decided to call a meeting of the hunters in town, so they can report on the effects of the declining ice. Hans Jensen generously allows us to use the guesthouse at the hotel. I want to beg forgiveness from my Greenland friends for the vandalism and greed of the so-called developed nations, where only profit counts, where decisions are not made with the biological health of the planet in mind but only the material wealth of a few. Where true poverty is enforced on even the wealthy, where the social standard is to live and work in a fixed place. Where the moral implications and social injustices of the crushing demands of extreme capitalism are daily overlooked and denied. Where the “I” is king; where the “getting” is done at the expense of others; where the concept of “we” is considered a form of weakness.

  It was here, in Greenland, that I had my first taste of true civilization: where the demands of capitalism are held to a minimum. Where the conscious choices of what an ice age society might keep of its traditions were added to what they deemed useful from the 21st century—harpoons and cell phones; helicopters and kayaks; and far beyond a simple striving for survival, gratitude for the natural beauty of the place and its importance in their daily lives.

  Here, people’s basic needs are met first; matters of buying and selling come last, if at all. This is a society based on sharing, self-discipline, patience, modesty, resilience, flexibility, and humor, and a sophisticated understanding of the circular continuity, the transmission of ecological knowledge that keeps tradition alive.

  Sunday night, meeting time: Jens and Ilaitsuk; Mamarut and Tecummeq; Gedeon and Marta and their son, Rasmus; Paulus, a hunter I hadn’t met before; the elder Qav; Otto S.; and Toku Ishima (Ikuo’s very capable daughter, in her 20s). The faces are solemn. There is none of the usual joking and laughter.

  “I’m so sorry for what is happening to your ice,” I begin. “As you know, it is happening not because of anything you’ve done, but because of what our countries have. Many of us are working hard to slow down carbon dioxide emissions, but we are not as powerful as we would like to be. I apologize for this. I’m so sad. You have been so kind to me and many others like me who have come as visitors here. I will work hard to bring your situation to the ears and eyes of other people, so they will know the precious culture that is being lost. I have tried to show them who you are—there’s no one quite like you in the whole world.”

  An embarrassed silence, then slowly the hunters begin to talk. Otto begins:

  “Even in summer it’s hard to get out to the islands or up the coast by boat because the sea is so rough. The whole village of Siorapaluk used to empty out in February and March. We all went north to hunt polar bears. All the way to Humboldt Glacier and Washington Land. The ice was good. Now we have to go up and over the ice cap to Kap Alexander, and it is very strenuous and a danger to our lives.”

  Mamarut: “And going south is very bad now too. We used to go over Politiken Glacier or around by the coast. Now, even these ways are gone. Many years in July we could get to Kiatak on the ice. I remember the dogs’ paws used to bleed where they went through the meltwater into the ice.”

  Tecummeq: “I always went with Mamarut. The ice was always solid. It wasn’t something we thought about. It was always very cold. Town is like prison. I used to be a hunter’s wife. I worked with Mamar
ut 100 percent of the time until a few years ago. I wanted to help him be a hunter. We had fewer animals to get because the ice edge was stronger. Now we can’t even reach Kiatak anymore, and that’s where the hunting was best. If the ice was still good, we could still be taking care of ourselves. There are only two of us. It must be very hard when there are a lot of children.”

  Otto: “Until 2003 the living of a hunter family was possible. But not after. In 2004, that’s when the ice got really bad. The wives have to get jobs, so they are able to buy fuel for a boat. That’s the only way for us to get walrus now. We share the boats, but still it is more than we have. We did not want these things. They didn’t interest us. Now because of the ice condition, we are forced to go this other way.”

  Toku: “The situation is like this: To be a full-time hunter is impossible today. In the old times the whole family worked together with no outside work necessary. Now even full-time hunters like Otto, Mamarut, Gedeon, and the others have to take care of dogs and family, and it’s hard because of the changes. The hunters’ wives have to get jobs to pay rent or bills. There are always those new kinds of expenses now. The hunters’ sons are told to get an education because it’s the only way to make a living in the future.”

  Jens: “Farther south the village of Savissivik is now very bad. They can’t even go to Kaviok because the ice is so thin. They had polar bears in the fjord between Kaviok and Savissivik, but they couldn’t get to them. Before it was the place with the most solid ice. We used to go there when the ice was gone here. We’d always go south. When the ship came in late summer, there was still ice and they had to used dogsleds to bring the supplies in. Still, there are seals to hunt down there, so as for now, they have food for people and dogs. But they can’t go very far in any direction except by boat, and at Moriusaq, they can no longer get out to Saunders Island and the other small islands where they hunted walrus. And if there’s no ice, there’s no walrus.”