He has been in the Arctic long enough now to know how hard the move will be to explain. It is always said that the Inuit are nomadic but that doesn't really capture it. Rather they move around a territory and familiarity is part of their armoury of survival. In the few months Gibson has spent in the Arctic he can see how strongly they are bonded to the land they know. They rarely venture outside it, and when they do, it is always to travel with someone who has already made the journey. Without that strong sense of knowing they are vulnerable. Their only maps are the ones they carry in their memories.
Gibson studies the charts, reads up on Ellesmere Island. The place is as far from Inukjuak as Inukjuak is from Ottawa. It is forbiddingly remote, the ninth largest island on the planet, but for more than ten months of every year surrounded on all sides by ice. On 4 May he crosses the Innuksuak River and pops into Rueben Ploughman's place, to ask if he would mind hosting a meeting to discuss the issue later in the day. From the Hudson Bay Company post he wanders up to the teacher's house, then to the nursing station, returning, finally, to the detachment building to make his preparations for the meeting. He does not think to extend invitations to the settlement Inuit. In the late afternoon, he returns to the Bay post and, over tea and biscuits, relates the content of Henry Larsen's telegram. Discussion begins convivially but soon enough the qalunaat residents of Inukjuak are bickering and at odds. Margaret Reynolds wants to know what the Inuit will do for medical facilities up on Ellesmere Island and hopes that she is not going to be the one to have to give them all a medical before they leave, since she has had no word from the Department of Health to this effect and is, in any case, hardly qualified for such procedures. Margery Hinds is more concerned about how the Department plans to give the children an education there. And who will ensure they will have the correct clothing and equipment? As welfare teacher the responsibility devolves to her, but she has had no official instructions in the matter and is unwilling to act without them. Rueben Ploughman wonders what will happen to his fur business if all the best trappers are sent away. He understands that it is Gibson's duty to find these volunteers; he's only hoping that Gibson will keep the interests of the Hudson Bay Company in mind when he does so. On the other hand, all seem agreed that this will be a fine opportunity to rid the settlement of some of its bad eggs: the gripers, the ne'er do wells, the men whose hunting and trapping activities never seem to keep pace with their families' stomachs, the family allowance dependents …and Paddy Aqiatusuk. It will do them a world of good to have to put their backs into hunting and trapping again. A moral wash and brush up, a hauling of boot straps, a collective pulling-up of Inuit socks.
A message awaits Gibson back at the RCMP detachment. Henry Larsen requires the list of volunteers by the beginning of June. Gibson has less than a month to find seven families to move a vast distance to an uninhabited spot they know nothing about in the middle of the north polar desert. By now he has been in the RCMP for six months. This is the first major test of his new career.
What Ross Gibson does not know is that white men have a long history of removing Inuit people from their homelands. The trend, if that is what it can be called, began with Martin Frobisher at the end of the sixteenth century. Frobisher arrived at Hall Island in the eastern Arctic on the Gabriel in 1576. The Inuit living there had never seen white men or ships before and they convinced themselves that the vessel was some kind of giant sea mammal on whose backs strange, colourless creatures rode. Nine of these lowered themselves into the Gabriel's skiff and made for the shore. The Inuit met them on the beach. The Englishmen handed the Inuit each a metal needle. Using sign language, the two groups agreed that one of the Inuit would board the Gabriel if two of Frobisher's men remained on the beach as surety. When the Inuk returned safely, the villagers grew more confident and nineteen went on board the Gabriel, where they exchanged sealskin and bearskin clothes for mirrors and bells. The following day, another Hall Islander went on board and was given a bell and a knife. A group of five crewmen volunteered to row this man back to shore, but instead of putting the Inuk down on the beach within sight of the Gabriel, as Frobisher had ordered, the men rowed towards the Inuit village, disappeared from view and did not return. For several days, Frobisher could get no word from or of them. Seriously concerned, now, for their safety, he decided to set a trap. Using bells and beads as lures, the crew of the Gabriel managed to entice an Inuk man to approach the ship. As the man swung alongside in his kayak, the Gabriel's crew scooped him out of the water, and tied him fast, hoping they could use him in a prisoner exchange, but the remaining villagers refused to discuss the disappeared crewmen or the Inuit captive. Frustrated, Fro-bisher set sail back to England with his prisoner still on board. The unnamed Inuk survived the trip but fell ill almost the moment he stepped ashore. A coffin and a grave were purchased for him for the sum of eleven shillings and four pence and he was laid to rest in St. Olave's Church in Hart Street, London, where he remains to this day.
The kidnapping of Inuit as surety or simply for their curiosity value became so commonplace over the next 150 years that in 1720 the Netherlands adopted a resolution banning the transporting of Greenlanders to Europe and in 1732 Denmark followed suit. Neither of these well-intentioned edicts had much effect and Inuit continued to be taken from their homes and families.
In 1897, the American explorer, Admiral Robert E. Peary, shipped six Inuit from northwestern Greenland to New York for “scientific scrutiny” but within months of their arrival, four of the six were dead, leaving only a man, Uisakassak, and a boy, Minik. Uisakassak sailed back to Greenland with Peary on the Windward the following year, but Minik's father being among the dead, the boy remained behind in New York as the adopted son of William Wallace, the building superintendent of the American Museum of Natural History. While wandering round the museum one day, Minik came upon an Inuit skeleton, strung up in a glass case for exhibition. Drawn to the sign on the case, Minik discovered to his horror and shame that the bones were those of his father. This puzzled him particularly because he had been to his father's funeral and seen the coffin lowered into the ground, but it did not take him long to work out that the interment had been a ghastly trick to keep him from the truth. Minik begged to be allowed to give his father a proper funeral. He would take the bones back to Greenland himself and bury them under a cairn in accordance with tradition. It was not to be. The skeleton remained, in all its immodesty, hanging from a hook on display. “I felt that I must go North, back to Greenland some how, some way,” Minik wrote in a letter, adding,
I have lost hope … And I have given up believing your Christian creed that you taught me was meant for one and all Christian and savage alike. I gave up that finally when Professor Bumpus at the museum told me for the last time I could not have my father's bones to bury them. Where is your Christianity? My own people are kinder and better, more human, and I am going back to them. My land is frozen and desolate, but we can bury our dead here.
While Minik was trying to recover his father's bones, Uisakassak arrived back in northwestern Greenland, bringing with him stories and impressions of the places he had seen. He told his fellows that he had found it difficult to navigate “among the man-made mountains” of the city, and that it had been “too warm and there was a great lack of walrus meat and blubber.” He described the trains which hurtled “like a gust of wind across the sea,” and could hardly stop talking about the streetcars “big as houses with masses of glass windows as transparent as freshwater ice, racing on without dogs to haul them, without smoke and full of smiling people who had no fear of their fate.” His companions were not impressed by these tales. Sorqaq, the local shaman, told him to go and tell his lies to the women, who would be more likely to believe them, and Uisakassak was officially shunned.
The Arctic trade in goods began with an equal degree of cynicism. Canada was an early European frontier long before Christopher Columbus sailed to America. The first documented visit, by Vikings, was in 982 and by the Middle Ages
, traders were regularly making the journey across the Atlantic to bring back polar bear skins, narwhal tusks and live gyrfalcons, which were then traded as far east as the Arabian peninsula. By the sixteenth century there was a thriving trade in furs between the Arctic regions and Europe, pioneered by, among others, Pierre Esprit Radisson, who remarked of his travels in the Arctic, “we are caesars, there being nobody to contradict us.” In 1821 Sir George Simpson, then head of the Hudson Bay Company, wrote, “I am convinced [the Inuit] must be ruled with a rod of iron to bring and keep them in a proper state of subordination, and the most certain way to effect this is by letting them feel their dependence upon us.”
The rod of iron was rifle-shaped and it was widely used to kill and maim Inuit, and to support the rape of the women and the abduction of their children. In the Arctic there was no one but the Inuit to act as witnesses. The early fur traders were, as Radisson said, “caesars.”
Trade itself was often unfair. In 1923, a .30-30 Winchester rifle sold for twelve white fox pelts, though such a rifle could be purchased for a single pelt in the south. The era of bells and needles as trade goods had long since gone and seemed now to have an aura of innocence about it. For the previous half-century the rifle had been the bestseller. Inuit looked after their things and by the time Robert Flaherty arrived in Inukjuak to make Nanook of the North the market for rifles was reaching saturation point. The former whaling captain turned trader, Charles Klengenberg, solved this small dilemma by giving the Inuit hard steel ramrods and advising them to scrape out the insides of their rifle barrels, an action which soon ruined the rifling, as Klengenberg knew it would. The guns then failed to shoot straight and Inuit starved until they could scrape together sufficient funds in the form of fox pelts to buy another. And so the market for rifles was restored. Klengenberg wrote of a later exchange with Inuit: “They were so innocent a people … that I had not the heart to take advantage of them in trade, so all I took was most of their clothes and stone cooking pots and copper snowknives and ice picks for steel knives and frying pans and a supply of matches. They had no raw furs with them, but their garments would be useful for my family and some of my rascally crew.”
By the 1950s, the Inuit were rather wary of any “offer” emanating from qalunaat, especially where it involved a move from their familiar hunting grounds, but they were equally afraid of what refusal might bring. To Inuit, whalers, police and representatives of the Hudson Bay Company were all cut from the same cloth. If you could not avoid them, you had better keep watch on them. They were not the kind of people who would be denied.
A day or so after the meeting with Hinds, Ploughman and Reynolds, Constable Ross Gibson orders Tommy Pallisser, the Hudson Bay Company translator, and Special Constable Kayak to prepare the detachment komatik and dog team for what might well be a long trip. They will head north towards Povungnituk. The first camp they visit will be that of Paddy Aqiatusuk.
Over the following two weeks, Gibson, Kayak and Pallisser sledge to every camp lying between Inukjuak and Sugluk, sixty miles to the north, looking for volunteers for the Ellesmere Island experiment. At each camp, the routine is the same. They unharness the dogs and set about looking for suitable snow for a snowhouse. If the men of the camp are out hunting, a local boy is dispatched to fetch those within range. While the three men of the patrol wait, Kayak and Pallisser fix up two small snowhouses, one for themselves and one for Gibson, who can never bring himself to sleep beside an Inuk, and someone boils a kettle of sweet tea. Once all of those who can be assembled are gathered round, Gibson pulls out Henry Larsen's telegram and a map and proceeds to tell the Inuit what he knows, which, in all honesty, is not very much.
Had Ross Gibson known more about Ellesmere Island it would have made it more difficult for him to sell it. The place was uninhabited and had been so since the Little Ice Age thickened its ice caps and grew its glaciers about 350 years ago. There was no evidence that the island would support human habitation. No wildlife surveys had ever been conducted there and it was not known how many fish, marine mammals, birds or land mammals populated the area. What was known was that the polar desert conditions did not support anything like the numbers of plant and animal life which flourished around Inukjuak. The cold and the dark were known from police detachment reports, though not to Ross Gibson. Temperatures in the High Arctic are on average 15°C lower than those in Inukjuak. In the polar north, temperatures rarely rise much above freezing, even in summer, and in winter they regularly fall below −40°C. A modern domestic freezer is usually set at about -18°C. At −40°C a cup of boiling water turns to water vapour when thrown into the air, saliva freezes and steam rises from the fingers. In humans, hypothermia can set in within two minutes of the skin's exposure to air. The winds, too, are much fiercer, becoming katabatic as they spin along the frozen flats of the Arctic Ocean. The sea around Ellesmere is never wholly free of ice and the navigation season is often as short as four weeks, making the area more or less inaccessible to anything but ski-planes for ten or eleven months of the year. On account of its position high above the Arctic Circle, the winter dark period stretches from October to February. For four months of the year it is dark twenty-four hours a day.
What Ross Gibson does know is that the Inuit already live in snowhouses, they already spend their summers in canvas tents, they already hunt seal. Surely, life on Ellesmere Island cannot be all that different? He makes some effort to explain the dark period and the fact that it is a little colder on Ellesmere Island, but, since his job depends on Inuit agreeing to move, he ends his pitch on an upbeat note, emphasising the tremendous quantity of game to be hunted, the piles of soft, meringue-coloured pelts to be trapped, finishing always with the trump card: the promise that anyone who does not like it can return.
Despite these inducements, no one wants to go. Even those who are having a hard time of it with the fall in fox prices say they want to remain with their families. Trappers are predicting record fox catches for the next year and the price is bound to rise sooner or later. Until then, life will be hard but not unendurable. They will do what they have always done and sit it out. And so, in camp after camp, all along the eastern coast of Hudson Bay, with much smiling and shaking of hands, the Inuit turn Ross Gibson away. He returns to Inukjuak without a single volunteer.
Back at the detachment, he rethinks his strategy, and fixes finally on the power of repetition. The only thing for it is to return to the camps and keep returning, pressing the advantages of the move until he senses the tide turning his way. Time is tight and getting tighter. Each time he goes out to the camps the ice is a little softer and the dogs are forced to strain a little more in their harnesses and Ross Gibson feels a little more frayed and desperate. On his third pass through the camps he is downright bad-tempered. Behind his back the Inuit still call him Big Red, but now they are afraid.
At the camps of the poorest hunters and trappers, or those with the largest families, people are beginning to waver. They are imagining that, if they do not go, Ross Gibson will stop their family allowance money, a dollar or two, but right now, the only dollar or two they see.
Ross Gibson decides to target Paddy Aqiatusuk. He would like the old grouch to disappear and he knows he will be likely to take a good few others with him. He is at the head of a big family. And so Gibson returns to Aqiatusuk's camp, talks up the great hunting and trapping, the proximity of police detachments in case of any emergency and the promise the family will all be returned if, after a year or two, they decide they do not like it.
Aqiatusuk sucks his teeth, shakes his head. He is contented enough where he is, on the land he knows, among his family. Gibson tries another tack, takes out a list, pretends to check it and notes, with Pallisser translating, that some of Aqiatusuk's family have already said they will go. He spots a certain tension in the sculptor's face, knows he has hit his mark. How will they hunt? Aqiatusuk asks. Where will they live? What will happen if there turns out to be no food? Gibson bluffs his way through, loses
his temper a little, becomes aware that his voice is raised. He is met with a wary silence. The truth is that Aqiatusuk has no desire to leave his homeland. His back is sore and his liver gives him trouble, he is happy to live out his days making his carvings and being a help to his family. And yet, and yet. If what Gibson says is true, he can go north with Elijah and Samwillie and his family, they can trap for a while, earn enough to buy a Peterhead boat and come back down to Inukjuak. There is something else, too, something he reads in the scowls on Ross Gibson's face. If he does not agree to go, he senses that the police will never leave him alone. The Big Red policeman will harass him from the settlement, he will refuse to pay him family allowance, he will stop him selling his carvings at the Hudson Bay Company. And he will make life unbearable for his stepson, Josephie Flaherty. No Inuit says no to a white man without repercussions. Aqiatusuk senses the menace, it is what his ancestors tell him. In his bones he feels it to be true.
The old sculptor marches into Inukjuak, sits himself down in losephie's hut, waits for his stepson to come home from work, amusing himself by playing with losephie and Rynee's little daughter, Martha. The door opens and losephie shakes his boots and goes to his stepfather to hug him. He already knows his family will leave, the settlement Inuit have talked of little else, and he knows, too, that he cannot go with them because he has a job and a daughter and another baby on the way. From losephie's hut Aqiatusuk walks to the police detachment and opens the door.
The Long Exile Page 10