The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  Over the weeks that followed, Aqiatusuk considered his options and after searching his heart he decided reluctantly that since he could not speak to losephie Flaherty on the radio, and he could not return to Inukjuak, he would do as Sargent had suggested and ask his stepson to come up to Ellesmere Island. The sculptor knew it was a lot to ask of the young man, more than losephie would realise, but the way he thought about it, the whole camp would be sent back to Inukjuak sooner or later and, until then, having the Flahertys on Ellesmere would bring great comfort to the family as well as adding another hunter to their number. If losephie were with him, Aqiatusuk felt he could manage his hujuujaq. The mail usually left the Craig Harbour detachment with the spring patrol at the end of March by dog teams and took two weeks to reach Resolute Bay from where it travelled by air to the south. If Aqiatusuk wrote a letter at once it would probably find its way on to the C. D. Howe that year and losephie would get it in July.

  Spring arrived on Ellesmere Island. Temperatures rose and remained stable at around −25°C. The sun dazzled and bounced off the ice and the whole of the sound solidified into a hard, white plate, as smooth as marble, as the sea ice settled. Everyone who had them took to wearing their snowgoggles. Those who had none were forced to bind their eyes with strips of sacking to ward off the dazzle. Even then, hunters routinely came in off the ice snow blind. Ice crystals spangled the air. Forests of little ice fronds sprang up from the land, icicles hung from the roofs of the sod huts and the wind transformed them into little glockenspiels. Ellesmere Island became almost unbearably beautiful.

  Seals began to gather in the open water at Hell Gate and, before long, the hunters were able to abandon their hunting at agluit, the seals' winter breathing holes, and turn instead to stalking the creatures when they came up on to the ice to bask. From time to time whale and narwhal appeared on their spring migrations north and, when they did, everyone ate well. The hunters picked up aborted premature seal pups on the ice and by May they were hunting female seals and their live, full-term young in their dens under the snow. For the first time there was enough meat at camp for everyone at least to have a little. The improvement in the conditions brought the husky bitches into heat and pretty soon they were producing pups.

  But Aqiatusuk took no comfort in this small upturn in his family's fortunes. His decision to ask Josephie Flaherty to come up to join the camp weighed heavily on him. It had not done anything to ease his homesickness either. He needed his stepson but he felt bad about asking him to come. He passed much of his time now sitting on the cliff above the camp, staring out across the sound, carving and waiting. All late spring and early summer he waited until one cloudy day at the end of July, his head began to droop and he began to feel his legs prick. Thinking he had overexerted himself on a hunting trip the previous day, the old sculptor clambered down the cliff and went to rest in his family's tent. By the onset of evening he felt quite ill. His chest ached and his limbs were sluggish and unresponsive. Through the night, his condition deteriorated until the moment arrived from which there would be no turning back. He had seen this moment a thousand times in the dwindling lives of fox and hare and seal and he was not afraid of it. He had lost the will to live and his heart opened to his fate. On 31 July 1954, Paddy Aqiatusuk lay down for the last time and took in his final breath.

  A few months later, when news of his death finally reached the south, Time magazine published an obituary. It read:

  Akeeaktashuk, 56, one of the leaders of the small group of Eskimo primitive sculpturists whose work came to the attention of the outside world in recent years because of its fluent, uncluttered simplicity; of drowning July 31, when he slipped from an ice floe while hunting walrus off Ellesmere Island.

  But Paddy Aqiatusuk did not die from a fall on an ice floe. He died of a broken heart.

  Paddy's stepsons buried their father at the foot of a south facing cliff under red rocks. The loss of their leader hit everyone at the Inuit camp on Ellesmere very hard. Aqiatusuk had pulled them together and they were now afraid that there would be nothing to stop them falling apart. There was no more talk about returning to Inukjuak. In ten weeks the dark period would fall over Ellesmere once more and they would have to build a winter cache of meat before it did.

  If Paddy's death ended all thoughts of return for a while, it also strengthened the hunters' resolve to survive. The American adventurer, Lewis Cotlow, witnessing Akpaliapik and another Inuk track a polar bear on Ellesmere several years after this, wrote:

  It seemed to me that the bear epitomised everything the Eskimo had to struggle against in the open wilderness: hardship and uncertainty, an often pitiless nature which was for each member of the community a personal and implacable threat. It was that threat which made these people the most tightly-knit, yet most individualised human beings I had ever seen. It made them ready at any moment to give up possessions or comfort to help a stranger. Not because of some abstract idea; for them it was the only way of life that made sense. So each man threw into the communal lot his strength, wisdom and skill as if nature had decreed, cooperate or die!

  Over that hard, second winter, and over the spring and the summer which followed it, the Inukjuamiut and the Ingluligmiut of Ellesmere Island pooled their strength, their resources and their knowledge into the raw business of survival. During the long and often savage months, those thirty-three reluctant pioneers took stock of their new land. It was not their way to try to master the place, a goal they knew to be quite fruitless, but to understand it. Gradually, through many weeks and months of watching and listening, they learned how to live on Ellesmere Island.

  Before the sun set for the final time that year, the camp moved to a larger stretch of beach beside Grise Fiord and there, using spare packing cases and bits of lumber dumped by the C. D. Howe on her annual supply, they constructed a huddle of little huts. Each was about 12 feet by 15 feet long and 8 feet high, with an outer structure of packing crates covered with sod and a roof constructed from canvas stretched over a wooden frame. There was no furniture in the huts, but those who could afford to bought a primus stove with the credits from their fox trapping and these supplied heat for cooking and light in the darkness.

  They rebuilt their komatiks shorter and wider, better to withstand the pressure ridges, loosened the battens to make them more flexible over rough ice and fashioned upright handlebars from bone and bits of old wood, which made them much easier to control. They plaited together new sealskin harnesses for the dogs, with a single central rope, from which long individual traces fanned to give the animals better purchase on the rough ice. The owners of shotguns made fresh cartridges from spent ones by inserting new firing pins and points, and filling them up with gunpowder.

  When the Inukjuamiut's bitches came in heat, they bred them to Akpaliapik's and Anukudluk's Greenlandic dogs and trained the pups to sniff out the breathing holes of seals and follow polar bear tracks. By the end of the year, most families had two sleds, one with steel runners for the compacted spring snow and another with whalebone ones for the winter. In the absence of water, they iced the runners with fresh caribou blood and filled the cracks in the whalebone runners with pieces of frozen walrus liver, rasped smooth.

  Land mammals continued to be hard to find but marine mammals proved more plentiful. The big issue on Ellesmere Island, they carne to see, was not so much the quantity of marine game as its accessibility. Like their land-based counterparts, the marine mammals around Ellesmere were living at the most northerly ranges of their species. They were mostly migratory and congregated in highly scattered pockets. As the hunters extended their ground, sketching hunting trails west along the sound from Grise Fiord, down into Devon Island as far west as the Grinnell Peninsula, then northeast to the Bjorne Peninsula and Baumann Fiord on southwest Ellesmere, they took note of the inlets and bays where they had seen narwhal, seal or beluga. They made trails inland from Grise Fiord across the south central tip of Ellesmere to meet the sea route at Baumann Fiord and ran their trap
lines there. They travelled as far east as Coburg Island, then north all the way to the Bache Peninsula, a journey which had defeated the icebreaker d'Iberville only a couple of years before. Eventually, their hunting routes would traverse an area no less than 255,800 square miles and would include 750 miles of established winter routes and 3,200 miles of less regularly used paths. By the end of the 1950s, the average hunter in Grise Fiord was covering an area of 6,864 square miles every year, the largest hunting range of any Inuit people.

  The hunters also began to adapt the way they hunted and trapped. In good fox years, they extended their trap lines, but learned to avoid those areas, such as Baumann Fiord, that were patrolled by wolves which would eat the trapped foxes. They learned how to stalk and hunt polar bear and then how to flense and butcher them, avoiding the livers which they knew would make them sick. When hunting for beluga, experience taught them to swap their harpoons for lassoes. The beluga living round Ellesmere had more fatty insulation than those in Hudson Bay and the harpoon heads would only find fragile purchase and work themselves out of the flesh, allowing the creatures to escape wounded. Lassoes gave the hunters a firmer grip but they also made sure that those whales which did slip away remained unhurt and would live to breed and perhaps to be hunted again. Instead of leaving their families behind, the hunters gathered the confidence to take them along, so the women could help in the hunt and make repairs to the hunters' clothing or sew a new pair of kamiks while they were en route.

  By the close of 1954 the hunters had established a hunting cycle on Ellesmere which remains unchanged today. From mid-April to mid-July, they hunted ringed seals by stalking them on the ice from behind hunting screens, utoq, made of Arctic hare to blend in with the snow. During late April they began nunajak hunting, locating seal mothers and their pups in their dens with dogs, and by June they were hunting seals through open leads in the ice in Jones Sound in their old police detachment skiff. Whenever their journeys took them to Coburg and Smith islands, Makinson and Sverdrup inlets, Baumann, Grise and Starnes fiords or Cape Combermere, they would stop to collect the eggs of the glaucous gulls and Arctic terns which nested in thick clumps on the cliffs. During the brief Ellesmere summers they would concentrate their efforts on sealing at ice cracks and when the water opened up in mid-July they would hunt ringed seals on the open water, banging on the gunnels of the skiff to arouse the animals' curiosity. Noting that walrus moved from Baffin Bay into Jones Sound in June or July, they would take walrus-hunting parties out on to the open water, finding the females and their young at Jakeman Glacier and males at Hell Gate. In late July, they hunted narwhal migrating up into Jones Sound from Baffin Bay. The beluga arrived later and more reliably, they discovered, from areas of open water in Baffin Bay and Cardigan Strait and came into Grise Fiord to breed. In the early autumn they pursued walrus heading back down south on their migrations and when the ice came, and they were able to take their dog teams out, they hunted caribou around Bjorne Peninsula and Makinson Inlet, lightly at first, and more vigorously after Henry Larsen relaxed the hunting quotas. As soon as the ice reached a thickness of three or four inches, the hunters returned to catching seals through their agluit or breathing holes.

  The women learned how to flense and scrape polar bear skins and picked up from some visiting Greenlanders the technique required to sew the thick pelts and make trousers with them. They also learned how to set their qulliqs with heather wicks and which kind of blubber to use for warmth and which for light or cooking. In their searches for freshwater they developed such a keen sense that they could often smell it out. They became more active in the hunt. Even the children mucked in, tending the fox trap lines and hauling buckets of freshwater ice.

  Though life was still tremendously hard, the Inuit survived. But they never forgot Ross Gibson's promise that they were going to a better life, nor lost the dream that one day they would find themselves on their way back to Inukjuak.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AT THE TIME of Paddy Aqiatusuk's death, in 1954, Nanook of the North had been playing in one cinema or another continuously for thirty-two years. The man who had made the picture, Robert Flaherty, had never contacted any of the principals since leaving the Arctic, nor had he ever returned, though from time to time he had been sent news from Inukjuak and had a good idea of what was going on there. He knew, for example, that Alakariallak, the hunter who had played Nanook, had died of starvation. He had mentioned Alakariallak's death in interviews and always said he felt “bad about it.” At some point, he had also discovered that Maggie Nujarluktuk had given birth to his son, Josephie, though on this topic he had remained resolutely silent. He never wrote to the boy, or, so far as we know, sent him any money or other token of affection.

  Language experts describe Inuktitut, the Inuit language, as highly contextual and so structurally complex and minutely interleaved that nouns and verbs are formed as they are spoken, according to the current state of the thing or action they are describing. This feature of the language has made it very difficult to produce an Inuktitut dictionary. I mention it here because, in this regard at least, Inuktitut has parallels with Robert Flaherty's own life. As a film-maker and as a man, Flaherty lived for his next self-created instant. Once that instant had passed, another seamlessly took its place, and then another after that. He was not a man for ruminating on his past. He once told an interviewer that he found horizons poignant. What he meant by this, presumably, was that horizons fenced him in while at the same time hinting at the possibilities that lay beyond. He lived his life in a state of perpetual motion, his sights set on whatever was there on the other side of the next experience.

  In Robert Flaherty's eyes, Nanook was the culmination of his love affair with the north, just as Josephie Flaherty was the culmination of his love affair with Maggie Nujarluktuk.

  Inuktitut brings the things it speaks about into being, and in the same way the Inuit brought Robert Flaherty the film-maker into being. The people of the Barrenlands had taught him how to see. In a manner of speaking, he had returned the favour in Nanook. For a worldwide audience of Nanook fans Robert Flaherty would always be the man who first threw light on the Barrenlanders. It was his vision that became the accepted view of the Inuit and their lives.

  Nanook of the North contrived to tail the film-maker. More and more it became an unwanted offspring, one that its creator was unable to shrug off. After Nanook, Robert would go on to make other moving pictures, take stills photographs, write books, but whatever he created would always invite comparison to that first, monumental effort. His fans, his backers and his audience never ceased to hope for another Nanook.

  Not long after the premiere of Nanook of the North, Flaherty took a call from lesse L. Lasky, the production head of Paramount. The mogul was an adventure fanatic. For years he had spent his vacations tramping the wildernesses of the Canadian northwest and Alaska, he had been camping with Zane Grey, the western writer, out in New Mexico, and the whole frontier myth fascinated him. In Flaherty, Lasky reckoned he had found a man on the same frequency as himself, someone whose adventures he might vicariously share. He told Flaherty to make him another Nanook. Flaherty could go where he wanted, do what he liked and Lasky would foot the bill. The call came at just the right time. Flaherty already had a plan for a follow-up to Nanook. Sometime before, he had been introduced to Frederick O'Brien whose travelogue of his year in the remote Marquesas Islands, White Shadows in the South Seas, had been a big hit. During their conversation, Flaherty mentioned he was looking for a new project and O'Brien had suggested he might get on well in another part of Polynesia with which O'Brien was familiar, Samoa. There, O'Brien told Flaherty, he would find a kind of paradise of plenty. The breeze was always balmy, fish flopped into the nets and fruit fell off the trees, and the untroubled ease of Samoan life was reflected in its permissive, happy-go-lucky people. O'Brien observed that he had never been anywhere where human life was more natural and human beings were more free. The Arctic had been one kind of Ede
n. Samoa would be another.

  By now Flaherty had a wife and three daughters and Polynesia was then still extremely remote and inaccessible. But the more he thought about it, the more determined he became to do it. And now he had a backer in Paramount. The Flaherty family, Robert, Frances, the three girls, and Robert's younger brother, David, boarded a steamer heading west out of San Francisco. A long voyage later, they landed at Safune, a small settlement on the island of Savaii in Samoa.

  O'Brien had given them a letter of introduction to a German trader called Felix David. He lived just outside Safune in a two-storey building with a first-floor veranda overlooking a landscape of palms and sky-blue sea. Felix David was an old-school eccentric. He had roamed round the Pacific for years, hooking up with the local women, trading in whatever was tradeable and treating the islanders on whichever remote paradise he found himself to improvised amateur operatic performances. He and Robert Flaherty formed an instant bond and with Felix David's help the Flaherty family found a house to rent nearby. There, in the grounds, they built an open-air theatre where they showed movies they had brought over from New York. Within weeks, the Savaiians had forgotten all about Felix David's operatic performances.

  Though conditions were a good deal more pleasant on Savaii than they had been in the Arctic, Flaherty found it proved much harder to settle on a theme for the Samoan film. Life was so easy and the Samoans so peaceable that there was no real drama. Robert, Frances and David had to spend a good many weeks drifting about with the locals before they landed on a topic that might make an intriguing film. Before any Samoan boy could pass into manhood, he had to undergo a series of agonising tattoo rituals. Beautiful and elaborate patterns would be imprinted all over his body using plant dyes and hot shark bones. Flaherty had first become interested in tattooing in the Arctic. Although the practice was much frowned upon by missionaries there, many older Inuit women still bore tattoos in the form of seal or walrus whiskers on their faces. But the Samoan tattoos were much more elaborate, often taking years to complete and the results transformed Samoan men into living story books. From the tattoos, other Samoans could tell which family the young man belonged to and where he fitted into the family hierarchy. The skill and intricacy of the tattoos determined his status among his peers, his future prospects and his marriageability. The Flaherty brothers began filming. They spent two years making their Samoan movie and the result was Moana of the South Seas which remained, until his death, Robert Flaherty's favourite film.