In the few Inuit villages I had worked in before Pangnirtung, recording, transcribing, and translating oral literature had given me a lens into the mental culture and mythic history of a community, although that is putting things in too academic a light. But in Pangnirtung it didn’t work out that way. Every moment in that village seemed off-kilter somehow; I could not get any real purchase on life there. In Pangnirtung, the stories themselves seemed natural forces to be dealt with. They had put my nerves on edge.
Fairly early in the translation process I began to feel that despite an increasing fluency in the language, I was ill equipped to perform my work with any semblance of poise or competency. Still, I was being paid a decent salary and all of this was a unique experience. I wanted to see it through.
But night after night in my dreams I reprised the Inuit narratives. It got to the point where I imposed insomnia on myself, preferring not to sleep in order to avoid that endless loop of stories. This was my situation; I had to look at it directly. Finally a person has to sleep—but I wasn’t sleeping, not really. Brief naps here and there, no more than fifteen minutes at a time, for six, seven, eight days running. It was not so much my drinking too much black coffee as it was that the characters in my dreams—the characters in the Inuit folktales—were constantly drinking black coffee.
Strange but true. Sometimes they ate coffee grounds.
Stenciled in outsize black lettering on the side of the convenience store,— in both Inuit phonetics and English, were the words Blessed Be the Cheerful Buyer. Accompanying the words was the painted figure of Jesus handing some Canadian dollar bills to a merchant. On closer inspection, this Jesus had an uncanny resemblance to the rock-and-roll legend Jim Morrison (perhaps the sign painter was a fan). The store carried all manner of goods and necessities: winter clothing, canned foods, rifles, ammunition, pharmaceutical products. At the back of the store, on a chair next to the coal-burning stove, I often sat and worked on the stories.
One late afternoon, Michael Pootgoik, who was about forty and who managed the store, showed me some snow globes he had just unpacked from a shipment delivered by mail plane, along a route that originated in Winnipeg and serviced many Arctic villages, including Churchill. The pilot’s name was François Denny; he had gone into the store to take a nap on a cot in the supply room. “He snores like a walrus,” Michael said. “I have to put the radio on.”
There were two dozen glass snow globes in the shipment. Each contained a diorama of an indoor or outdoor scene in miniature. As he dusted each globe with a moistened cloth and inspected it for hairline cracks, Michael also turned it upside down and then right side up so that the fabricated snowflakes inside fell like confetti on the interior tableau. There was a Christmastime village, perhaps somewhere in New England, with a Christmas tree in the town square decorated with angels; children sang carols on the porch of a house. There was a hunter wearing a checked flannel shirt, black trousers, snow boots, and a thick fur hat, aiming his rifle at a buck with its head turned upward to the falling snow. There was a line of three hula dancers wearing grass skirts and no blouses, their breasts hidden by extravagant leis (seeing these Hawaiians in the snow made us both laugh). There was Little Red Riding Hood pursued by the Big Bad Wolf. There was—my favorite—a string quartet sitting in individual chairs on a bandstand in the middle of a tree-lined park. There was a blacksmith shaping a piece of iron in his shop, which was shown in cutaway relief, complete with bellows and hammers and tongs. There were ice-fishing shacks on a pond. There was a cluster of stars and planets on the ground, as if fallen from the heavens in their original array. There was a rural schoolhouse with children on its playground. And there were others I cannot recall.
“Most every family in Pangnirtung has one of these,” Michael said.
The next day, I decided to purchase a snow globe as my going-away gift in reverse, for Mary, the five-year-old daughter of my host family. The moment I stepped into the convenience store out of the cold slanting rain that was forming black ice on stretches of road, I saw the angakok curled up in the fetal position on the floor near a shelf that contained power tools. I hoped that he was asleep.
Michael was working the counter as usual. I told him I wanted to buy a snow globe for Mary Pootgoik and asked to see the inventory. “I already sold four,” he said, “but I’ll set out the rest.” He lined up the globes on the counter. I took my time looking them over. “Which do you think Mary might like best?” I asked.
“Why not bring her in and have her pick one out?” Michael said.
“Except that would ruin the surprise.”
“A surprise is over quick and then you still have to hope you made the right choice, eh?”
“Okay. Good idea.”
I left the convenience store purposely avoiding the angakok. I found Mary, and as she and I walked into the store she pointed at the shaman and said, “That man stinks. I’m not afraid of him. He can hurt me and he stinks but I don’t care.”
Mary, a chubby little kid with the sweetest face and the brightest, most stalwart disposition on earth, should have been my teacher in all things having to do with that miserable angakok. At the counter, she was delighted to be able to pick out a snow globe. “I think you’re giving me a present because I put a lot of sugar in tea when I make it for you,” she said. She sat on the counter, dangling her legs, and picked up snow globe after snow globe, studying each one with the utmost seriousness. Finally she said, “I want this one.” She held up the snow globe with the hula dancers inside.
I paid for the gift and handed it to Mary, who then walked out of the store. The angakok shouted something at her and she burst into tears and fled. She dropped the snow globe just outside the store and kept on running. I picked it up and put it in my coat pocket.
Back in the store now, I glared at the angakok and he glared right back. “Okay, got to deliver some boxes to the clinic,” Michael said. “Be back in a short time.” He lifted two boxes and a somewhat larger one, balanced them in his arms, and left by the back door. If I had been in my right mind, I would have followed him. But I just stood there next to the remaining snow globes.
Then I heard the transistor radios. This creeped me out no end.
I turned and saw that the angakok, whom I could smell from across the store, was sitting up and leaning against the wall. He was holding a screwdriver with the sharp end right up against an electric wall socket, as if he were about to jam the screwdriver into it. He was madly grinning, many teeth gone, and bobbing his head back and forth as if he alone could detect a lively tune inside the cacophony of radio static. Perhaps most arresting of all, he was holding a teddy bear. The store carried a variety of stuffed animals: owls, bears, tigers, walruses, seals, ravens.
The angakok stood, dropped the screwdriver on the floor, walked over to a shelf, and took up a sewing kit. He retreated to his corner, where he removed his mangy overcoat and began to sew the teddy bear to it by its four legs. Then he turned up the volume of each of the transistor radios. When finally he slid to the floor, a number of radio batteries fell from his coat pockets.
I do not know to this day what reckless impulse compelled me to deepen the antagonism between us, except that I wanted something to happen, something to end once and for all. I walked to the shelf that held the stuffed animals, found an identical teddy bear, looked at the price tag, and said, “Don’t forget to pay the nine dollars for that bear.” I pointed to the stuffed bear he had sewn to his overcoat.
“You know how I’ll pay for this bear?” he said, as if choking on the English words, as if he had rocks in his throat.
“No.”
“I will tell Pootogik I’m not going to put him inside one of those,” he said, pointing to the snow globes. “He will give me as many bears as I want.”
I did not know how to respond. He said, “But you choose—you choose which one you want to live inside. Right now—choose!”
“Keep the fuck away from me!” I said with all the force I
could muster.
I walked along the side of the store opposite him and out the front door. Mary was standing not more than twenty yards away; she had been watching the store. I handed her the snow globe with the hula dancers inside. I attempted a little joke: “I wouldn’t mind being in there with those hula dancers.” Which of course hardly registered at all with Mary, and she did not laugh or even crack a smile; she ran off toward her house.
Then I saw Michael returning empty-handed from the clinic. He walked up to me and said, “Did he steal anything while I was gone? I know he did. What did he take?”
Humiliated, dispirited, hapless, infantilized—you name it—my catalogue of despondency seemed endless in my interactions with this angakok. Maybe this is how it should be, I thought, this is what I deserved, representing as I must centuries of colonial intervention, or something like that, though I was in Pangnirtung only as a kind of stenographer for elderly people who told folktales that I fully understood to be indispensable and sacred to Inuit culture and history.
But this angakok couldn’t care less what I knew or didn’t know, or if I did or did not harbor good intentions. He wanted me to walk backwards two thousand miles south. So far he had followed me from grave marker to grave marker in the cemetery, muttered at me, spat at me, jammed his thumbs up my nostrils, and threatened to imprison me in a snow globe. I had to admire his inventive tenacity even while wanting him to disappear. Even knowing he might kill me. Part of his résumé as an angakok was that he had killed people.
He had won. Whatever battle we were having, he had won it. I could already feel myself leaving Pangnirtung. Such a beautiful place, really, but it had become impossible for me. Let’s face it, I thought, I have become unhinged. In the convenience store Michael said, “This angakok won’t leave until you leave.”
So I arranged for a flight out. The morning before I left, however, I recorded a story, which when typed out amounted to only a couple of pages. A woman named Jenny Arnateeyk—she was the elderly caretaker of the cemetery—told it, and I gave it the title “The Visitor Put in a Snow Globe,” which pretty much sums up the plot.
The Visitor Put in a Snow Globe
A visitor arrived and an angakok arrived at about the same time and things got bad right away. The next day the angakok put the visitor inside a snow globe. He got right to it. He didn’t hesitate. Then the angakok dropped the snow globe through the ice.
The snow globe floated up again and could be seen just under the ice if you rubbed the snow away with the side of your hand. A lot of people did this, mostly children.
Some days passed by. The angakok said, “Have you noticed how much better the weather has been since I dropped that snow globe through the ice? Have you noticed how many fish have been caught? How much better everyone is eating these days?”
When children looked at the snow globe, they saw that the visitor was keeping busy. He had a little house in there. He had a fireplace that never ran out of wood, so he kept warm. It didn’t seem so bad except he was under the ice. That had to be strange for the visitor. Children visited him every day—that must have been good for him.
One day the angakok said, “I’m going a long way to visit some ravens. Then I’m going even farther to visit some other ravens. When I’m gone, don’t take pity on the fellow inside the snow globe. If you let him out, the weather will be terrible and all the fish will swim great distances away.”
But when the angakok left to visit ravens, the people in the village took pity, and they got the snow globe out from under the ice. Then the visitor was his normal size again, and he said, “Thank you. I was only visiting.”
“How was it inside a snow globe?” someone asked.
“Unusual.”
“Well, then—you’d better leave.”
The visitor left on a mail plane. The villagers waited for the weather to turn and for all the fish to leave. But the weather stayed all right, and there were plenty of fish to eat. The villagers hoped the angakok kept visiting ravens for many years to come.
All this happened quite recently.
I returned only once to Pangnirtung, to write about soapstone carvings, in late August of 1992, taking the hour and a half flight from Frobisher Bay to the village’s airstrip. I stayed with an Inuit host family for a week; their prefabricated house overlooked Pangnirtung Harbor. My hosts assured me that it was “too early” for any angakok to arrive, and I was greatly relieved. It was clear that my previous visit had become part of local lore, and from the little I could gather, my difficulties at that time had become a kind of entertainment.
Once I had unpacked, I went to meet the three soapstone carvers whose work I was to write about, and they told me that only weeks earlier a photographer from Nova Scotia had been in the village to take pictures. This turned out to be Robert Frank, one of the great twentieth-century photographers. Frank’s five-day visit to Pangnirtung is not a part of his biography much mentioned, but to my mind the photographs he took there—the stark, bouldered terrain, the hardened mud roads, the prefabricated Inuit houses, the graveyard—are commensurate on every level with the photographs he took over the course of decades in various parts of Nova Scotia. In a book titled Pangnirtung, he writes: “Prefabricated homes along the main road in Pangnirtung. At times a decorated window—reflections inside or outside. Stones—maybe a balance of sky above . . .”
In the autumn of 2006, I visited Robert Frank in his Bleecker Street apartment in Greenwich Village, a few days before we held an on-stage conversation at the New York Public Library. I had brought him an Inuit drawing of a spirit hut composed by an artist in Eskimo Point. We listened to a Bob Dylan album, went to dinner on First Avenue. When we returned to his upstairs workroom, he rummaged around in a filing cabinet until he found a folder labeled “Pangnirtung.” He removed three photographs, signed and dated them, and offered them as a gift to me.
I was moved by this spontaneous generosity. I looked at the photographs and mentioned that I recognized a house in one of them, which had a poster of a tiger in the window, a tropical beast in the Arctic, open-mawed with sharp teeth showing. We both recalled Canadian flags displayed in other windows. I said that Pangnirtung was one of the bleakest places I had ever been in, yet the people, with a few exceptions, were quite hospitable. Robert Frank said he remembered seeing the complete weather-bleached skull of a whale in the graveyard. That evening in his apartment, we spoke mainly about Pangnirtung. He had fond memories of the place. He had especially liked the graveyard. “It’s beautiful there, don’t you think?”
Two days before I left Pangnirtung on my second visit, the band formerly known as Turbulence, formerly known as Nanook the Gook, and now called Night All Day, came to town. Edward Shaimaiyuk had flown them in. The only member of the original group remaining was the drummer, Tommy Novaqirq, whose radio indictment back in 1981 was still vivid in my memory. By my estimate, Tommy was nearly forty years old now—“an aging rocker,” he said self-mockingly. He looked more than a little the worse for wear. He was quite surprised to see me, not only because ten years had passed, but what was I doing in Pangnirtung anyway? When we got the niceties out of the way, he said, “Well, yeah, people just kind of run into each other up here, don’t they?”
The band traveled light. They set up their minimal equipment—instruments, speakers, and microphones—in a kind of warehouse space. Their performance drew about two dozen people of all ages. There was some makeshift shuffle-dancing, some drunkenness, and a few teenage girls who wanted to travel with the band. “Not too many people in the room,” Tommy said later, “but we had the music cranked up loud so everyone in Pangnirtung could hear it, eh?”
At the outset of the performance, the lead singer mentioned that Tommy was the only original member of Nanook the Gook and that they had CDs for sale. Then Night All Day launched into the first of five consecutive John Lennon songs, and I thought, So strange—all these years, the repertoire hasn’t changed at all. But after a brief intermission a you
ng Inuit guitarist (I never learned his name) began a medley of stunning vocal imitations of the most popular Canadian artists: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell (his version a little too falsetto, but still splendid), Robbie Robertson, Gordon Lightfoot (performed with notable mockery), and a heart-wrenching rendition of the McGarrigle Sisters’ “Heart Like a Wheel.” During the second intermission I told the young guitar player that with the exception of Gordon Lightfoot, those were some of my favorite singers. “You being the one European in the room, no big surprise there, eh?” he said, laughing, and I laughed, too. “But me too, I love them singers, but they ain’t the only Canadians with talent.”
Late in the evening, I sat drinking rotgut coffee with Tommy in a small room adjacent to the post office, just the two of us. His facility with English was much improved since I had first met him. He told me he was still living in Eskimo Point and now took care of his two daughters; his wife had left him for good. He filled me in on the other original members of Nanook the Gook, especially about the fate of Peter Shaimaiyuk and his time in New York City, where he had been arrested and jailed for running out on a hotel bill. There was no particular reason for him to reminisce with me, except the fact that I’d asked questions and he didn’t seem to mind answering them; back in 1981 I had been just another “come-and-gone-type visitor” to the Arctic. He did become more animated when we spoke about the night John Lennon had been murdered. “It was bad for everyone,” he said. “Bad for everyone. Still is. Them songs don’t get old, though, eh? I feel beat to shit, but the songs don’t.”
I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place Page 11
