Sixty Degrees North

by Malachy Tallack

  During the Second World War, the United States took on two major building projects in Canada. The first was the Alaska Highway, passing through British Columbia and the Yukon, which the army completed with immense effort in just eight months in 1942. The road cut a 1,700 mile slice through a part of the country few had ever visited, and it made regular land access to the north a reality for the very first time. The second project was the Canol (Canadian Oil) road and pipeline, between Norman Wells and Whitehorse. Equipment and supplies for that project had to be carried through Fort Smith, and the increase in traffic required an upgrade of the portage road from Fort Fitzgerald, which the army undertook. The work also necessitated a winter road to Hay River, on the south shore of the Great Slave Lake. These projects, along with the air bases the army constructed at Smith and elsewhere, changed the north forever. The region would never again be so isolated from the rest of the country. When the Second World War came to an end, the population quickly began to rise.

  Canada’s north is woven together with the stories of people who’ve chosen to leave the south behind. A considerable percentage of the non-indigenous population were born elsewhere, and they bring with them a profusion of histories. Some come here to escape the frantic pace of the south; others come to find work, or quiet. Some stay only a short time; others never leave. But these people bring to the north an instinct towards change. They help to create a sense of a place not yet complete, a place still in the making.

  One such immigrant is Ib Kristensen, who has spent more than forty years in Fort Smith. On a warm afternoon I sat with him outside North of 60 Books on Portage Avenue, the shop and café that he and his wife Lillian opened together in 1975. We sipped our coffees and watched as his sheepdog ran to greet each visitor to the store. A few ragged clouds moved overhead, throwing thin shadows onto the grass around us. Ib leaned back in his seat, his white hair and beard neatly trimmed, his glasses perched comfortably upon his face. He smiled as he spoke of the half-lifetime he’d spent in this town. ‘I’m very fortunate to have found this place,’ he told me.

  In the winter of 1959, after a stormy Atlantic crossing, Ib and Lillian arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They had $400 in their pockets and not a word of English in their mouths. Remembering how he felt on that cold day, more than fifty years ago, Ib shook his head. ‘How on earth did we get here?’ he laughed. Just a few months before, the couple had walked into a Canadian government travel bureau in Copenhagen and sat down to watch a film about Vancouver. They’d made up their minds to leave Europe, but hadn’t yet decided where they would go. ‘I didn’t feel there was enough room for me in Denmark,’ Ib explained. In that film they saw a place with more room than a person could ever need, more room than a person could even imagine. The pair signed their emigration papers that same afternoon.

  From Halifax, the Kristensens travelled west by train through the vast belly of the country. They crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, arriving in Vancouver, which would be their home for the next eight years. Ib was a bookbinder and typographer, and Lillian a weaver, and both found employment in the city. But Ib’s work would later take him back east, to McGill University in Montreal. There, the Kristensens and their two sons spent the end of the 1960s. But the stay was not an entirely happy one. Quebec nationalism was on the rise, and with it came an increasing military presence in the city. ‘I grew up in the war,’ said Ib. ‘I didn’t want to see a uniform ever again.’ And so the couple looked north. They wanted a place where they could live together as a family and as part of a community, and in 1971 they chose Fort Smith. They purchased an old log house for $500 and the land it sat on for $1,000. Ib took a carpentry course at the college, and they made themselves a home.

  By the time the Kristensens arrived here, Fort Smith had either become a victim of northern development or its beneficiary, depending on your view. Its former roles, as entryway and de facto capital of the Northwest Territories, had both come to an abrupt end during the 1960s. In the early years of the decade a road and railway had been built all the way from Edmonton to Hay River, bypassing Fort Smith and effectively making its portage route redundant. Then, in 1967, the Canadian government decided upon an official capital for the Territory, and ‘luckily’, as Ib puts it, ‘Yellowknife got that’. While a few government jobs did and do remain, the focus shifted elsewhere, and the town’s responsibilities disappeared. Almost overnight it changed from a bustling gateway to a place without purpose at the end of a long dirt road. Things could easily have ended, but they didn’t.

  Ib Kristensen is an old man now. He talks slowly, with the composure of someone who’s considered his words long before he’s spoken them. He smiles broadly and often, with a warmth that is both generous and genuine, and he talks of this town as though there were nowhere else he could be. There is a place for everyone, he told me, and this is his place.

  When Lillian Kristensen died in 2004, Ib decided to retire and sell North of 60 Books. He joined me there as a fellow customer (albeit one who was welcomed with a hug by the current owner). As we sat speaking on the lawn, Ib recalled the freedom and potential he found here in the early ’70s, when Fort Smith’s future was uncertain. Those who shared this town felt a responsibility to create the kind of place they wanted to live in, the community was a thing to be moulded and improved. And that sense, of somewhere unfinished and bristling with possibility, has not yet faded away. ‘There’s an immense opportunity to do things in a place like this,’ Ib said. ‘If there’s something you want to do and there isn’t anyone else doing it here, you just start. If you want that kind of freedom, it’s still here.’

  When the portage route along the Slave River became redundant, everything changed. No longer was this town a key staging post on the road to the north; no longer was it held aloft on the tide of northern development. Instead, the country’s eyes looked elsewhere: to Hay River and Yellowknife and Whitehorse. And the town turned too – away from the river, and away from the flow of people and money that had given it life. Fort Smith turned towards itself, and became, to borrow Wendell Berry’s phrase, ‘the centre of its own attention’. This was once a transient-hearted gathering of service providers on a portage route to the north. Like a commuter town, its focus was always on the elsewhere. But today this is not the case. Today Fort Smith is that most precious of things: a community that recognises and values itself as such. It has an inward gaze and a preoccupation with the local that both requires and reinforces a genuine acknowledgement of interdependence. That acknowledgement is crucial to the nature of the place.

  We live in a time of great division and alienation, in which ‘social networking’, a parody of community, is passed off as a viable alternative or replacement for it. To recognise the interdependence of people upon each other – of people who share a place – is the fundamental act of community. And it is, today, a radical act, a willing and deliberate entanglement that ignores the siren cry of solitary freedom. The places where this is still the dominant way of living are, for me, places that foster hope. Not the hope that we may go backwards, and try to live as our grandparents lived. But rather, the hope that what has been diminished in this past century – the wisdom and intimacy of community life – may not be entirely lost. Fort Smith is such a place, and the reasons it remains so are primarily geographical.

  Where economic factors allow, communities are strengthened by remoteness. In Shetland, small islands such as Fetlar, Out Skerries and Fair Isle have maintained a kind of togetherness even as they have battled depopulation, job losses and other threats. In part this is due to the inherent centeredness of islands, but it’s also an issue of simple practicality. In places such as these, recognition of the community is not really optional. Any other way of living would be destructive. Remoteness exposes the vulnerability of a place, and it makes clear the absolute dependence of people upon each other.

  Fort Smith too is an island, surrounded not by water but by an ocean of trees. And it is certainly remote. Hay R
iver is the closest settlement of any size, and a 350-mile round trip is, happily, too far for commuting or for regular shopping excursions. With the exception of those few who fly back and forth to Yellowknife for well-paid jobs in the diamond mines, Fort Smith’s citizens are largely contained in Fort Smith and in the neighbouring hamlets of Fort Fitzgerald and Salt River. The community that’s developed here, for that reason, seems very much like that of a small island. People recognise that they are indebted to each other, and that such indebtedness is not a burden. There is, too, a kind of levelling that leaves few observable social divisions within the town, and the relationship between ‘European’ and indigenous Canadians is generally good. (The population here is mixed quite evenly. Around one third are Dene, a group of northern First Nations with languages in the Athabascan family; one third are Métis, aboriginal people of mixed European and First Nations descent; and one third are ‘white’.) For those who choose to accept the constraints of geographical remoteness and to stay put, a connection necessarily develops with the here, and that connection can grow into a deeper, broader engagement. Such communities are never perfect, but they strive in the right direction.

  It was early afternoon. The hot, sticky day thickened and grew heavy. A dark warning grumbled above the forest, and everything hung silent for a moment. There was a pause like a breath inhaled, then held, and the pressure rose as though from the ground itself. The air seemed to stiffen around us like a tourniquet. And then the storm opened. The first fat raindrops fell in a clatter, then a roar, punching the dust up from the street’s edge. Then came the thunder, raging into the town. Rain descended in great, gasping sheets, punctured by lightning. The ditches, which earlier seemed needlessly deep, were full and overflowing in minutes. Everywhere was water.

  I escaped into the Church of St Isodore, part of the Mission Historic Park, where buildings from the town’s Catholic mission are being rebuilt or restored. The hammering rain increased, and soon it was coming through the roof and in the door. Hail stones erupted from a bulging black sky. The noise was enormous. I wandered around the room, taking my time with the interpretive signs, loitering, until the girl behind the desk invited me to play pool on the old table in the centre of the church. We shouted to each other across game after game, struggling to hear above the noise outside. It was more than two hours before the rain eased enough for me to venture back out to the street.

  Later, when the storm had cleared, I walked out to the bluff overlooking the river. From the bench there I could see the Rapids of the Drowned, and the white specks of pelicans on the water. I let my eyes relax into the view, enjoying the distance. For most of my life I’ve lived in houses that looked out over the sea. In Fort Smith, hemmed in by trees, I felt half-blinded, and that spot offered the nearest I could find to a horizon. I imagined that water rushing on to the Arctic. Ahead of it whole oceans had gone, while Fort Smith stood watching. The Dene name for this area is Thebacha: ‘beside the rapids’. The story of this place has been defined by the river.

  That night I struggled back into my tent. My arms were red and lumpy, sunburnt and bitten; I looked like a victim of some hideous disease. But the insects had vanished, and the evening was chilly and quiet. The jack pines around the campsite whispered and scritched, as though they didn’t want to be heard, and the sharp, sweet smell of them filled the air. The more nights I stayed in the tent, the more I was conscious of the ground beneath me. I had no sleeping mat, and though I’d not noticed for the first few nights, I was now aware of tree roots, twigs and pine cones spread out underneath my body. I could feel their shapes pressing into me.

  The storm broke again around 11.30 p.m., just as the fading light forced me to give up reading. A few distant rumbles had become closer and more frequent, and all at once the tent was lit up. I counted the seconds. One, two, three, four … it was twelve seconds before another crack and long burst of thunder filled the air. A few spots of rain turned at once into a deluge, clawing wildly at the sides of the tent. I sat up and checked that everything was tight and able to keep me dry, then lay on my back and waited. Another flash. Eight seconds. And another. Five seconds.

  Wood Buffalo National Park was on high alert because of the long period of dry weather. Lightning strikes could easily set off a forest fire. The previous morning the sky had been blue-grey with smoke from a blaze somewhere in the park. The helicopters were out and the watchtowers would be manned. The rain was a constant howl on the canvas, and I closed my eyes, trying to let the sound wash over me. Somehow, I slept.

  I was woken at six a.m. by the light and the cold. It was close to freezing, and I was shivering hard. I dragged more clothes on and curled up, trying to find some warmth. Sleep arrived again then, stealing quietly into the tent, and a clear, bright morning followed close behind, without a hint of the night’s violence.

  ‘White people have lost their relationship with the land’, François Paulette told me. ‘They must have had it or they could not have survived for thousands of years. But now all people think about is money. All they have in their heads is money.’

  He looked at me, unsmiling, then returned to his lunch. Paulette is a former chief of the Smith’s Landing First Nation. He is an influential and respected Dene Suline elder, who today spends much of his time campaigning on land rights and the environment. When we met, he had just returned from Norway, where he’d been invited to speak to shareholders of Statoil, one of the companies exploiting the Athabasca tar sands in northern Alberta. His speech that day in Stavanger began: ‘What you do with your money is your business. But when you begin to spend your money in my territory [in a way] that disrupts and destroys our way of life, our civilisation, then that becomes my business.’

  Paulette is an imposing and intimidating figure – well over six feet tall, with long grey hair pulled back into a pony tail, and a thin moustache on his broad, rough-sculpted face. As he enters a room, attention instantly surrounds him. Everybody turns to greet him. He shakes hands, asks questions and remembers names, like a perfect statesman.

  As we sat together in a near-empty restaurant one afternoon, François spoke slowly and with a heavy accent. He paused between sentences, sometimes for long periods. During these pauses, he was not waiting for me to respond or to fill the silence. Rather, he was talking at the appropriate pace. He was gathering, carefully, his thoughts.

  ‘The Dene culture is entirely about our relationship with the land,’ he told me. ‘It is a spiritual relationship. It is emotional, mental and physical. The land is sacred, and there are protocols for everything. When I take a plant from the forest I must leave tobacco in thanks. When I am out on the river I must thank the river.’

  This insistence on gratitude and propitiation is not unlike that of the Inuit in Greenland. It is a focus on reciprocity, and on the bond between people and place. For the Dene, the land is not a resource, it is a presence; it is not something separate from their community, it is integral to it. When François told me about a hydroelectric dam that developers hoped to build on the Slave River – an idea first raised in the late 1970s but still no closer to reality at the time of my visit – he was adamant. By restricting the flow of the Slave and flooding the land above (some of which is owned by the Dene) the dam would not only ‘desecrate the river’, it would ‘desecrate our history’. ‘It will not happen in my lifetime,’ he told me.

  It would be fair to say that Canada’s indigenous people suffered less direct violence, historically, at the hands of European settlers than those of the United States. But that would not be saying much. Over the centuries, native people here were exploited, discriminated against and abused. Battles over land rights continue to this day, and the active suppression of native traditions and culture went on until the late twentieth century. From the 1870s, thousands of young indigenous people were forced to attend ‘residential schools’ – such as Breynat Hall in Fort Smith – whose principal aims were the Christianisation and assimilation of ‘Indians’ into mainstream
society. Often, children were banned from speaking their own languages, and some had little or no contact with their families for months or even years. Many suffered physical and sexual abuse in these institutions, and sanitation levels were often appallingly low; at least 4,000 children died, mostly from diseases such as tuberculosis.

  In 2008, twelve years after the closure of the last of the residential schools, the leaders of all of Canada’s main political parties issued a public apology, as did representatives of the churches who had run them. A ‘truth and reconciliation’ commission was established to assess the enormous psychological and cultural damage done, and millions of pounds in compensation has been paid to those who attended. The legacy of the residential system is an appalling one. In their aim of separating native children from their communities, the schools were very successful; but they were far less so when it came to ‘assimilation’. Graduates often found themselves unable to fit in, either back at home or elsewhere, and a wide range of social and psychological problems became commonplace: post-traumatic stress disorder, criminality, alcohol and drug abuse, depression.

  Although what happened to young native Canadians has been described as ‘cultural genocide’, the residential schools did not succeed in eradicating the traditions of indigenous people. Those traditions survived. And they did so, in part, thanks to the tenacity and articulacy of campaigners like François Paulette, who have helped to bring the concerns of Canada’s First Nations to the fore. But François’s words troubled me. His verdict on ‘white people’ sounded like a judgement that could not be overturned; it was a sweeping, cultural indictment. And that was hardly surprising. The Dene’s relationship with the land has evolved over countless generations, and is passed down through stories and protocols. But these are culturally exclusive, and the ways of thinking they engender cannot be recreated from the outside. The understanding of the Dene is, for the rest of us, largely inaccessible. So if François Paulette is right – if European cultures have entirely lost the traditions by which a relationship with the land is maintained, are we then destined to be estranged from our places? Can we never truly be at home?