In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  The sky is clearing, but it’s cold. Ice spangles the net enclosure. Spring has come earlier this year, the herders say, and they worry that the mosquitoes will soon arrive. It’s time to go. The helicopter is scheduled to pick us up at 11. We pile our gear on a waiting sled and ski behind it to Snopa to wait.

  Loose village horses are running. Tails flying and heads high, they are prancing and snorting. One thick-legged gray workhorse bucks across the field in front of us. We’re on what the villagers call the airfield, an empty, snow-covered pasture with a tiny shack at one end. The reindeer and the sled are parked under a limp wind sock. While waiting for the helicopter to arrive, we tour the village. It is a handful of wooden houses from the 1800s, with beautifully carved window frames and lace curtains. Each house has a greenhouse and a garden plot. Horse-drawn sleighs carry milk from the dairy. There’s a communal wood-fired bath and sauna and fresh bread just coming out of the village bakery. In the schoolhouse, the teacher proudly points to the portrait of Pushkin that has replaced the one of Lenin. A small store sells cigarettes, hard candy, packaged cookies, and vodka. By morning most of the men in the village are drunk.

  Nikolai and the others have been searching for Fyodor. He was seen running between two barns but quickly hid. He knows he’s in trouble because he didn’t come back to help gather the reindeer. Later, when he shows himself, the herders shun him, and he mopes off, no longer a “happy drunk.”

  We lie on the ground, our heads on our backpacks, looking skyward for the helicopter. Arthun gives me a gift of a reindeer’s headstall made of leather and bone. “Everything we make is done with a knife and an ax,” he says proudly. “Soon we will be away from this place and there won’t be anyone getting drunk.” We stroll to the cliff overlooking the Snopa River, the one we were to cross just a few days ago. Now the ice has melted and the water runs brown. Arthun says, “I can hear water running everywhere. The reindeer’s antlers are growing back, and today I saw four geese, that’s how I know it is spring.”

  Later he says, “I’m sorry you had to see us this way, with some of us getting drunk. It’s usually not like this. We live far from villages. I wish you could stay. Yes, a whole year would do it. Then you would know us, and after, you could go your way.”

  The helicopter lands in the bare field, a beast falling out of a nightmare. There are passengers inside who have come from other remote villages and are headed for Arkhangel’sk, women wearing helmetlike hats and thick wool coats. As we board, the herders hand up our skis and duffels. We stack them on top of the other loose baggage in the middle of the aisle.

  The door slams and the aircraft lifts with a shudder. Tears come to my eyes. I will not be here again. Cloud shadows sprout and die. I turn my head to look: It is endless, this mosaic of rotting ice and gray-green lichen. As we gain altitude, I’m instantly lost. There are no villages, no chums, no reindeer, no residence-on-Earth simply forged by bone, wood, hide, and ax. High up in the sky, I understand that the body of the tundra is bigger than all that; it dwarfs human and animal occupation. All I see are islands, hummocks, and meltwater moats, and a whole frozen world going soft in faint light. I strain to hear the lichens’ and fungi’s symbiotic song and dance, fearing that the beat will soon be a cranberry bogs’ cough, methane boiling up in a million pond pots.

  We hover, then slide over a world of leaking vessels—as if taking in a last breath. Is the Earth bleeding to death? Trees, when they appear, stain the sky with shadows that are blue, not black. Geese drop down onto water (or is it sky?) and swim against reflected cloud drift. Lake ice is gouged by thawing reindeer tracks. Collars of ice fold back from waterways. A tree goes down—I see it falling. Beyond, five swans land. A bend in the river dangles like a loose knee.

  We land at Oma, then Mezen’, then at a nameless village. As we pass into the world of trees, I look back at the vast expanse from which we have come and see that, once this generation of Komi are gone, there will be only the wiggle-worm puzzle of melting tundra, a whole planet brined.

  IN A DARK LAND

  NUNAVUT, ARCTIC CANADA

  A dream before flying north to Nunavut: Someone is dying. He’s calling my name. We’re in a dark place. A single eye is roaming the room. He asks me to grab the eye and put it in his forehead so he can see his own demise.

  DECEMBER 6. Iqaluit, Baffin Island. Falling farther and farther from sun.

  In failing light I board a small plane with insufficient heat and sit behind a teenage boy who is on crutches. He wears only a thin windbreaker, one shoe, and no socks, leaving the toes of his broken foot exposed. The young bush pilot has been staring at him, “You ought to wear more clothes. If we went down in the tundra, you’d be first to freeze.” The boy laughs, then, sheepishly, makes the sign of the cross as we take off.

  We are headed for Igloolik, a town on an island of the same name at the north end of Melville Peninsula in the eastern Canadian Arctic. Nunavut’s Arctic Archipelago, with its scattered islands and narrow straits, is more land than ice. Subsistence hunters here say they are “going out on the land” to hunt instead of “going out on the ice,” even if their prey is a marine mammal like walrus or bowhead whale, harvested on the sea ice. To the northeast, where Greenland rises mountainous and topped by an ice sheet, travel and hunting is almost exclusively on ice.

  The last pink of a short day fades as we fly northwest across the ice-scoured rock of Baffin Island. In December the top of the Earth is tilted away from the sun, and at latitude 69° N, Igloolik will have only a few hours of twilight—no direct sun. Over the years of Arctic travel, I’ve come to enjoy the trance of perennial night, but today my mood is somber.

  A howling wind buffets the plane. We fly straight into it. As night comes on, we rise above clouds into a catapulting darkness that pushes into every corner of the plane, tightening and loosening the psyche like a vise. Ahead, under clearer skies a moon glint emanates from ice. Twenty thousand years ago all this was covered with an ice sheet. Now, with that burden lifted, isostatic rebound is occurring on these gravel and bare-rock islands: Igloolik is rising three feet per century. A continental climate keeps Nunavut frigid in winter; its island archipelago and narrow straits hold sea ice firm even as other parts of the Arctic are losing their sea ice.

  The dark time in any Arctic village is quiet—not much hunting activity but plenty of meetings, planning, school functions, and equipment repair. A hunter on the plane, coming home from a meeting in Iqaluit, reminded me that in the early times, Igloolik was not a town at all but one of many seasonal camps where seminomadic families hunted abundant walrus, narwhal, and seal. Caribou were nearby—they crossed the small strait to Melville Island and went inland. Even now, hunters wear caribou anoraks and leggings because they are exceedingly warm and weatherproof.

  “Mostly we traveled,” the hunter says. “Across to Baffin, up to Pond [Inlet], west to Boothia, south to Melville. Animals took us where they wanted us, summer and winter. If we wanted to eat, we followed.”

  The plane shivers and drones. We fly across the thick waist of Baffin Island, then north along the edge of Foxe Basin. As I look out the plane window, the upended plates of rough ice near shore are sometimes visible, but very little else demarcates land from ice. From a volume of oral histories called Saqiyak, I read this: “We used the land as a tool back then. If snow was drifting, we knew the wind. We knew when blizzards were coming even when the sky was blue. Clouds told us wind was on the way. Rough water signaled land; calm water warned of drifting ice. The ice used to tell us things too. We watched it all the time. Long, wide cracks in the springtime meant the ice was thick and wouldn’t melt soon; many small cracks meant it might come apart under you. If warm weather came too early, then summer would be cold; if heat came late, the rest of the summer would be dry. We were weather-watchers. Had to be.”

  The plane changes altitude, and we drop through a raft of clouds. Still, there are no village lights or signs of life anywhere. Nuna means “earth.” Nunavut i
s the 770,000-square-mile territory claimed by and awarded to the indigenous people of Arctic Canada in April 1999 after two decades of negotiation. The founding notion of Nunavut was what its Inuit citizens call qaujimajatuqangit, or IQ, meaning “traditional Inuit knowledge.”

  The new Inuit government’s mandate was to reflect directly its people’s traditional values, knowledge, and worldviews by replacing the imposed colonial governance from Ottawa with one that would have an Inuit majority. Inuktitut, their language, was to have equal status with English. Control of lands, lives, and resources, including minerals, education, and wildlife, was to be returned to Inuit citizens. Core traditional values and cultural sustainability were key.

  That was nine years ago, and the “old ways” and the words that articulate it are said to be quickly eroding. “There is no ‘IQ’ here,” an Inuit friend says. “Despite everything that is going on in Igloolik, the accumulation of thousands of years of culture is fading away.”

  In 2006 I visited Sheila Watt-Cloutier at her quiet house on the outskirts of Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut. A tireless spokeswoman from Nunavik—northern Quebec—she was nominated for a Nobel Prize along with Al Gore. She headed the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and now travels the world with her message about the importance of Arctic peoples in a time of changing climate.

  We drink peppermint tea and look out at the icy bay.

  “We think our culture is valuable and good for everyone to know about,” Sheila begins. “We’ve lived at the top of the world for millennia without depleting a single animal or resource. It says something about the sustainability of our culture, and it speaks to the great disconnect that we are addressing up here. We are part of a very unusual place, and we are part of the world. We’ve changed from a powerful, wise culture to one that is self-destructing. We need to be as conscious as possible about controlling our own scene and to recognize what has wounded us and to keep track of who we are. It’s not about keeping to strict tradition but to be able to choose how to live.”

  She shows me a photograph of her daughter, who is an expert throat singer and tours Canada giving concerts, an example of taking something from tradition and giving it a modern twist. Sheila holds the photo in her lap and sighs deeply. Flying the world tires her. “I love it here in my little house. It’s my refuge,” she says, then begins again explaining the lost past.

  “When the cultural authority of the shaman was eliminated by missionaries, when our sovereignty was dismissed as unreal because we did not practice land ownership, a culture of dependency resulted. When you lose the power of the hunt, you lose the power of belief, language, and narrative that drove us. When we no longer live on the land properly, we lose our dignity. The wisdom of the land and the hunt builds character skills. It teaches patience, courage, sound judgment, and to be bold under pressure. These are qualities people need everywhere—these traits are transferable. The hunting culture is a modern tool kit to adapt to the world. There is no better measure of genius than to survive here, to be hospitable to what others think of as an inhospitable climate, to become one with the place, not to conquer. We Inuit embrace the cold. I don’t ever remember being cold, just happy.”

  THERE’S COMMOTION on the plane. The boy on crutches and an older woman are excitedly pointing out the window at lights in the distance. “Where’s that?” I ask. “Hall Beach,” they say in unison. Then, straight ahead over the pilot’s head, more lights appear in a frost haze. “Igloolik,” they say. The name means “a place of many winter houses.”

  It looks too big to be an Inuit village. “How many people live here?” I ask. “Too many,” is the woman’s sullen reply. On approach the island glows bright. “Sixteen hundred,” she says at last, just as the plane bounces down. “If you’d come last month, you would have seen the sun. Now you won’t see nothing. The sun left us on November 29th and won’t come back until January 14th.”

  The runway is perched on a flat bench above town. Below are rows of houses lining a horseshoe-shaped bay covered with ice. All is white. A few houses are festooned with Christmas lights. Skiffs lie on their sides, abandoned for the season at the edge of the frozen shore.

  Snowmobiles are the source of liveliness: They arrive at the airport to pick up passengers. The boy with the crutches leaps on behind a driver and zooms away. No one comes for me. Soon I’m the only one left in the tiny waiting room. An older woman asks if I have someplace to stay. It’s late, and they want to close up the airport and go home. I say yes. But I don’t know when he’ll arrive. Finally, a young woman appears and says, “John hurt his back. Can’t drive. I’m your ride.”

  I’ve come to visit John MacDonald, founder of Igloolik’s Oral History Project, in existence for more than 20 years. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, John grew up in Malawi, southeast Africa, but made his way improbably to the far north, where he met his wife, Carolyn. They lived in various Inuit communities but landed in Igloolik, with John heading the Igloolik Research Centre for visiting scientists. Carolyn founded an early-learning center and a Head Start program.

  Fluent in Inuktitut, both John and Carolyn are knowledgeable about Igloolik’s material and intellectual culture and stalwart members of the community. They hunt and fish, build kayaks, and sew traditional fish-skin pouches; they know the legends and the way-finding words. But the median age in Igloolik is 18, the unemployment rate is nearly 80 percent, and the town contributes its share of suicides to the Nunavut rate of 77 per 100,000 people. John and Carolyn have choices others here don’t have. They can always leave and go home. “Except,” John says, “this is home.”

  When I met John here a year earlier, he told me about his Oral History Project. It began in 1986 as a collaboration between the Inullariit Elders Society and the Igloolik Research Centre that John headed. The aim was to collect all that remained of the traditional knowledge of the Amitturmiut—the Inuit people of the northern Foxe Basin. There are 600 carefully translated oral histories of elders in the area, each one archived and key-worded on computer software at the lab.

  “It’s always too late to begin such a project if you start thinking of all that’s been lost,” John says. “On the other hand, it’s never too late to begin.” He found that even in the 1980s, there were still plenty of people alive who had lived traditionally and were eager to pass on what they remembered from those who taught them—parents and elders—as well as the traditional ecological knowledge they knew themselves, firsthand.

  The town lights are a kind of sun, but one that has been eclipsed. I take off my winter boots and climb the stairs. “I hope you aren’t coming up here to ask about climate change,” John says, first thing. I gulp and say nothing. He’s tall, lean, and white-haired. “Because we’re not affected by it. I’m tired of the crisis narrative about global warming. It’s a lie conjured up by the southern media [i.e., in Ottawa] that diverts resources away from our real problems. What we have here is something more immediate. We have social problems, a terrible malaise. The immediate threat is to the Inuit people here—their elegant culture, so brilliantly adapted to the world of ice that has for thousands of years kept the barbaric at bay.”

  His blue-gray eyes soften. He offers me a glass of homemade wine. Red, from French grapes. He takes a sip and smiles despite the fact that he’s in pain. It’s late and Caroline is already asleep. The sky is dark and the town roads are white sheets. Snowmobiles roar by.

  I think of what Inuit hunters in Clyde River, on the east coast of Baffin Island, have said about the climate. They call it uggianaqtuq—“a friend acting strangely.” But they are more exposed to open water and the variability that comes with a warming ocean and hard winds, whereas the narrow strait that divides Igloolik from the west coast of Baffin Island is narrow and the winter sea ice protected.

  Too tired to argue, I find my bed in a windowless basement room. It’s cozy and warm. John’s outburst about climate change puzzles me. Eight months earlier, when I visited him here, he seemed less angry, but as the week pro
gresses, I begin to understand the urgency of his appeal.

  MORNING. Over porridge John and I talk. “The point of loss for the Inuit people here,” John says, “was when they were moved into town. That’s when things changed radically. Leadership was undermined, the skills needed to live on the land that had been learned and passed on for thousands of years, the complexity of the language and the knowledge grew weaker. The young people who have become true hunters can be named in one breath. It’s becoming an unusual choice. Revered, but unusual.”

  Out on “the land” extended families lived seminomadically, moving from camp to camp, following the ice, the weather, and the animals. Home was anywhere there was food and family: Skins were prepared, clothes were made and mended, the walrus-blubber lamp—the qulliq—was kept lit, and children were raised. Each group had internal allegiances. How could they understand the instruments of authority that came from the outside, from the governing structures in the south? No one looked up to these leaders. They weren’t the decision-makers from within family groups. “The change happened only 50 years ago, and the people here are still in culture shock,” John says.

  On the radio Christmas carols are sung slightly out of tune in Inuktitut. “The lure was, at first, schooling,” he tells me. “They forced the children to come into town to get an education, and eventually the parents followed. There was also the lure of medicine and religion. A Catholic priest told them that if they confessed, they would be absolved of their sins. This pleased them. They could step out of their taboo-ridden society, toss away their amulets, and do whatever they wanted to do,” John says.

  Both Catholic priests and Anglican ministers forced people from the Igloolik area into baptism, pressuring them to say yes in what appeared to be a competition for parishioners. The priests went to the camps and told the people that God would give them everything they wanted, that God’s power was stronger than the shamans’. As people were brought into a sedentary life—nomads have always been mistrusted by the greater society—the authority of a centralized, single God mirrored their relocation to town and replaced the lively pan-holy, spirit-glutted land.