In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  “Animal transformations”: “Sometimes animals take the shape of a person. I’m not certain how it happens, something extraordinary, something to tell others about something—this is inuruuqajuq. It may be a dog or another species of animal. You would first notice it as an animal, next thing you notice, after you turned away for a short while, then you see a person in its place. Sometimes the animals get the capacity to talk, at least that’s what I’ve heard, they could talk. They were not feared. They were not scary at all. But when a loon uses its dance-sound in mid-flight there is something amiss. There are birds that fly in circles above you and they are chirping, this too was not liked by people. They know that something unpleasant is going to be heard. There were things that made you to know things, bad things, to happen.” (George Agiaq Kappianaq oral history)

  “Gratitude”: “At the time when I was still too small to go on hunting trips and we were living in the igloo, the windows were frosted, including a frost built up on the panes at the entrance. When the frost starts to melt on its own, though the heat has not changed, my mother would immediately start to express her gratitude and announce that the hunters had succeeded in catching a game animal, and our supplies had been replenished. So it would come to be. She was able to tell from the defrosting of the windows.” (Lucien Ukaliannuk oral history)

  “Shelter”: “This time of year we would start to move into qarmaq (sod house), while some would still be in a tent. Even when there was snow around, some would have stayed in a tent. Some would move into an igloo, using tullaaq (stomped hardened snow). Some would use slabs of ice hewn from freezing ice, tugaliaq, and some would have made a qarmaq before it got too cold. When you were in a tent in autumn, in the morning you wake up you will find your footwear frozen. Water in the pails would be frozen, then when the qulliq is lit, will slowly get warmer, so during the day the pails finally melt, that was the way it was. Everything was really hard in those days. It is now so different. Now we are controlled by money, in those days money was something we never thought of. The only thing in our minds was game animals and the need to survive.” (Louis Alianakuluk Utak oral history)

  WILLIAM EDWARD PARRY was given the task of finding a passage to Asia by the British Admiralty. The Napoleonic wars in Europe had ended, and Trafalgar, having grown bored, asked the navy to map the world and seek a shorter passage to Asia. Northwest Passage mania emerged quickly.

  In 1824, on a second expedition to find the Northwest Passage, Parry and George Lyon sailed two ships, the Fury and the Hecla, up the wide waters of Foxe Basin. As winter came on, they anchored near the walrus-hunting village of Igloolik. By late summer the ice in the strait named for their ships was already three feet thick and the land was fog shrouded. For the next ten months Parry, Lyon, and their crews lived adjacent to 200 Inuit hunters and their families, going hunting with the men and taking Inuit “wives” for the season.

  The Iglulingmiut, the local villagers, thought Parry had come looking for the remains of his mother, since their legends told of white people being the progeny of a marriage between a woman and a dog who lived on Qiqertarjuk, an island near Igloolik. The villagers helped Parry build an ice wall around the Fury to protect it, and drew accurate maps of the Melville Coast, assuring him that a passage existed, though, because of the ice, he was never able to find a way through to Asia.

  George Lyon took to village life. In the Private Journals of G. F. Lyon he gave meticulous descriptions of the seminomadic hunters he came to know in scenes of both filth and splendor: “On the 25th of September 1822 I landed to visit my old acquaintances and found their huts in a most filthy state, owing to the mildness of the weather, and to their internal warmth: the water was dropping from the roofs, the ice had melted on the floors, and the juices of thawing and half-putrid walrus flesh, with other watery inconveniences, had made large sloppy puddles in the low entrances, through which we were obliged to crawl on our hands and knees.”

  Winter houses were made of bone and sod; igluit (the plural of igloo) were connected by low tunnels that fanned out like stars. They were built with walrus-ivory snow knives on the sea ice near the breathing holes of seals. Farther down the coast Lyon described a house made of freshwater slabs of ice: “Toolemak’s dwelling was a perfect octagon and so transparent that even at some paces distant it was possible to distinguish those who stood within it one from the other; yet at the same time, it was so airtight, as to be completely warm.”

  Parry and Lyon enjoyed their new Igloolik friends and admired the ingenuity of their clothing: the deerskin mittens, double sealskin boots with walrus-hide soles, and “summer frocks” made of duck skins with the feathers worn next to the body.

  Lyon reported that the women of Igloolik softened the bird skins by chewing them and stretching them on racks to dry. They made whalebone pots, ivory ornaments, gear for bows, fishing lines, and harnesses for dogs. “They also have an ingenious method of making lamps and cooking pots of flat slabs of stone, which they cement together by a composition of seal’s blood applied warm, the vessel being held at the same time over the flame of a lamp, which dries the plaster to the hardness of a stone,” Lyon wrote.

  Their kayaks were 19 feet long, with 64 ribs made of dwarf willow, small bones, and whalebone. Dogsleds were six feet long, made entirely of bone with walrus-ivory runners. When hunting walrus in summer, they hoisted their kayaks on a piece of drift ice near a herd of resting walruses and paddled the ice toward the sleeping animals. Harpoon lines were fastened to the ice, so when a walrus was struck, it could not escape. When the animal tired out, the hunter put his kayak in the water and lay low, and when close enough, speared the animal to death.

  Social life was easygoing: Marriages, divorces, wife exchanges, and mutual infidelities were carried on in mostly amicable ways, in what Lyon called “extraordinary civilities.” Although the paternity of children was never certain, men treated their mates’ progeny with equal care.

  Lyon also observed Toolemak, who was a shaman, as he went into a trance: “A very hollow, yet powerful voice, certainly much different from the tones of Toolemak, now chanted for some time, and a strange jumble of hisses, groans, shouts, and gabblings like a turkey, succeeded in rapid order.” Later, as the trance subsided, Lyon remarked: “The voice gradually sank from our hearing at first, and a very indistinct hissing succeeded: in its advance, it sounded like the tone produced by the wind on the base chord of an Eolian harp; this soon changed to a rapid hiss like that of a rocket, and Toolemak with a yell announced his return.”

  According to Lyon, healing consisted of blowing on the diseased organs and open wounds. Newborn infants were swathed in the dried intestines of “some animal,” Lyon reported, then washed in its mother’s urine. Charms made of the foot bones of wolverines, the front teeth of musk oxen, the eyeteeth of foxes, and the bones and teeth of fish were worn. A string of miniature knives made of walrus ivory was worn to charm the weather. Parry and Lyon ate the local specialty, igunaq (fermented walrus), and, in turn, taught European dances to the locals. They bought dogsleds and dogs and made frequent forays onto the ice. But when Parry had an argument with one of the shamans and tried to kill him with an ax, it’s said that the blade failed to penetrate the man’s body. “We didn’t need guns or axes. Our weapons were carried inside,” Sheila Watt-Cloutier said about the story. The shaman was reportedly so angry he made the ice become so thick that no outsider was able to sail to Igloolik or penetrate Fury and Hecla Strait for 40 years.

  AS SOON AS EXPLORERS and whalers from the British Isles and other parts of Europe and from America began plying the coast of Melville Peninsula and the low-lying island of Igloolik, flour, sugar, knives, cooking pots, steel sewing needles, and wood, plus rifles, ammunition, disease, and rum entered Inuit life. Some hunters took seasonal employment on the ships and used cash or trade goods to buy food for their families, to make up for the months they weren’t out on the land. The accordions and square dances brought by Scottish crews are still practi
ced today, and square dances are called in Inuktitut.

  With the good came the bad. Whalers took on seasonal “wives” who bore half-breed children soon abandoned by their fathers. Epidemics of southern and European diseases followed. Bowhead whales and walruses were hunted almost to the point of extinction by American and European whalers during the 19th century.

  As soon as the whalers stopped coming, the marine mammal populations began recovering, but the march of outsiders continued. In 1910 a Catholic priest named Etienne Barzin established a chapel at Avaaja, a camp 15 miles north of Igloolik. Anglican Bibles were printed in the newly created Inuit syllabary. Before then Inuit had no written language. It was easy to learn and to read, and it helped spread Christianity.

  With a wry smile, John says, “Theirs was a taboo-glutted society. When they found out they could come to town once a month and make a confession and didn’t need to follow the strict rules of taboos anymore, they were relieved. It freed up their time. It was a shortcut to salvation.”

  Traders replaced whalers. In 1921 the Hudson’s Bay Company opened a post in Pond Inlet, and by 1930 another post had been established in Igloolik. Fox furs were the rage in Europe. Subsistence hunters were encouraged to stop winter hunts and become trappers. The Hudson’s Bay Company bought the furs in exchange for credit at the store, where they could buy food and “southern goods.”

  While these amenities certainly eased a difficult life, it corrupted the seasonal round of subsistence living. Families congregated closer and closer to the Hudson’s Bay store, and soon enough, the game nearby was hunted out. Dependency on the fur trade increased, but when the fox-fur craze came to a sudden end in the 1940s, the hunters faced starvation again. They had lost track of the cycle of game as well as the skills and “second sight” of the great hunters who had come before them.

  But all was not lost. According to the Danish explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, who came to Igloolik in 1923, shamans and elders flocked to him, telling him stories. “The ‘old days’ were not that long ago,” John MacDonald reminds me. In village after village, camp after camp, Rasmussen talked to anyone who would talk to him, and most did, and took meticulous notes—3,000 pages of them.

  They told Rasmussen that in all living things were forces that rendered them sensitive to the rules of life, and that these forces were found in names and in the soul. The soul gave the particular appearance to each being. In humans, the soul was a tiny human being, in the caribou, it was a tiny caribou, and so on. The inusia, the soul, was situated in a bubble of air in the groin. Any offense against the soul became an evil spirit. Evil spirits could be used by shamans to harm people who had disobeyed the rules.

  Shamans were male and female, and sometimes couples who jumped easily between the spirit, animal, and human realms. They could cause death or they could cure, they could find out where the animals were, and they could find people who had gone missing on the land “by turning into spirits and go looking for them,” one elder said. She begged Rasmussen to take her with him as he traveled from camp to camp by dogsled. She jumped on his sled and would not get off, and ended up living for a year with Rasmussen and his lover, Anarulunguaq, and her cousin, Miteq.

  “We used to believe that animals all have spirits. Birds, lemmings, seals, caribou, all kinds of animals have spirits. Even weasels and foxes have spirit and shaman could move into animals’ bodies,” one of Rasmussen’s informants said. Among the people, songs, amulets, and strict taboos were the spiritual and social tools to maintain a thriving society; modesty in front of the weather, animals, and one’s relatives was mandatory.

  The human alone was weak and powerless. There were ruling powers that could take or give life. Sila was the spirit of weather and intelligence, of consciousness and nature. Nuliajuk, or Arnaluk Takanaluk, was “the woman down there,” who controlled the marine mammals and the seas. She was pictured in a drawing by one of Rasmussen’s informants as a tiny, pear-shaped being with long, spiked hair sticking straight up.

  The Iglulingmiut and the Avilingmiut believed that some of them were marked by Sila and held its power within them. Those born on days of good weather were called either silatiariktut, good-weather souls, or silaluktut, bad-weather souls. Those who carried the spirit could influence weather by going outside naked, walking around, and crying, “Silaga nauk, ungass, ungaa?” (“Where is my weather, where is my weather?”) It would then begin to snow.

  Wind had a spirit, and when it blew too hard, the shaman wrapped himself tightly in his clothes so the wind couldn’t blow anymore. The spirit of the snowdrift was called Oqalorak. It ruled the sharp edges. The harder a blizzard blew, the more the spirit was delighted. Oqalorak sent storms down onto hunters and laughed at them.

  The moon spirit was Tarqip. He lived with his sister, Seqineq, the sun. As a result of an incestuous relationship, in which Tarqip accidentally slept with Seqineq, the brother and sister lived in a double house in the land of the dead.

  Helping spirits could be almost anything. One called Nartoq had a nose that protruded from its forehead, a lower jaw that was part of its chest. Its threatening behavior was meant to remind its “owner” that he was too easily angered. Another helper named Igtuk, meaning “boomer,” made the sound of thunder in the mountains. “No one knows where he stays,” Rasmussen’s informant said. “He is made otherwise than all other living things: his legs and arms are on the back of his body, his great eye is just level with his arms, whilst his nose is hidden in his mouth. On the chin is a tuft of thick hair and below it, on a line with his eye, are his ears. The mouth opens and discloses a dark abyss, and when the jaws move one can hear booming out in the country.”

  Shamans talked to these and other spirits using special words called irinaliutit. The words could be bought and sold, handed down, or communicated as a legacy before death. The shamans, using these words, could cause dead things to come back to life. They could make frost appear. They could create life out of dead things and make clothes come to life. Nature and culture were bound together tightly, no seams between. Everything was alive, walking, hunting, singing, talking, listening, behaving, and “together-living,” Rasmussen’s informants told him.

  George Aggiaq Kappianaq, born in 1917 near Igloolik, remembers meeting Rasmussen. He referred to him as a “half-breed white man” and recalled that Rasmussen’s living quarters were very bright. “On the table there were cookies in a tin. I believe I might have helped myself as much as I could,” he said. He was six years old at the time.

  George was a frequent contributor to the Oral History Project. He wanted to pass on all that he knew and remembered of life out on the land. There were suicides even then, he said, and remembers finding a man who had shot himself because “he had too much in his head.” He brought the man’s head to his mother, who was one of many local shamans, so she could “wash it out.”

  George’s life was filled with spirit helpers: “I remember seeing the helping spirit as a bird. It was this high [he raises his arm], and there was an aura. I could see it walking around, back and forth across the porch. To become a shaman you fast for five days—no food, no water. Then the person will make the sound of a bird.

  “My mother became a shaman. Her helping spirit was that of a white man from the ship. She said she could see his aura as a bright thing from that person. Even in the dark she said that it became bright as day. A woman can be even stronger than a male shaman. Very much so. Some women were able to be a lot more powerful than men in shamanism. That’s because of their mental state. They are more reluctant to harm others. For this reason they are more powerful.”

  George had a spiritual bent as well. He said: “I could see a beast right through the wall [of the igloo]—maybe a polar bear or a dog. I could even see the stars.” He remembers doing what he called “going out with something other than a woman”—having sex with a dog, a caribou, or a seal. “I personally started to do it. If I had not confessed, I would be long dead,” he said. “You ha
ve to confess to a shaman, because if you hide anything, you will get cancer and die.”

  About converting to Christianity, he said, “It’s hard to tell if this religion is truly a good religion, because it leads to hate and despising. One must have love and practice it. One must not get too occupied with the forces you are expected to despise.”

  He was sure that the old ways still percolated through Inuit society, no matter how much they changed. He said: “There are still shamans around and always will be.”

  In 1923, Rasmussen said to those who doubted: “If in these myths are things which seem to be contrary to common sense, it is merely because the later generation is unable to grasp everything that, to their forebears, were obvious truths.”

  WITH PRIESTS AND TRADERS came schoolteachers and more missionaries, as well as “southern” medicines. After World War II the Canadian government decided to develop the far north less out of concern for the well-being of its Inuit citizens than concern that assimilation take place and Canadian sovereignty be firmly established.

  When it was discovered that TB was ravaging the Inuit populace, a ship was sent to take people to sanatoriums for treatment. But it seemed more like kidnapping, a continual effort to subjugate these wild people. “They came for us at night,” a former TB patient said. “We didn’t know where we were going or if we would see our families ever again.”

  Sheila Watt-Cloutier recalls: “During the TB scare, people were moved out of their villages on a hospital ship. As a convenience the government gave every Canadian Inuk an identifying number, engraved on dog tags. Numbers were used instead of our real names. I’m EA3582. They were trying to erase us, and we didn’t like it. Finally they put what they called Operation Surname into effect, giving us all Christian names and dropping the Inuit names by which we were known to each other.”