In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Theo says that there are only a few left who know the traditions. Some don’t even hunt seals anymore, and it’s the same with moving-ice hunting and the winter walrus hunt. “When the hunt goes, so does the reason to speak the language.”

  A night wind blows and the sod roof seems to shift. The low entry door made of driftwood creaks. My toes, frostbitten many times over the years, hurt now as they thaw.

  “My grandmother survived on human flesh. Her husband offered himself!” Theo says and looks to see if I’m shocked, but I’m not. Starvation stories are abundant in the Arctic. He continues, “It was my father’s mother. She was gone by the time I came to be. A young couple, they were headed for their autumn camp with their two children when they discovered their winter cache of food had been raided by wolves. They stopped and hunted for caribou but with no success. They jigged for fish. Nothing. Winter was coming on fast, and they knew starvation was near. Finally, they began killing their dogs for food.

  “They tried to catch rabbits but couldn’t find any. They ate leather thongs and straps, and later they ate their own clothes. My grandmother was only 14 years old. Her husband was older. He said to her, ‘When I die, please eat me. I taste like caribou.’ And finally she did. Then she ate her two children after they died.

  “She was found in May. She had eaten all her clothes and had only a piece of skin to kneel on, sleep on. A couple was traveling by on their way to Pond Inlet when they heard a strange, low noise. They went towards it. They saw this woman. Her igloo had half melted and fallen down around her. When they recognized her, she said, ‘I am not human. I have eaten others.’

  “They gave her a little hot water, then a little boiled meat. Every hour or so they gave her a little more. When she was strong enough, they took her back to Igloolik. A tent was put up for her away from others, where she had to live for a year. Later she became a special kind of person. She married and had five children. She never let anyone in the village suffer. She shared her food with everyone so that no one should feel hunger again.”

  Theo sticks his head out the door. White up there, white down here. “Tomorrow won’t be good weather,” he says quietly.

  MORNING. Snowdrifts lean against the low entryway. Theo’s nephews clear it away. Theo stands outside in his insulated camouflage suit. Coffee cup in hand, he stares into the whiteout: “We could hunt today if we had to, but we’ll stay here. I hope we can hunt soon. Meat is a requirement. I get heartburn if I don’t eat meat!”

  Back inside he and John tell stories. The two men, now in their late 50s, grew up together. John begins: “Once a polar bear grabbed me by my caribou pants. When a bear comes, two people should not stand together because he can grab both of you at the same time. You can tell by the ears which bears are aggressive and which are tame. Sometimes a bear will kill a person by chance. But if a bear doesn’t want to be caught, he’ll turn into something else. I’ve seen it happen.”

  Theo: “A bear might go behind some ice and come back out as a wolverine.” John says he saw one turn into dark ice and another one that became a seal.

  Theo’s eyes shift back and forth to see if I believe. I smile and shrug. “Who’s to know?” he says finally. “With the Christian beliefs we have today, these kinds of things are impossible. But before, it was believed to be real. Once you believe, then…” He doesn’t finish his sentence.

  Soft clouds lie on the horizon and the sky is clearing. We stand outside to get some fresh air. John tells me there are still powers at work here. “I saw a mermaid in one of the lakes near our summer camp.” A mermaid? I ask. Was it Nuliajuk? The goddess of the sea? He shakes his head. In Rasmussen’s ethnographic notes there are references to mermaids and also mermen, dwarfs, giants, shadow folk, claw trolls, mountain dwarfs, glutton spirits, the spirit of stones that could marry a woman, and the thrashing spirit that lived inside the bearded-seal whip, to name just a few. Do myths come from experience or are memories part of the collective mythology?

  “From what we’ve been taught, there are some we can shoot and some we can’t,” Theo says. “A hunter has to have a feeling about the state of the animal, the accessibility of the animal. We dismiss one that is not going fast enough, or if a walrus is rushing back and forth in front of you for no reason. We don’t just hunt everything that moves.”

  John says that the most difficult part for a full-time hunter now is getting gas for the snowmobile. “I hunt for four boys and three girls. I have to get gas from a family that works a job. Then I hunt for them too. We give each other assistance just to put meat on the table. That’s why the number of hunters is going down.”

  Theo: “If you look at the almighty dollar, that’s what’s affecting all of this. The dollar has killed a lot of culture, of us being a sharing community. The dollar has had the most effect. The second thing was the missionaries. But the Bible and the Inuit ideas of sharing aren’t really so different. At the time the priests came here, it didn’t seem to be bad. But later, there were more serious consequences.”

  Like what? I ask. He glares at me for asking a stupid question. “They didn’t see what we had here.”

  IT HAS BECOME DAY. Theo, Harry, and the film crew go out to hunt for nanoq—polar bear. The rest of us stay behind. It’s minus 20 and still blowing, but we can see islands and straits, hills and flat expanses of sea ice, and beyond, Baffin Island. A young couple who arrived late are left behind to take care of camp, lest polar bears come. They use the time to teach us how to make an igloo. After several hours the blocks of hard snow we’ve cut are misshapen; they break and the “boss block” falls in. When our tiny shelter is complete at last, we chink it with snow that melts a little, then grows firm.

  Is there a story about the weather going wrong? I ask Luke, the young man. He thinks for a while and says that the weather has become stormier. “It’s hard to predict where the wind will come from. I used to know what the weather would be, but now it’s confusing. My grandfather told us to learn the weather and know what’s going to happen and what to do as a result. Now he might not know. It’s all because of that hole in the ice up north in the big ocean.”

  During the night Luke has a fight with his girlfriend. In anger she kicks out the side of their igloo. “It’s not cool to do that,” one of Theo’s nephews says. Ashamed, they leave before dawn. Later, John repairs the broken wall.

  At two in the morning the film crew and the hunters come back with a polar bear. The animal has been skinned, the meat cut up and laid on the komatik. It will be distributed to family members back in Igloolik. The return trip takes another grueling ten hours. It’s not the sub-zero weather that’s bad but the speed of the snowmobile and the subsequent windchill. I sing to myself and think about Greenland dogs: how the speed of a dogsled is just right; how the dogs are deeply alert; how, when open water is near, they’ll stop and crouch down suddenly. But what does a snowmobile know of danger?

  One of the snowmobiles hits a piece of rough ice and flips. Harry’s leg is hurt and one of the skis is broken. With their usual ingenuity, the men cobble together a new ski with bits of this and that, reveling in the opportunity to be clever. We continue on, more slowly now.

  In town the bear meat is laid out on a tarp on the snowy road in front of Theo’s family house. An older woman I’ve not seen before comes from across the street, kneels down, takes a choice hunk, and walks away. “Who was that?” I ask.

  “That was my ‘father,’ Theo says. “See, we name our children after someone who has gone before and honor them that way. Names are gender neutral. They go according to kinship, not sex. That woman who took the meat was named after my father, so she has first choice of meat. I call her Father, never by her actual name. When a man is named after a woman, he wears girl’s clothes when he’s young and is given sewing needles. A woman named after a man gets a sled.”

  Who is being born right now? Who will be the recipient and who the one who gives the name? Brother’s name to girl, girl’s name to brother. “
Gender doesn’t matter. But who you are named after does, and what that person’s life and thoughts can teach you,” Theo insists. “In the old days water was thrown out the front door of the house to quench the thirst of the dead.”

  Later, when I ask Leah Otak about naming, she turns suddenly angry: “You’ll never understand it,” she says. But why wouldn’t I?

  EVENING. Town is quiet. I’d asked to meet with Zach Kunuk, the director of the film Atanarjuat—The Fast Runner, as well as the more recent film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, but we learn that Zach’s film assistant has been killed and his brother has just died in Iqaluit. The family is gathering for the funerals.

  So I spend my days at the Oral History Lab, trying to visualize the way things looked 200 years ago, in what Margaret Mead called “a form of life in which every detail had been polished into a consistency by a thousand years of use.”

  At John MacDonald’s house I piece together the ethnographic notes of Rasmussen and other ethnologists—Franz Boas, Diamond Jenness, Hugh Brody, and Asen Balikci—trying to recreate a whole season in my head. I imagine living under the knotted brow of Baffin Island on the moving ice of Ipik, harpooning walrus, flensing and splitting those tough skins in an igloo clouded with the smoke of walrus, whale, or seal oil and burning moss that impregnates long hair and skin clothing, as blocks of ice melt and spangle the interior with icicles.

  I watch a woman pound walrus fat into glistening strips, which she fits tightly into an oblong stone hearth. At the edges she shoves pieces of oil-soaked arctic cotton, and lights it until a wide line of flame appears, “like a smile,” she says.

  Physical beauty and having fun are important. In earlier times women tattooed their hands, arms, and faces. “I’m talking about trying to look good,” declares Apphia Agalakti Awa, an elder no longer with us. “I’m talking about the time long ago when women tried to look beautiful.” The tattoos varied. “Soot would be taken from the lamp and they would run the needle through the skin. As they were pulling the thread, the thread would leave the soot behind. They would make little designs, little lines on the chin, here and there, two at a time.” Other lines were put on the forehead, the eyes, and cheeks. In that way it was thought that women looked beautiful all the time. No need for makeup.

  Margaret Sunaq Kipsigaq recalls: “They used to wash, from what I have heard, just using water, and their face would be cleaned with blubber, with bearded-seal blubber. Blubber makes you clean, when you are covered with oil, you get clean. That was the way they used to wash, with Kakala. It was a stove. These are stoves that are used outdoors.”

  Before doctors, medicines were makeshift. Apphia Awa remembered that when someone had bad diarrhea, “pond cotton was mixed with a special dirt that would get stuck in the intestines and stop the diarrhea and stomach cramps.” Dog urine mixed with snow was ingested for bad colds. Bandages were made from the skin of what was described as “mushroom-type plants.” A seal’s gall bladder was used to kill infections in skin wounds, and fish fat was made into an ointment for burns. Women did other things besides prepare skins, tend to the sick, make clothes, gather greens, and cook. Many were shamans, and one woman, named Atuat, had her own dog team.

  Less than a hundred years later, issues of survival for the people of the Arctic are of another order. They are global and seemingly irreversible. Nothing substantial has been done to cut greenhouse emissions. As carbon dioxide exceeds 380 parts per million in the atmosphere, the chances of slowing the warming trend are nil, and soon there will be no ice, only open water.

  The conservative ex-prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, called the Kyoto Accord “a job-killing, economy-destroying accord” and “a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.” Now, as temperatures move up and the world economy slides down, his words seem doubly hollow. Yet the frigid winters we’ve been having lately have people confused. The lack of sunspot activity may be the cause. But weather is weather, with its own moods, and the upward trend in global warming is steady.

  MORNING. The temperature drops to 30 below. “More like our usual winters,” John MacDonald says as we walk to the grocery store. I can’t help grinning. “Are you admitting that something is different, that the climate is changing?” I ask. A faint smile comes over his face. His denial seems more like a defense against the enormous grief he must be feeling as his adopted town turns nightmarish. And he’s right about the ice in the narrow strait at the top of the island. The cold continental climate and the way it is protected by Baffin Island to the north helps preserve the ice. Igloolik does not face open water the way some Nunavut towns do, and the ice through the archipelago holds all spring, not subject to open water with its wind waves. But the sea ice thickness has changed and spring comes earlier, bringing birds, like robins, for which there are no names in Inuktitut.

  A young Inuk on the snow-covered path yells out to John: “Hey, what happened to climate change? It’s cold here!” Earlier, Carolyn complained that kids aren’t wearing enough warm clothes and come into school with frostbite. “They watch southern TV and think it’s only cool to wear windbreakers and tennis shoes.”

  Yet Nunavut residents have been noticing the changes for years. In 2001 an elder reporting from a Conference on Climate Change in Cambridge Bay said, “All our accumulated knowledge of the weather patterns are unwritten and have been passed down for generations orally. I do not speak or write English so I cannot say I know what they talk about in regards to climate change, but there are changes in our climate and the weather.”

  Shari Fox Gearheard, a research scientist from the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, lives full-time in Clyde River, on the northeast coast of Baffin Island. She has been conducting research on climate and environmental changes and documenting traditional ecological knowledge since 2000. Now fluent in Inuktitut, she and her husband ask the important questions about weather changes, wind, sea ice conditions, animal migration patterns, traditional medicines, tools for hunting, and traveling. She’s working on responses to global heating and adaptation options for Nunavut communities.

  The hunters in Clyde River say that in the old days there was always one long snowstorm in the winter but now there are many; that the wind packs the snow too hard for igloo building; that Ski-Doos get lost in storms; that there’s more fog. They worry about sea level rise and the effect it will have on shoreline nesting areas. With coastal erosion young chicks and eggs wash away, and eventually whole villages will be lost.

  Elders from Baker Lake express concern about the decreasing water supply, saying there is less water in the lake and the rivers feeding it, that arctic char cannot be found at the mouth of Prince River, that the water is not healthy, and therefore the fish are often not safe to eat.

  Through Shari’s persistent and energetic efforts, the elders are pooling their ecological knowledge, keeping track of weather, ice conditions, wind directions, water currents, bird and animal migration patterns, and hunters’ travel routes. Using a GPS and data-gathering system, they compare historical routes, ice conditions, and temperatures to help guide today’s hunters.

  THE IGLOOLIK town hall is quaintly called the hamlet office—as if this were a scenic village of thatched-roofed crofts. Brian, the red-haired town manager, and his wife, Mary, a sharp-eyed young Inuit woman, recently arrived from Sanikiluaq in the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay. Brian is wiry, full of praise for the town mayor, and eager to keep traditions alive. “I took the job because they really needed someone up here to try to straighten things out. I came because I was needed. The most traditional communities are struggling hardest. I help run the municipal government. But it really isn’t a legitimate government at all.”

  His office is cluttered and busy. The door is always open. People come in and out and coffee is poured. He leans forward as he talks, all earnest exuberance. “If I were king, I’d use councils in the smaller communities. The elders say they have to get these kids out hunting and fishing
, but the kids say they don’t want that. They want to go to high school so they can go to college in Iqaluit or Ottawa. Only a few do that. There’s an enormous dropout rate. The families want them home to be providers of food, to be traditional hunters, but the kids want to leave.”

  When the territory of Nunavut was formed, there were 25,000 people. Now there are 31,522, an average educational level of the eighth grade, and a housing shortage. “If you are 12 years old, it’s hard to do your homework with 14 other people living in the house of all ages, plus visitors coming by,” he says. “There’s lots of stress. That’s where drugs and alcohol come in. They’ve been here for 30 years. Total prohibition won’t work. Where Mary and I lived before, in the Belcher Islands, it was dry, so an underground culture developed. Alcohol comes into town piecemeal and is consumed as soon as it gets here. You can order so many liters at a time through a committee, but they add to it by getting people who don’t drink to order their quota for them. Ed DeVries, [a candidate for] the Marijuana Party…set up shop here for a while. Can you believe it?” He laughs. “On the other side of town the Jehovah Witness people are burning books. And in between, all sorts of things are going on. Some good, some bad.”

  When Brian arrived in Igloolik in 2004, there was a 2.3-million-dollar deficit on a 4.5-million-dollar budget. This had been going on for three years, but there was so much internal conflict, nothing really happened. “The Nunavut government is supposed to be monitoring these things, but they didn’t get to it. No one had been doing the books. I was told that half a million dollars had gone missing.