In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

Mitch tells of a time out at spring camp when the aurora came all the way down to the ground. “There was no ice and the water was crackling,” he says wistfully, then tells us that Igloolik is the area in Nunavut with the most biological diversity. “We have bowheads, belugas, narwhal, harp, ringed, and bearded seals, arctic char year-round, and caribou.”

  The subject quickly turns to money problems in town. John says that money has taken the place of food. “It is shared out amongst family members. But somehow it’s not the same. It’s crass. Like begging for handouts, not getting a piece of meat and cooking and eating together with the family.”

  Carolyn passes bowls and plates of food around the table for a second time and says, “Mothers who work for Head Start are asking for food instead of money, because the kids and men in the family just gamble it away.”

  John chimes in: “Gasoline here is highly subsidized. It’s $1.15 per liter. People in need are given money, and their rent is reduced to $60 a month if they don’t have a job. It’s ordinarily $1,500, so what’s the incentive to work?”

  Mitch: “The purchase price for a house like mine with crummy fixtures and no insulation is $250,000. Who can afford that except a government type like me? Phone reconnections cost $250, so if anyone fails to pay their phone bill, they can’t then afford to have it hooked up again.”

  Carolyn: “There are no jobs. And no one from the Qallunaat community can dictate what economic priorities they must hold to. Suggestions can be made, but we can’t meddle in how money is spent.”

  John: “It’s estimated that each kid in town spends $5,000 a year on soda pop at $2.50 a can. It’s emblematic of the great boredom here. On the other hand, money is still used in the old way—the sharing aspect of the Inuit community.”

  Mitch: “The elders who are getting their compensation checks of $40,000 are preyed upon by their own families. There’s pressure to share it all. The old ways of sharing don’t always translate well into the 21st century.”

  John: “And no one is paying attention to population growth. There are 50 to 60 live births per year here. In ten years there will be another 600 people in Igloolik. It’s already too crowded. No one can provide wild food for their families when everyone is putting pressure on the same resource.”

  Sonia: “There’s some work being done on the drug and alcohol problem. In Clyde River they’re teaching hip-hop. You have to be drug and alcohol free to come to the class. No more drum dancing, I guess.”

  Mitch pushes back from the table and gazes out the window. He looks sad and drawn. “I won’t miss town, but I’ll miss being out on the land. Last spring I saw a Thule site with a whalebone arch on Devon Island. It was the most beautiful house site in the world.”

  We move into the small living room, its bookshelves lined with tomes about the Arctic. I thumb through a book of old photographs of igloos. John says, “The hunters still build igloos when they’re out, but kids kick out the walls of them if they are built too close to town—just to be mischievous.”

  Sonia: “Did I tell you about book burning?” I shake my head. “The Pentecostal Church that arrived here in the 1980s is having another book burning soon. They burn videos, shamans’ drums, porn, and my meditation manuals. The last time, they said the smoke from burning books took on the form of Satanisti—Satan.

  Mitch: “A deaf mute in town robbed a grave and put the corpse on a widow’s doorstep.

  John: “There are only two interesting things about love affairs: How they begin and how they end.”

  Mitch: “Like the one I had with a polar bear I’d caught. I tranquilized it and was tagging it, when it rolled over on top of me. I couldn’t get out from under it. Maybe I should have stayed there.”

  Later in the evening we discuss the famous adaptability of the Inuit. “It is predicated on the traditional hunting life,” John says. “When the bowhead whale was hunted to extinction here, people moved to other areas to access other kinds of animals. It’s absurd to think that the resources right here, a day’s snowmobile ride from town, can support an expanding community. And yet the ethical question arises: Do we leave people alone to live their ice age lives? Or do we make generous offers to provide for the welfare of all Canadian citizens but insist on a centralized delivery system, which, in turn, annihilates the culture?”

  Sonia: “For every life saved from TB, how many suicides, stabbings, alcohol- and snowmobile-related deaths are there?

  John: “As our mutual friend, the anthropologist Hugh Brody, says, it’s not a matter of choosing between the traditional as opposed to the modern, but the right of a free indigenous people to choose the components of their lives.”

  IT’S LATE AND WE’RE STILL TALKING. Improbably, Carolyn’s potted hibiscus has sent out another pink blossom as if in anticipation of spring. In a few weeks the first sun will appear. When people lived out in their camps year-round, she tells me, they celebrated the first day of the sun by blowing out the blubber lamps and relighting them. If the sun returned before the first new moon of the year, spring and summer would be warm; if it came after, it would be cool.

  John says that in some Arctic encampments the sun was greeted atop igloos with a barking shout of joy, and people claimed that afterward, they could hear the sun’s hiss as it quickly set again.

  After dinner I walk Mitch and Sonia back to their shared house. Bands of teenagers roam the streets. Three boys hit hockey pucks back and forth on the icy streets. A young kid on a snowmobile jumps over a hummock of ice, catching air and slamming down so hard that a piece of metal flies off. He continues on, laughing.

  An RCMP truck is parked at the medical clinic. “That means something bad has happened,” Mitch says. Inside his house we make tea and talk until two in the morning. I walk home alone. A few groups of teenagers are standing around idly. The RCMP truck hasn’t moved; the clinic is ablaze with light.

  I can’t sleep. The windowless room pushes in on me. I’ve been feeling ill and doze off but wake suddenly, gulping for air. Lucien Ukaliannuk had said, “Peculiar things happen when someone is going to pass on. As people, we make our own future. Very much so.”

  I’m not sure how to make sense of what I’ve seen here. There are stories of diminishment all over the Arctic-—not just here. This is the somber tragedy of the subdued, bewildered, canny, fate-befallen Inuit people, their dazzling genius draining away with the melting ice. They have in their cultural baggage all the skills to survive, but time is not in anyone’s favor these days. In Igloolik and other Arctic villages, the elders who remember life before moving to town and can teach the young ones about it are dying. Youth abounds, but their threads to the past have been cut by the sharp edge of the modern world.

  MORNING IS TWILIGHT. Something has happened and I don’t know what. I come up the stairs from the basement to a room stiff with grief. Outside the sky is violet, inside nothing looks human. John’s and Carolyn’s faces are shells. They are doing things: packing up blankets and food, pajuktuijuq, food gifts that will be sent to another’s household.

  The room seems dark, though it isn’t. The human world of passion and communication has been erased. I think of my dreamed-of eye that began this chapter, roaming the room, asking to see its own death. John and Carolyn move like shadows. It is a room where too much has been seen. Earlier it was cluttered with the paraphernalia of active lives, with the circumpolar moon shining in. Now it feels like a place that can no longer hold light.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  John looks at me. “Leah Otak’s brother was stabbed to death by his girlfriend last night. He was the last one in the family who provided food for Leah and the adopted children she is raising. That brother was the favorite child. Now she has lost her mother, both brothers, and a niece who was killed in Hall Beach.”

  They are pulling on anoraks and boots. “And you think our problem is climate change,” John says bitterly as he goes out the door. “Be sure to keep it locked.”

  TEN-THIRTY IN THE MORNING. Pin
k sky but no moon, no sun. The kneading of the dough in the kitchen is vigorous and repetitive. John has returned and is making 12 loaves of bread to help Leah feed her clan. “The woman who killed Leah’s brother had killed another boyfriend a few years ago,” John says, shaping the loaves on a wooden board. “She did time, was released, and killed again.”

  Loaf pans go into the oven and others are waiting on the counter. “Leah’s brother had some problems, but he’d straightened up. He was interested in theoretical physics. He studied it closely and played in a band with Zach’s brother. Yes, that’s the other news. Zach’s brother died of brain cancer yesterday. The week before, Zach’s other partner in the film company was killed violently. We’ll be going to funerals,” he says quietly, and for the moment his rage subsides. It’s replaced by a suffocating silence as if the house had been wrapped in cotton. No Christmas tunes play. By the time John is finished baking, darkness is overtaking the town. It’s 1:30 p.m.

  A week earlier Leah had told me about her summer cabin at the beach, where she goes to collect her sanity. “It’s amazing to take the kids there for a weekend. I don’t have a lot there—no lights, only a woodstove. In spring and summer we watch the birds and have a contest to see which ones hatch their eggs first. The kids want to go there every chance they get. It calms them. We take walks at night during the full moon. Here, we live under false lights. But at camp, many still use a qulliq—a blubber lamp. They cut the walrus or seal blubber into squares and cook it to let the oil out. Then it’s poured onto moss in a shallow oblong bowl and the lamp is lit. That’s how we have heat and light without electricity.”

  At night they put nets out in the water, and in the morning they have arctic char to cook over the fire. “I would like to spend a whole summer at our old camp,” Leah had said. “My mother lost a child, and we went back there about three years ago to put up a headstone. Who wants to be buried in town? We don’t belong here.” Now I wonder where Leah will go for solace, if there is such a thing.

  At the end of the day John says, “Look, about global warming, we’re just not seeing it here. But there have been climate shifts before this one. The Thule people were living here on bowhead whales, then, when the weather warmed and the ice began breaking up and shifting, the populations dispersed into smaller groups in Foxe Basin. They are an example of people adapting to climate change. It must have been catastrophic: Many humans died, others adapted. The polar bear evolved from the grizzly. Now, perhaps it’s going back again, to being a brown bear.”

  He continues: “These are threats to the world as we know it. Maybe we won’t survive. But we won’t know that for a while. The more immediate threat to the Inuit is how to organize themselves around the government and globalization. What we had here was a life elegantly and brilliantly adapted to a difficult environment. In everything they expressed the genius of a place, a culture that found order and kept the barbaric at bay. Now I’m finding it difficult to see how it’s all going to end.”

  LAST DAY. A rim of light brightens the gray horizon, then fades. Twilight goes to black. Across Davis Strait and north to Greenland there is only polar night—no light at all until the end of February. Here in Igloolik I stare out the window at bruised days.

  A deceased person’s soul is kept alive by a name. I ask who will get the names of the newly dead—Leah’s brother and Zach Kunuk’s—but no one knows. In the night, pond ice, land-fast ice, and sea ice converge under the umbral hat of a tilted sun, as the dead are absorbed into the living and the threads that bind them are carried in the names.

  Before the Qallunaat came in the early 1880s, there was a dark-time ceremony called tivajut. In his oral history, George Kappianiq says, “It was held after the darkest period had climaxed and as the days started to return. They would make a big igloo. This occasion was held in celebration of the New Year that would see them to the time when they would be able to catch more game animals. They were able to determine the returning of daylight by the star structure. The stars start to move faster as the daylight starts to return because the Earth rotates and tilts. If you observe the sun as it goes down, it really goes fast. We appear to be stable but in fact we are moving.”

  Closed-system chaos, in the universe as well as this society. Without a ceremonial life and ritual there can be no passage from dark to light, from madness to sanity, from life to death. Without boundaries there is no societal cohesion, no self-discipline in which the good of the group remains more important than the individual. These were the ways that Inuit people managed to stave off self-interest and greed, to cope with the cold and survive.

  In late autumn, in anticipation of darkness, or maybe the hunger that often came with the dark days when there was little hunting, incidents of pibloktok—Arctic hysteria. It broke out among humans, often women, and also dogs and was said to be the result of starvation and of mineral and vitamin D deficiencies. But the anticipation of darkness in the isolation of the far north can be profound, and the strong influence of the environment must also be factored in.

  JOHN, CAROLYN, AND I eat dinner quietly and go to the living room for our evening libation. No more dinner parties for a while. Carolyn dozes on the couch. Kindness shows in her face even when she sleeps. Her days with children and mothers begin early in the morning and are strenuous. She rises and goes to bed. John and I are left to mull over global heating and cooling and the coming and going of lives.

  We drink a “wee dram” of Scotch and listen raptly to a CBC radio program about collapsing stars and supernovae that experience death more than once. One star kicks off solar masses several times. More massive stars burn off carbon, and the temperature gets so high that the radiation produces both matter and antimatter. This consumes so much energy that the remaining mass begins to contract. Instability increases until finally, the star collapses at a black hole.

  “It sounds like a description of Igloolik,” John says solemnly. “Maybe we are dying now but will live again.” Earlier, he had talked about the intricately woven web between Inuit views of the environment, cosmology, and survival. “Their understanding of nature, of being part of nature, was both transcendent and practical, and the narratives that emerged were meant to awe and instruct. Now it’s all ending—the old ways and the people who knew them,” John says.

  And the ice, I add, finally getting in my last word about climate change. Culture is always changing, and so is climate and the extinctions it causes. But we’ve tampered with nature too much, this time, and it is having its way with us. It’s far bigger than Igloolik.

  John looks askance at me, then smiles: “I guess we’re just a failed species, eh?”

  Another wee dram and we listen to the end of the radio report: “After the collapse at the edge of the black hole, something else happens. There’s a collision between the star shells kicked off by the pulsing star. The resulting kinetic energy produces light.”

  ICE ISLANDS IN WIDE LEADS. Sunrise merging with sunset and nothing between. I buckle my seat belt and click through the images on my camera. There’s one of a towering thundercloud with a hole at the top, a hole like an eye in the forehead of a coming storm. When we die, can we see ourselves vanish?

  The plane lifts off from Igloolik. Below, the frozen, white-blasted town appears antiseptic and harmless. In Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable, he wrote: “They must have explained to me, someone must have explained to me, what it’s like, an eye, at the window, before the sea, before the sky…. I must have wanted it, wanted the eye, for my own.”

  As the plane bumps upward, I recall John’s story of Sikuliarsiujittuq. It is a red star that rises on midwinter evenings over the sea ice and is named for a big man who was afraid of going out on the ice for fear that he would fall through. At last he is convinced that he should go hunting. When he asked how one should spend the night on the ice, the other hunters said it was customary to have one’s hands tied up. He submitted, and later they stabbed him. He then rose up and became a star. “They love th
ese stories about those who are harmed by others and then get otherworldly grace,” John says.

  Above, the stars; below, the tidal crenulations of shore-fast ice in collision with moving ice. I begin to feel the burden of this town’s sorrow lift. Craning my neck, I look for Sikuliarsiujittuq, but clouds have gathered over Foxe Basin as we fly southeast toward Iqaluit. A storm is on the way.

  The scene back at the airport was crowded with members of the Kunuk family. The coffin bearing Zach’s brother arrived, just as the coffin bearing Leah’s murdered brother was being pushed into the cargo hold. The killer, it was said, was one of the passengers on the plane.

  It seems important to remember that Igloolik’s problems belong to everyone. They are symptomatic of the kind of unhealthy societies that have been created everywhere—inner-city strife and rural community boredom, the cruel dispossession of colonialism, the injustice of having been betrayed, and the two kinds of imposed poverty, material and spiritual, that bring about similar results: a sense of deprivation and displacement.

  The ice mirrors ruined lives, and now the ice itself is headed toward ruination. The clues to finding one’s way home, so to speak, are being cruelly removed.

  “We are all immigrants to the modern world,” Kai Lee, a social geographer, said. But what kind of world is it? What will it be in 50 years?

  The latest report from climatologist Susan Solomon at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains that the upward trend in temperatures as a result of carbon dioxide emissions is irreversible for at least a thousand years, because the balance between heat transfer and deep-ocean mixing has been lost. The thermal expansion of seawater alone will cause 1.3 to 3.2 feet of sea-level rise, and that doesn’t include melting ice sheets and glaciers, which will add much more.

  OUT OF DARKNESS COMES transformation. The charnel ground is a kind of radical space, and in it exuberant, creative enterprises can suddenly flourish. They help transcend betrayal and punishment because they focus on what is, not the bitterness of the past. In Igloolik, this is happening. Young hunters are staying true to tradition and providing their families with food. The Artcirq circus troupe started as a result of a teenage suicide and is now thriving. Isuma, the film production company, has created a flood of new films by Igloolik residents, and its new Aboriginal Peoples Television Network is streaming video in Inuktitut online day and night. Zach Kunuk has just received funding for a language and culture institute that will install public access production studios in any Inuit community that wants to participate. The Women’s Film Cooperative has just finished a new film called Before Tomorrow, which showed at the Sundance Film Festival. Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen keep winning international awards.