The first mission was established by E. D. Peck in 1894 at Kuuj-juarapik. Increasingly, the Ungava Inuit congregated around the whaling and trading posts and missions to trade pelts, meat and clothes with the whalers and receive medicines, food and benediction from the missions. They began to settle, or at least to limit their previous wanderings to within a day or two's travel from these little settlements. The more concentrated their populations, the more game they took from the surrounding areas. Before long, all the land close to those stations had been hunted out and the Inuit found themselves more and more dependent on the largesse of the whaling crews or the missionaries.
The missionaries helped bring an end to the desperate Inuit practice of infanticide by parcelling out destitution rations to starving Inuit families and by taking in babies, particularly girls, whose parents could not feed them, and bringing them up as servants in the missions. They also helped put a stop to the widespread, if last-resort, Inuit custom of leaving their elderly to die. The fact that this was most often voluntary, the elderly themselves caulking in the final snowbrick, or setting themselves adrift on the waves in a pad-dleless kayak, made it no less traumatic for the families. But God's messengers also had a sinister side. In the space of a generation they had persuaded the women of Ungava to dump their warm and very practical caribou-skin trousers for flimsy tartan skirts and Mother Hubbards. And on the subject of sex they were particularly punitive. They forbad Inuit men to take more than one wife, which sometimes left widows and their children to starve to death, and frowned on the age-old Inuit custom of wife swapping which, though it could be hard on the wives, nevertheless helped keep most camps free of the toxic intrigues of sexual jealousy. But what was more devastating to the Inuit sense of themselves was the missionaries' relentless suppression of their traditional beliefs and complex system of taboos. In most Inuit communities where missionaries held sway, shamans were banned from their customary practices and there were stories of missionaries smashing Inuit skin drums and forbidding the drum dances and songs by which Inuit passed on news from elsewhere. In the course of only a few years the doughty men of God had set the lid on a rich stew of belief which had been bubbling for a thousand years. Inuit were so cowed by what appeared to them to be Christianity's unsparing dogmatism, and so awed by the material riches it seemed to bring, that within the space of a few short years, most Ungava Inuit were refusing even to speak about the old beliefs and there were cases of families preferring to starve rather than take themselves hunting on a Sunday.
By the time Maggie was born, life in Ungava was becoming a mess of competing interests and contradictions. Whalers wanted the Inuit to be one thing, fur traders another and missionaries required something else again. None were content, it seemed, with leaving the Inuit to be Inuit. The confusion came to a head in 1906 when Thomas Watt Coslett killed the whale trade off with his invention of a means to prevent iron stays from rusting. As a result, the demand for whale bone in Europe and America ceased almost overnight. Some of the whalers packed up and headed off to the great fisheries at Grand Banks, others returned to their own countries and a few stayed in Arctic Canada and set themselves up as fur traders, or went to work for one of the established fur companies. The fur trade was nothing new and in Ungava it was centred almost exclusively on the Arctic fox. Unlike its cousins farther west, whose fur is often speckled with blue, the Ungava fox is a wonderful creamy white in winter and this made it particularly sought after. Ever since their arrival on the eastern shores of Hudson Bay, whalers had been buying and selling fox pelts as a subsidiary business to their chief interest in bone and blubber. Those from New England were particularly strong on the trade, each whaling ship regularly bringing back a thousand or more fox pelts at the end of the annual whaling season. What was different now was the scale and organisation of the enterprise.
In 1909, when Maggie was still a child, the Rvillon Frres Company set up the first permanent fur post on the banks of the Innuk-suak River at Inukjuak. Around the same time, the Frres' great rival, the Hudson Bay Company, began to take a serious interest in the eastern reaches of the bay. The company had long since established posts along the western coast, principally at Fort Prince of Wales, now Churchill, in 1717, but it had left the east largely unexplored. Now it had no choice but to expand. Competition between the two great fur companies had become so intense that there were tales of fur traders in remote outposts keeping sleds ready-packed so that they could rush across the tundra and claim for their employers any rival post which had temporarily shut down through the ill health or death of the former post manager. Three years after the Frres arrived at Inukjuak, the Hudson Bay Company commissioned an icebreaker, the Nascopie, to patrol the eastern Arctic checking on its existing posts and looking for new openings and in 1920 the Bay finally opened up its own post at Inukjuak, to rival the Frres', with another the following year in nearby Povungnituk.
By the time Josephie Flaherty was born Inukjuak was a flourishing fur post and, instead of hunting and occasionally assisting whaling ships, the Inukjuamiut were living principally on their earnings from trapping Arctic fox. The Hudson Bay Company and the Rvil-lon Frres were encouraging this trade, handing out the new, steel-sprung traps on credit and favouring those who brought back the largest number of pelts. Competition between the rival traders kept prices high and for a few years in the 1920s the winners in this greatand as it turned out, finalbattle between the two fur giants were the trappers themselves. Though life in Ungava was by no means easy, no one starved to death, except by dint of the kind of terrible accident which befell Alakariallak.
Trapping was no longer a sideshow to the main event of hunting for meat. It had become the principal reason for men to go out on the land. It was a labour-intensive business, because the traps had to be maintained, checked and rebaited continually. The fox population was subject to a seven-year cycle. In peak years, trappers could expect to trap ten times the number of fox that they could in lean years. The changing fox population coupled with fluctuations in the price per pelt at the trading stations made the business uncertain even in good years, and the focus on trapping left Inuit families more dependent on the food, traps and ammunition to be had at the store. Although they did not know it, the Inuit of Inukjuak were about to fall into a web of dependency on southern trade from which they have not to this day been able fully to extricate themselves.
CHAPTER FOUR
ALTHOUGH there are no written records of Maggie Nujarluktuk's life, it is safe to say that she would have pressed her new baby's nose to her own and given him an Eskimo kiss, which is not so much a kiss as a transfer of energies. We know she named him Josephie for his father, Robert Joseph Flaherty. Her midwife, a family member, would have picked him out an atiq, a soul name, to join his as yet unformed soul to all those who shared the same name. His grandmother would have found him an Inuk name, something that reflected the way he seemed to live in the world.
The little boy would have spent his first few months of life in Maggie's amiut. There he would have lain warm and naked, the filling in a sandwich of animal fur and human skin. His earliest view of a landscape, one whose contours he would never forget, would have been the rise and fall of his mother's strong, sealskin-scented back. When he was hungry, his mother would have lifted him from the hood and put him to her breast. When he shat, she would have cleaned his naked skin with her hair. For months he would have slept, watching the Arctic world go by, and dreamed. By the time summer came he would probably have already been eating what would become the mainstay of his diet, seal meat, chewed and softened by Maggie. Already the breezes and the low contours of the land would have been familiar to him. He would have had a strong sense of where he was.
Each June, the Nujarluktuk family moved out to their summer camp. The muskeg was spongy with meltwater and it was too difficult to travel far on the land during July and August. For the next few weeks, the family would confine themselves to forays along the coast, the men in kayaks and the wom
en in larger umiaks made of sealskin and driftwood, visiting other camps, hunting, fishing, or simply trading. They would not have roamed as far as they had before, when Maggie was a child. It made more sense to stay close to the trading posts with their supplies. The family would also be living in a larger grouping than had been customary a generation before, a group headed by a “camp boss,” a fictional title conferred by the fur traders upon whichever man in a group spoke a little English and seemed pliable. Needless to say, these “bosses” had no particular authority among the Inuit, who made decisions collectively, but they tolerated the invention of the “camp boss” because it made little difference to everyday life in the camp, and seemed to please the trader.
Maggie's family occupied a strip of coast just north of Inukjuak. It was this broad sweep of low rock with its detail of lichen and crunchy willow which became the canvas on to which Josephie painted his childhood. He would have sat in Maggie's amiut while she wandered along the coast gathering the plants they call qungik and airaq, which make good tea; the grasses she would use as wicks in her qulliq, and the willow twigs she needed to weave into mats. As she went, she would have checked the willow bed for ptarmigan eggs and chicks and then inspected the willow branches for willow worm cocoons which she could dip into seal fat and put out for supper.
By early September Maggie would have been picking the tiny Arctic cranberries, cloudberries and lingonberries that ripen on the south-facing slopes and scouring the heath for newly shed caribou antlers, which she could peel and boil into a rich and bloody soup. Soon the winter would be down on them again and they would be building snowhouses and there would be nothing visible along the coast but mile after mile of ice and snow. The young Josephie Flaherty would have watched ptarmigan pluming from their nests in the willow, seen lemmings mustering and followed fox tracks and the remains of ancient caribou paths and thought about the seasons. This would have been his education. He would get no other. The first school did not arrive in Inukjuak until 1949, by which time Josephie was twenty-eight.
The fact that Josephie Flaherty survived into his second year was something of a miracle, since babies born in Inukjuak in the first half of the twentieth century had about the same chance of seeing their third birthdays as those, say, born in medieval Europe. Malnutrition and hypothermia were common, and there were the usual round of childhood perils, including those diseases visited on the Inuit by whalers and fur traders and, later, by the annual arrival of the supply ship and to which the Inuit had no immunity. The average life expectancy among the Inuit in Arctic Canada in 1923 was about twenty-eight years and falling, considerably less than half that of southern Canadians.
Inuit bring up their offspring in a particular way. In the Inuit world, babies are born without ihuma, the part of the mind that has ideas, constructs order from impressions and experiences, solves problems and remembers their solutions. Ihuma develops with experience and the only way to get that is to live. So, like all Inuit children, Josephie would have been allowed to make his own mistakes, even when they were alarming and potentially dangerous ones, like putting his fingers in the qulliq, or teasing the sled dogs. He wouldn't have been scolded. Whenever he had temper tantrums or expressed childish frustration his family would simply have laughed them off until he had grown out of them. This he would have been encouraged and expected to do. Inuit value serenity and self-possession. To them explosions of rage or pique are childish characteristics.
Arctic explorers of the early twentieth century like Robert Peary and even Roald Amundsen often made note in their diaries and other writings of the impassivity or inscrutability of Inuit, little understanding that without great emotional self-restraint, life in Arctic conditions would, for human beings of any kind, be impossible. To be inscrutable, which is to say, restrained and self-contained, is a good thing in the Inuit world. More than that, it is a tool for survival. Almost by definition, the Arctic's white explorers failed to understand this. For the most part they were vainglorious, self-serving men. The Arctic was a very expensive place to explore. Funds would not have flowed to wallflowers. But they were not the kind of men who would readily have understood the Inuit.
In Robert Flaherty's day Inuit beleived that the only fixed part of a person's personality was their atiq, or soul. All the rest was ihuma, the gradual deposition of experience. Even now a bad-tempered or hysterical person is said to be nutaraqpaluktuq or childish, and his ihuma stunted, making him ebullient and oversensitive. A person with too much ihuma, on the other hand, is said to be narrow-minded, overdemanding and analytical. In the Arctic, each condition is a liability. The man with too much ihuma will allow his brooding to take him away from the real world, until he falls through the ice one day, or stumbles into a crevasse. A person with too little is bound, sooner or later, to go crazy. The ideal Inuit type, a man or woman with just enough ihuma, is cheerful, calm and patient in adversity, immune to irritation, sulking or to the hostility of others. He takes his life as it comes, recognises its limits and accepts its various outcomes. The most important words in his vocabulary are immaga, perhaps, and ayunqnaq, it can't be helped.
Which is not to say the Inuit value dourness or solemnity. On the contrary, Inuit children are brought up to be happy, or, leastwise, to look it. When a person feels happy, or quiva, people are drawn to him. In this respect we are not so different. As much as life in the temperate zones, or in the tropics, leading a successful life in the Arctic is all about having people on your side.
Displays of rage, frustration or depression are so disapproved of among the Inuit that many grow up without any conscious sense of having these feelings. In every community, of course, there are misfits, men and women whose inner selves grind against their outward expression, men and women, in other words, who live a gentle, or not so gentle, lie. In the past, these more tortured souls might find outlets as shamans or anatoq, and their internal ruffles might become a sign of peculiar power. Unable to find their place in conventional life, they would be honoured and respected as exceptions. This had always been the way Inuit managed the unconventional, the eccentric and the mentally ill, and it remained so until missionaries stamped out shamanism in the late nineteenth century. By the time Josephie was born, the old ways had become shameful and the people who practised them were neither spoken about nor publicly acknowledged. This was no longer a world with any place in it for misfits.
So far as anyone can tell, or cares to recall, Josephie Flaherty was a balanced child with neither excess nor deficit of ihuma. In retrospect, some who knew him talk of having detected a hint of oversen-sitivity, some nub of excess, but most speak of him as a loving boy, helpful, loyal and a good son to Maggie. He was, they say, self-reliant, quiet, even brooding, someone who got on with what he had to do without a fuss, and with no particular consciousness, at least in his early life, that his mixed blood marked him out as different. He felt himself to be Inuit, with all that being Inuit means. The ties that bound him were the ties of his Arctic family and for the remainder of his life they would be indissoluble.
There was no getting away from the fact that Josephie was different, though. He grew up tall with gangly limbs and softer, less ruly hair than that of full-blood Inuit boys. His lips were fuller, the face longer, his eyelids adopting a compromise position, halfway between Asia and Ireland. His arms were unusually long and his paddle hands lent him a seal-like air, an impression only strengthened as he headed into puberty and sprouted whiskery facial hair.
Josephie Flaherty's early life was measured out in ship years, by the annual arrival and departure of the supply ship, Nascopie.
There was a saying in Inukjuak that the second best day of the year was the day the Nascopie arrived and the best day was the day it left. No one disputed which of these days was the more exciting. The moment news of the ship's imminent arrival reached them from the north, men all along the coast would fire their rifles. The members of the Nujarluktuk family would quickly change into their smart clothes, rush down t
o the shore and paddle out to meet the ship, moving alongside it for a while to exchange smiles and waves with the crew, the Hudson Bay trader, the policemen moving between posts, the missionary, the medic, the civil servant and the occasional geologist or researcher on board. If young Josephie ever looked for his father's face among the passengers, he would not have found it, but it is perfectly possible that he would not have looked.
The family would make their way south along the coast to the mouth of the river, where the high-summer water, free now from ice, rushed to meet the sea, and they would tie up their boats at the “pier,” a strip of sand lined with rocks at the water's edge. By the time the Nascopie was at anchor, the family's tent would be up, its guys secured to rocks, and the women would be arranging skins at the sleeping end and stoking a willow-twig fire on which to make tea. A while later, the ship's whaleboat would begin chugging towards the shore, and the Hudson Bay Company post's boat would head out to meet it. From 1935, when the first police post arrived in Inukjuak, an RCMP Peterhead joined the little flotilla. The police were not a welcome arrival. The Inukjuamiut could not see the point of them, since no one ever broke the law. Their chief role, so far as the Inuit were concerned, seemed to be to busy the settlement flagpole with its Union Jack and Maple Leaf every ship time. The routine was always the same. Shortly after the flags began to billow a priest of some sort would be dropped off at the detachment, along with another man in police uniform and an assortment of other qalunaat, the flags would flutter upwards and the assembled would sing “O Canada” to a circling audience of mildly puzzled loons. From the vantage of their tents the Inuit would shrug and mutter ayunqnaq, it can't be helped.
The Long Exile Page 5
