The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  On 15 October 1953, the sun set over Ellesmere Island for the last time that year. For the next four months the Inuit would be living in perpetual darkness. On good days, when the clouds were drawn back, the sea ice reflected the moon's glow and so long as the Inuit were out on the ice, they could see their footprints. On bad days, and most days were bad days, they could not tell what was beneath or above or around them, nor in which direction they were travelling or even when their journey, however short, might end. The Inuit of Inukjuak had no word for the void that opened up around them. At first, they tried to carry on with the routine they had worked so hard to establish while there was still light. The men left to go hunting in the dark and returned in the dark. They ate and pissed and shat and made love and sewed and cooked and swapped stories and fed their dogs and cleaned their equipment in the dark or by the dim yellow light of a qulliq. To cheer themselves they made bone flutes and lutes with sinew for strings and they sang and played music and told stories. But the dark exhausted them and pretty soon it was almost impossible to maintain a routine. Their body clocks broke down and the brain could not tell whether it was day or night or something in between. The absence of light made hunting an almost daily terror. Though they could no longer see it, the constant creaking and cracking of the ice reminded them that they were surrounded. The ice around the Lindstrom Peninsula often broke open without warning and floes were blown away on the high winds. Rime frost and beached ice collected at the shore and right at the sea's edge the smooth spread of the ancient ice foot gave way to rough ice rubble and pressure ridges. The hunters had not had time to learn the position of all the contradictory currents and eddies in the sound before the dark came down, and they did not know where the ice was at its most unstable. Around the cracks there were patches of rotting ice and, beyond these, smooth fields of the open sea ice interrupted by immense, embedded icebergs.

  The land was no refuge. It was rocky and covered in loose boulders and scree and there was barely enough snow to sledge across it without the komatik runners' catching on some upstanding piece of rock or ice. In the darkness it was almost impossible to tell where the cliff edge lay and there were no established hunting paths or customary routes.

  Even out on the sea ice, they often had to rely on their dogs to scent the way home and they would find themselves trapped on moving ice floes or lost in the fiords, waiting for a moonlit day or night. Sometimes they were away for days at a time, leaving the women and children alone at camp to fend for themselves, not knowing where their men were, if they were still alive, or how long they would be gone.

  With the dark came the cold. In Inukjuak the snow always fell heavily at the end of September and by the beginning of October the Inukjuamiut were living in snowhouses, but here in the High Arctic the snow arrived in sporadic and unpredictable bursts, and when it did come the wind refused to allow it to settle so they were forced to remain in their flimsy canvas tents. The temperature hovered around −30°C and when November arrived, it plunged even lower. With winds roaring from the Arctic Ocean the windchill could drop the air temperature on the sea ice to −55°C. Whenever they went outside, their heads pounded, their eyelashes froze together and little ice balls collected around the tear ducts in their eyes. The hairs inside their noses stuck together and pulled apart each time they breathed and the breath came as a shallow pant. The lungs burned, the eardrums ached and the brain struggled to locate the body's extremities.

  November merged into December and the Inuit were still in tents. The inside temperature rarely rose above -15°C and the women were forever breaking the icicles from the inside of the tent canvas. Everyone was constantly cold but there was not enough fuel to light fires and the only warmth they could generate came from the blubber qulliqs and their own breath. At night, the children slept bundled together with the adults and, during the day, their skin turned raw from all the rubbing their mothers had to do to keep them warm. The men caught a few wolves and the women sewed little suits from the pelts of these, and from the skins of dogs that died and the scraps of spoiled fox pelts, but the hunters had to be given first priority for caribou skin clothes. If they died, the whole camp would die with them, and so the children had to make do with whatever was left over.

  By December, the camp was struggling to stay alive. There was not enough meat and for weeks at a time they had to live on bannock bread and tea, but the bannock did not fill their stomachs and the tea did not keep them warm. Their bellies demanded niqi, fresh meat, nirimarik or real food, flesh and blubber, but by December there was no niqi to be had. To satisfy their cravings they began to eat the carcasses of starved wolves or foxes they found lying in the ice. They ate ptarmigan feathers and bladders and heather, they boiled up hareskin boot liners and made broths from old pairs of sealskin kamiks. They chewed seagull bones and dog harnesses. They ate fur and lemming tails. They consumed their sick dogs and the bodies of their aborted pups. But nothing was ever enough. Before long some kind of stomach sickness began to spread among them. Their bellies knotted into fists, and their muscles trembled. The children leaked diarrhoea then vomit which the women in the camp fed to the dogs rather than have it go to waste. Sargent came to see them, leaving rations of flour, tea and a little sugar, but it all raced through their stomachs and out of their bowels more or less undigested. The illness dimmed their spirits further. Everyone grew so demoralised that not even songs and music could cheer them up. They began to fret and pine for the people they had left behind, and to talk about them constantly, remembering old times, events, celebrations. They came up with a new word to describe the dark period, Qausuittualuk, the Great Dark Time, and they named their new home Qausuittuq, the Place that Never Thaws. In the dark, their loneliness and isolation took on a peculiarly schizophrenic quality so that they were no longer able to distinguish what was real and what not. Qausuittualuk was more than mere physical blackout, it was a blind drawn across their souls.

  Glenn Sargent reported the situation in his monthly dispatch to headquarters under the heading “Stomach Influenza,” but he played down the cause and severity of the sickness. He was under pressure to make the experiment work and he was mindful of the competition at Resolute Bay. In truth, he didn't really know the worst of it. The camp was forty miles distant and the Inuit rarely made the trip into the detachment. When they did, they were often too afraid of Sargent's authority, his temper and his gun to speak out.

  Often, in the later days of the winter, Aqiatusuk would take off up the cliff and sit in the darkness with his face to the south. Whenever he thought about the situation he was in, he felt gusts of angry resentment against the qalunaat and their promises. They were wrong. There was no better life to be had in Qausuittuq. He missed his stepson, Josephie. He missed Inukjuak and his old hunting grounds. It was time, he decided, that he and his family went home. Halfway across the world in London, at about the same time, an exhibition of Inuit sculpture was opening to tremendous acclaim. The exhibition included works from several Inuit artists, but chief among the pieces on display were Aqiatusuk's wonderfully understated depictions of hunters. The Art and News Review commented that the pieces were “astonishingly subtle, these are works of art in the fullest meaning of the word.” The Manchester Guardian went further. “Remarkable,” said their critic. “Powerful enough to make the most fervent admirer of Henry Moore pause a moment.” The exhibition proved so successful that galleries in Edinburgh and Paris asked for it on loan and Aqiatusuk's name became well known in certain art circles. Aqiatusuk knew nothing of this exhibition. No one had thought to tell him it was on. He was stuck at the top of the world, barely surviving.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SIX MONTHS into the relocation experiment, two very different stories were emerging. According to the Department the whole thing was proving a great success. Larsen, Stevenson and Departmental administrator Ben Sivertz had visited Resolute Bay and Craig Harbour and made inspections of the camps. At the detachments, Corporal Glenn Sargent and Consta
ble Ross Gibson had been encouraged to submit positive quarterly reports and to play down any problems. The Canadian Broadcast Company's film of the drop-off had been well received in the south and within weeks of the relocation, The Toronto Sun, the Montreal Gazette and the Hudson Bay Company's paper, The Beaver, had all published glowing accounts of the new, improved lives the Inuit were living on Corn-wallis and Ellesmere islands. The good news had spread to the U.S., and a National Geographic journalist, Andrew Brown, had flown up to Resolute Bay to interview Ross Gibson.

  None of these newspaper reporters or Departmental officials had asked the Inuit what they thought about the move in any detail. If they had, their stories would not have been admiring tales of pluck and grit but something more shocking, a detailing of the privations of more or less abandoned families trying to survive in the harshest terrain human beings had ever inhabited. These stories would have mentioned the disorientating, demoralising darkness which made hunting and trapping not only tremendously difficult but extremely dangerous and the huge distances hunters were having to travel on mobile pack ice in order to be able to hunt and trap enough to survive. Had they been asked, the Inuit might well have told the reporters and Departmental officials that while the hunters were away, the women and children were often forced to survive on bannock and thin broth made from seal heads, and that everyone regularly went hungry and thirsty. The group on the Lindstrom Peninsula might have pointed out that the women of the camp were having to walk miles out on the floating pack to chip freshwater ice from bergs mired in the floe and at the Resolute Bay camp they might have mentioned that no large game ever came on to the island and that they had been reduced to sneaking up to the air-base rubbish dumps under cover of darkness and stealing the remains of the pilots' packed lunches in order to stave off starvation. The Inuit would have certainly reported that both camps were too small and too remote to be viable and that the attempt to mix the Inukjuamiut and the Ingluligmiut had been, all in all, a bad idea. Parents might have brought up the fact that their children were now being denied schooling or access to medical care and single men, like Samwillie, would perhaps have complained that it was going to be impossible to find a wife up there, among women who were either already married or close blood relations. They all would have said they were homesick and they wanted to go back home.

  Over the months it became Glenn Sargent's unenviable task to navigate a path between this untold truth, only part of which he really knew or understood, and the Department version being fed to the press. Perhaps for this reason, he turned down the requests of Paddy Aqiatusuk and some of the other Inuit at Lindstrom Peninsula to make radio contact with their relatives in Inukjuak. Sargent said it would be too difficult to organise, but it may well be that he just did not want the awkward facts to emerge.

  At Craig Harbour Christmas came and went. Corporal Sargent put on a festive meal of corned beef and sent everyone away with tinned sardines, some sugar and a few hardtack biscuits. Shortly afterwards, snow arrived and within days the biting winds had compacted it down so that it could be cut into snowbricks. This was a turning point in the new migrants' fortunes. With a sense of relief, the Inukjuamiut began building their snowhouses along the beach in a neat line topped off at one end by the sod houses of the two Pond Inlet families. The Aqiatusuk family snowhouse was, like most of the others, about twelve feet in diameter and about six feet high. Its entrance was elevated above the level of the living space, which was accessed by a tunnel so that warm air would not escape from it. The tunnel led from the outside first to a kind of porch, where Paddy, Samwillie and Elijah stored their dog harnesses, snowknives, harpoons and floats and frozen clothes. Another tunnel opened out to the living area, which had an ice floor and snowbrick walls lined with caribou and buffalo skins. At one end of the living area, the ice floor was built up into a sleeping platform and covered in more skins. In the centre of the house sat the qulliq over which Mary Aqiatusuk had built a simple wire frame on which to hang the cooking pot. By the side of that sat a large stone which acted as a store for frozen meat and blubber, when there was any. The space was cramped and often thick with the fumes from the qulliq but at least it was possible to stay warm inside, for the temperature in the snow-houses often rose as high as −5°C. As the winter progressed and the sea ice stabilised, the camp hoped they would be able to build more snowhouses out on the sea ice, away from the permafrost, where it would be a few degrees warmer and they would be nearer the edge of the shore-fast ice where most seals were to be found.

  The men now felt able to leave the settlement for longer periods in the knowledge that their families would probably not freeze to death. They passed the late winter carving out new hunting routes, as far as Hell Gate in the west and south across the great ice sea to Devon Island. For week after week, they hunted seals at their breathing holes and in nets hung under tight leads in the ice and, though they were never able to catch enough meat to fill the bellies of their families, the camp did at least draw back from starvation. And so they passed the remainder of that winter, hanging on to life by a few threads of sealskin, some snowblocks and a stone blubber lamp.

  At winter's end, when the immediate crises of survival were over, Paddy Aqiatusuk began to realise that something powerful had happened to him. For the first time in his life, he had been overcome by the thing that every Inuk dreads, often even more than death. The feeling had begun as a slow thump in the chest then strengthened until it became a sickness. Paddy Aqiatusuk was hujuujaq, homesick. Not any ordinary homesickness, but the deep, griping longing for kith and kin to which Inuit, perhaps of all people, are most prone. Paddy's hujuujaq was not merely a sense of missing. As it worked its way inside him, he felt himself invaded by a savage absence, a sense not simply of not being but of never having been. Away from his homeland he no longer really knew who he was. There was no escape from it. Working on his sculpture only furthered his distress, since so much of what he carved related to his life back in Inukjuak. He realised that to retrieve some sense of himself and restore some equilibrium to an existence which tottered dangerously towards the abyss he would have to go home.

  He relayed his disquiet to Corporal Sargent, but the policeman did not seem to take any account of it, instead repeating the same excuse he had given over the matter of radio access, that sending Aqiatusuk and his family back to Inukjuak would be too logistically difficult. Aqiatusuk reminded him that the travellers had been made a specific promise that the Department would help them return if they did not like life in the High Arctic but Sargent merely shrugged.

  On 14 February 1954 the sun poked a first, experimental ray beyond the confines of its winter hiding place and the Inuit at Lind-strom Peninsula ran from their snowhouses and sod houses to greet it. Over the days that followed, the sun did nothing more than wanly circle the horizon but the camp welcomed its return as that of a long-absent friend. Piece by piece the world quietly reappeared and they were reminded just how beautiful it was. The winter had renewed the land. Icicles sparkled off the komatiks and icebergs shone blue-green in the distance and the sea was as white as a fox.

  The return of the light seemed to impress upon Aqiatusuk more fully than ever that in spite of its beauty, Ellesmere Island was not his land. Once more, he took himself off up the cliff at the back of the beach and, gazing southward, set his sights on Inukjuak. He was feeling old and tired, his gallbladder ached and the signs of his age only made him more determined to return home. No Inuk would countenance dying in a foreign land, full of unknown spirits and unfamiliar stories. When the time came Aqiatusuk wanted to leave the world among friends and the spirits of his ancestors. And he wanted desperately to see losephie.

  He passed his days carving and looking out across Iones Sound but the ache would not leave him and, when he could finally stand his hujuujaq no longer, he returned to the detachment to ask Glenn Sargent one more time to help him go back home. If it proved impossible to send him home permanently, he asked if a visit could be arranged so
that he could see his family and his stepson again.

  But Sargent had his instructions and they were to keep the Inuit where they were. He told Aqiatusuk that there were only two ways out of Ellesmere. One was by sled to Resolute Bay and from there by plane to the south, then north again to Inukjuak, which would be tremendously expensive and difficult to organise. The other was by sea on the C. D. Howe, but that too had its problems. After she left Craig Harbour the C. D. Howe's route took her all the way to Montreal. If she were to pick up Paddy and his family, they would all have to remain in Montreal for twelve months before boarding the C. D. Howe on the following year's patrol. The navigation season was too short for the C. D. Howe to sail back into Hudson Bay after calling in at Craig Harbour and such a huge diversion would, in any case, prove prohibitively expensive. There was no money to support the whole family to live in Montreal for a year and, Sargent surmised, they would be very unhappy there. What Sargent did suggest was that if Paddy was missing his relatives as much as he said he was, then he could write to them and ask them to join him on Ellesmere Island. The government, he said, would sponsor their journey north on the C. D. Howe, just as it had Paddy Aqiatusuk's. It was the best he could do.