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Nunani

May 30, 2003 - Nomad (Part one)
May 23, 2003 - Brother
May 16, 2003 - Want (Part two)
May 9, 2003 - Want (Part one)
May 2, 2003 - The likeness of a big person (Part four)

May 30, 2003

Nomad (Part one)

RACHEL QITSUALIK

"Where my horse has trodden, no grass grows."
-Attila the Hun

I'm looking out the window and seeing sweet, golden sunlight – not that pale, bleary light that I've been seeing too much of lately. The other day, I was stepping between a couple of large rocks, and happened to notice some tiny clusters of aupilaktunnguat (purple saxifrage) petals ready to uncurl. The snow buntings are back again, as are the seagulls. I even saw some shiny green flies dancing in the dust down near the shore.

Spring has arrived, promising summer, and just as the animals are obeying their instincts to relocate, I'm feeling my own. I feel it every spring, even when I lived in the South for a few years. My nomadic impulses start to whisper to me. I feel the need to roam, to see new things.

Apparently, I am not alone in this tendency. I have talked to many other Inuit about it, and they all seem to feel the same way. It has not been a simple matter for Inuit to make the transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary one, a fact that has been overstated and flogged nigh unto death in many a stuffy tome.

Nevertheless, the fact stubbornly remains true, and the nomad blood still calls. To this day, many Inuit resist community existence by hunting and travelling as much as possible. For numerous hunters, their house is just their base of operations, while their soul resides out there somewhere, on the land. Many Inuit, like myself, were raised on the go, and still remember how it seemed normal for whole families to travel everywhere by dog-sled. It is hard to make true nomads visualize living in any one place for the rest of their lives.

Inuit come across this tendency honestly. Their love of travel is ancient beyond belief, a need nearly transcending the cultural and bordering on the biological. Historically, this nomadic zeal seems to have remained consistent even among distant cousins of Inuit, even those hugely distant Asiatic peoples from Siberia and Mongolia. Think of the invasion of Europe by Huns and Mongols as ... summer trips that got carried away.

It seems that there have been circumpolar nomads present at least since the last glaciation period, which ended around 10,000 BC. No one is sure exactly when the Inuit-Mongol style of facial features, build, and skin colour originated, but you don't have to be an anthropologist to tell that such peoples are related. And to this day, Inuit and their distant, distant, distant cousins in Asia have all treasured the life of travel and adventure – that of the nomad.

Probably the greatest act of travel that the earliest ancestors of Inuit undertook was coming into North America at all. We don't know what they called themselves in the Alaska of 2,500 BC, but archaeologists call them the Arctic Small Tool tradition. This period of history occurred before there was a Greece, Babylon or China. Europe was obscure and utterly tribal, with no cities or agriculture. The Egyptians had only recently begun to build pyramids. Bronze tools were considered high-tech. No one had yet thought to build chariots or ride horses. The superpower of the day was Sumeria.

Just as the southern regions of the Orient and Occident were refining their abilities to stay put (building cities, practising agriculture), the ancestors of Inuit were refining their ability to survive on the fly. The dog would eventually be their version of the horse or ox-drawn cart, and they were destined to develop quite the repertoire of technological tricks suited to their strange new home.

In 2,500 BC, primitive agriculture was difficult enough to practise in nice, warm climes. But it was never even an option for the ancestors of Inuit, ever dancing on a knife-edge of lethal cold, where edible plants were not exactly fond of growing. But as their nomadic tendencies drove them eastward over the next four millennia (except for some who went southeast, contributing to the ancestry of Navajo), there never seemed to be a need for agriculture, since there were plenty of animals. Sure, they developed different technologies as time went by, but those nomads would not reach a real crisis point for another 2,000 years. When the crisis came, though, it was a big one.

(Continued in Part two.)

May 23, 2003

Brother

RACHEL QITSUALIK

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
- Proverbs

I started out in this life with five brothers but now I have only two.

It is difficult to talk about any of their deaths, but the last was the worst. He committed suicide almost a decade ago.

Though my mind has suppressed the actual date, I roughly remember the time of year. My other siblings have said the same thing, when we could finally talk about it in bits and pieces. When we had the strength to. There was a time, though, when I could not even think of his name without going into a crying jag.

My first impulse was disbelief. When my younger brother called to tell me about it, I thought he was kidding, not that I assumed he was cruel enough to pull such a prank. It was simply that my brain literally could not process the information.

Time lost all meaning. I must have functioned on some level, but I don't remember eating or sleeping in that first terrible month of trying to get through each day. I would wake up each morning thinking, "I'm never seeing him again. He is gone." As surely as if he had evaporated, he was no longer here.

Then I would think of his children and how horrible it was for them. How would they live through so much pain? How would I? Fortunately, my husband was a solid rock when I could not stand one more minute of this existence.

Anger kicked in. How dare he leave me to deal with everything, including his death, while I have to stay stuck in this body? Why does he get to exit and I don't? I was not suicidal, not then, but I didn't want to be "here." I felt guilty that I wasn't mentally present for my now small family.

My husband and I went to see some elders about it, at a centre in Ottawa called Kumik. There, we happened upon an old married couple, both healers. They prayed for me. It so happened that they had recently lost their son to suicide, so I felt better for their understanding.

It never gets any better, they said, and they told me to allow lots of room to grieve, to let it out when I could. The man gave my husband extremely useful advice, telling him that my breakdowns were inevitable, to do nothing other than be there for me, since there were no words that could make it better. And the elders taught me a song to help me get through the roughest times. It helped. I don't know what I would have done without them.

I lit a candle and tried to forgive my brother. Images kept going through my head about how it must have happened. I wondered if he died quickly or painfully. Where his soul now was. Was he in a good place? Would he try to contact me? Would I see him in the afterlife? There were no simple answers.

His funeral was held in Pond Inlet, where the remainder of our family lived at that time. His body is now a frozen shell underneath the snow, his essence no longer here.

I grieved, moved on, became buried in my work. My life had become cloaked in dark clouds of grief, and it was as though some aspect of myself had fallen into a deep slumber.

To my surprise, sunlight finally pierced those clouds with the most simple of events. One of my half-brothers called to see if I was all right. Hope came with the understanding that I wasn't struggling alone. That other had known loss as well. I am now dreaming of a time when he and I can work on healing together, and this has taught me something.

One of our greatest errors, when we suffer, is that we refuse to burden others with our problems. We suffer nobly, alone, because we do not want to spread our affliction.

But just as suicide is a lonely act, only the embrace of others brings healing in its wake. Just as it is a loveless act, only love reverses it. Just as it is death, only other lives can bring light within its shadow.

My brother and I.

Pijariiqpunga.

May 16, 2003

Want (Part two)

RACHEL QITSUALIK

The Inuit way – that which is "Inuktitut" – is not merely a matter of culture, but of breeding. It is a well-documented fact that Inuit have physically adapted to their environment. An example of this is the development of extra blood vessels in the hands (none of my southern friends can handle a frozen fish for long without going numb). But my own suspicion is that Arctic severity has forced even more evolution upon the Inuit mind than on the body. Even the Inuit I know who have been raised in the South still exhibit very Inuktitut attitudes: stoicism, cynical humour, an easy-going demeanor, and a non-paranoid sort of wariness. Their brains are instinctive survival machines, even without the culture.

The greatest evidence to support the idea of the unique Inuit mind, I feel, is the Inuit way of life today. Modern Inuit have embraced the global community, living in houses, paying taxes, watching cable TV. Some have legal degrees and 4x4 trucks. They catch the latest movies and music almost as soon as southerners do. They have all the modern concerns of waste disposal, managing governments, doing business. One might almost think that they are identical to southerners, but simply situated in the Arctic.

Now here is the miracle: Inuit also still hunt. They still eat traditional foods. They hold drum-dances, throat-chanting events. Many still consult elders. Every day, I spot someone wearing some piece of traditional clothing, always quite well made. Every day, I spot sleds lying around, often right next to huskies meant to pull them. Inuit still learn traditional sewing techniques. They carve like mad. Chances are good that if you go to tell an Inuk about some traditional story, they will have already heard a version of it. They have made award-winning movies about their traditional lifestyle, showing no sign of quitting.

The greatest miracle of all, perhaps, is that they still speak their original language. Just the other day, I went to rent a copy of "X-Men" and saw two boys, about eight years old, speaking Inuktitut to each other. They were not speaking it as "properly" as I would have liked, and they were giggling as they exchanged Inuktitut "dirty" words, but it suddenly occurred to me what an astonishing thing I was witnessing. In North America alone, there are many aboriginal cultures that no longer know a word of their original languages.

Such amazing preservation of culture ties into the reasons why the questions posed by early explorers did not elicit the expected answers from Inuit. "What do you believe?" was posed by Knud Rasmussen. The answer from his Inuk companion was, "We don't believe. We fear." A similarly fundamental question posed by Rasmussen to a different man was, "What do you want?" The Inuk's response was to run off a long list of things that he must avoid in order to stay healthy.

Such answers best characterize the Inuit mindset, that which persists today. To the average southern mind, fulfillment is defined by acquisition. I am not referring only to materialism, but to acquisition of resources, such as relationships, recognition and opportunities. The assumption is that life begins at a sort of "zero-rating" for happiness. After that, the more things that go right in one's life, the happier one becomes. There are great expectations of life.

However, the traditional Inuit mind expects very little. In this mind set, happiness is a natural state, disappearing only when things go wrong. Instead of trying to make oneself happier, the traditional Inuit mind is preoccupied with preserving happiness by fending off those things (disease, injury, hostility) that steal happiness away.

The reason, I think, that Inuit have preserved their culture so well is that their minds have evolved to feel that life owes them nothing, facing hardship with a heroic kind of stoicism that is bred into them by their environment. While modernity may sometimes stifle this tendency, the instinct is always there, a genetic gift. The concern of the deepest Inuit mind is to maintain the things that give one joy, while trying to adapt to that which does not. Inuit, therefore, are less concerned with alteration than they are with preservation. Thus do the things that they best love about their culture ever endure.

What do Inuit want? To be Inuit.

Pijariiqpunga.

May 9, 2003

Want (Part one)

RACHEL QITSUALIK

Do you know yourself?
How little of yourself you understand!
Stretched out feebly on my bench, my only strength is in my memories.
Game! Big game, chasing ahead of me!
Allow me to relive that!
Let me forget my frailty, by calling up the past!
I bring to mind the great white one, the polar bear, approaching with raised hindquarters, his nose in the snow - convinced, as he rushed at me, that of the two of us, he was the only male!
This is how it was.
Now I lie on my bench, too sick to even fetch a little seal oil for my woman's lamp...

- Song of Orpingalik, Netsilingmiut

Of all the questions that explorers and anthropologists have asked early Inuit over time, the most common ones are also the most basic: What do you like? What do you want? What do you fear?

The answers to such questions have also been the source of the greatest frustration to explorers, as well as to other southerners wanting to learn more about Inuit culture. In the past, I have made it clear that traditional Inuit (especially elders) used to consider a direct, personal question to be exceedingly rude. Their way of dealing with such rudeness was to become evasive, even tricky, in the hope that the one asking the questions would simply go away. But while this is true, there is another side to "Inuit evasiveness," as well, a cultural side. So bear with me while I have a look at it.

While we have all heard it time and again, I have to repeat it here: It cannot be stressed enough how hostile and uncertain the world of pre-colonial Inuit used to be. We all know how adaptable Inuit culture is, but most people think that this adaptation is a matter of technology. Look at how clever Inuit are for doing so well with so little to work with. But in having such a cushy existence ourselves (let's face it, life isn't a fraction as hard for us as it was for many of our ancestors, no matter what part of the world our genes hail from), we too easily overlook the fact that survival is not simply a matter of technology. At least two-thirds of survival is attitude, mind set, culture.

While I was living in the South, I had the privilege of conducting a seminar on cold-weather survival. One of the people attending it was a U.S. Marine, a veteran of the Vietnam War. As individuals who pride themselves on their ability to survive anything, Marines love any extra tips they can get on survival in any climate. To my great pleasure, this fellow was extremely excited by the seminar. Just ask my husband. The Marine kept pumping his hand, saying, "You're lucky to have that one - she can take care of herself!"

Perhaps ironically, my culture is such that I am not even comfortable relating the above story, in part because the survival knowledge that I was imparting during the seminar was commonplace when I was growing up. You did not have to be a great hunter to know how to dress properly, how to conserve heat in oneself or a shelter, how to make cord or clothes, how to find and melt drinking water, how to do basic tracking, or how to orient oneself when lost. You were considered incompetent if you did not possess such knowledge, in the same way that modern, urban folk are considered incompetent if they do not know how to buy groceries or use an elevator.

The one thing that I was concerned about during my seminar, however, was that I could not impart to my listeners the survival "mind." I was certainly not worried about the Marine – years of soldiering and past trauma had ensured that he already possessed it. But my milder listeners were convinced that survival was guaranteed by simply knowing some cute tricks.

If I could go back and tell them all one thing, it would be this: Traditional Inuit culture is the environment, and nothing other than this.

The Arctic has not simply forced Inuit to develop certain technologies. It has created, sculpted, determined the entire culture, including the way in which the people think. It has made the Inuit mind unlike any other on Earth.

(Concluded in part two.)

May 2, 2003

The likeness of a big person (Part four)

RACHEL QITSUALIK

The giants had allowed the man to borrow a large team of their intelligent hunting wolves, so he explained to the wolves that he wanted them to retrieve his son. It was his only son that he missed above all others from his old community. The wolves understood well. They listened obediently as he explained that he wanted them to coax the boy onto the kamotiq and bring him to the land of the giants. If they failed, they were to howl on their way back.

The wolves departed and soon approached the community, where they found the boy playing alone outside. Before the boy could panic, the wolves began to act like monstrous puppies, jumping and licking and rolling over, all the while leading the boy closer to the kamotiq. But the boy noticed what the wolves were doing, and he never quite set foot on it.

The day slowly burned away, and the wolves finally returned to their master. When the man heard them howling on their way back, he knew that they had failed.

Days went on like this, with the wolves trying time and again to retrieve the boy. But they could not. In despair, the man at last gave up, resigning himself to life with the giants. Many years saw him become used to their ways, even to their food. Eventually, he even took a giant wife.

One day, he came across another human being from his old community, and he eagerly asked about his human wife and child. Then his heart broke, for he was told that his wife had waited for him all these years, never realizing that it was he who had sent the kamotiq for his son. So he told the man from his community to go back, to tell his wife to forget about him and to remarry if she could.

This was the last thing he said to any human being. After this, he hopped onto his massive kamotiq and let the wolves pull him back to those misty lands of the giants, his only remaining home.

I have heard different explanations of what this and other giant stories mean. One friend of mine insists that this is a distant memory of Inuit captivity at the hands of Europeans, pointing out the giants' size, the wall of water (the Atlantic?), food incompatibility, weird butchering practices, and the intelligent wolves (European dog breeds?). While I find this explanation unlikely, if true it would colour the tale with surpassing sadness.

My own feeling, however, is that this is an especially Inuktitut story, especially by way of its protagonist, who demonstrates cunning in trying to escape his situation, but finally resigns himself to it once all efforts fail. It is typical of the Inuit tales that laud ingenuity, but ultimately convey the message that humanity's powers are limited. Man must accept that he will eventually run out of tricks, that nature will overwhelm him. The giants, in this story as in others around the world, are merely the agents of nature, the forces of the Earth given a face.

Even more, I feel that Inuit giant tales – probably those of other cultures as well – represent mystery. They harken from a time when there were still lands unknown, when people used to thrill in speculating as to what ill-fated travellers might stumble upon. After all, giant tales almost always involve exploration. So if there is any sadness to be taken out of this story, it is not because it is a tale of loss or captivity, but simply because it tells us that the world may be less interesting to us than it was to our ancestors.

Folklorically, there is still a place for ghosts in the ruins of human habitation. There is still a place for vampires in the urban jungles where humanity habitually preys upon itself. There is still a place for demons in the madness, the evil we see in some. But giants? The lack of unknown frontiers has left them behind. We still like to imagine what might dwell at the bottom of the sea, but even this unknown space is rapidly losing its appeal to many. And the giants our ancestors knew have faded from relevance, becoming as banal and unremarkable as stones. Not unlike nature itself.

Pijariiqpunga.

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