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March 31, 2006

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
April 5, 1923 – In Search of Igsivalitaq, the Outlaw

KENN HARPER

This was no easy task for a few years earlier Igsivalitaq had murdered another man in a fit of temper. Then, knowing that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had established a detachment at Chesterfield Inlet, he had fled with his wife and son into the mountains near Pelly Bay.

Many Inuit feared Igsivalitaq. Anarqaaq, Kunu’s guide, told him, “That meat you bought is going to cost you dear.” The other guide, Taparte, was also apprehensive about encountering the fugitive, for Taparte had married the widow of Igsivalitaq’s victim. Both men feared that Igsivalitaq, an expert marksman, might think that they had been sent by the police, and shoot them on sight.

But Kunu was undaunted by the prospect of the meeting. Before he left Orpingalik’s camp, Orpingalik’s wife, Uvlunnuaq, the mother of the outlaw, sang for Kunu a song that she had composed in sadness over her son’s fate.

Three days after leaving Orpingalik’s camp, Kunu and his party finally met the object of their quest. He had heard their dogs first and so was expecting visitors but had no way of knowing if they were friend or foe. Kunu took the initiative in announcing himself in much the same way that the fugitive’s father had introduced himself some days earlier, “We are only ordinary people who think of no evil.” Igsivalitaq, at first ill at ease and suspicious, finally relaxed. He told Kunu his own version of the circumstances that had caused him and his family to live apart from other men:

“Others have told you why I live by myself; now I would rather tell you the whole story myself.

“About two years ago I was living not far from Repulse Bay... in order to be near to the places where I could buy guns and ammunition from white men.

“In this new country I had a hunting companion, and we often had contests. We were equally fast, equally skilful at hunting, but he was the stronger. We were always alone when we practised our sports, and my companion, who could not run so far as I can, made use of every opportunity to let me know that he was not afraid of me. And so it happened one day that to prove his superiority he rubbed his muck on me, and that was an insult I could not forget. When a man does that in our country it is an insult that means that he had an inclination to kill one. The treatment I had received tormented me so much that I could not tell anyone about it. Hatred grew up in me, and every time I met my old companion out caribou hunting it was as if I loathed myself; thoughts that I could not control came up in me, and so one day when we were alone together up in the mountains I shot him.

“...Now if there had been no white men in our country the dead man’s relatives would take vengeance upon me, and I would not be afraid of that; but now I was told that white men would come up from Chesterfield and take me away to punish me in the white man’s way. White men were masters in our country and they would take me home to their own land, where everything would be wild and strange to me. So I grew afraid and came back to my old country and now live in the mountain regions where no white man has ever been before.

“When you came... I thought you belonged to the white men whom the Aivilingmiut call police. I thought you were coming for me, and if I was to be taken away against my will I would rather die; so I had sharpened all my weapons to be ready... You came as friends instead, and you must know that as long as you are with us everything I have is yours too.”

Kunu sympathized with the man. He thought that he should not be punished according to laws with which he was unfamiliar. And he tried to explain to him the Sixth Commandment — thou shalt not kill — by telling him that “people should be tolerant and sociable and do no harm to each other.” But Igsivalitaq was not naïve enough to believe that white men actually lived according to this precept. “The effect of my words was weakened,” wrote Kunu, “because via Repulse Bay he had heard a trader’s account of the Great War.”

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

March 24, 2006

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
March 28, 1923 — Rasmussen meets the Netsilingmiut

KENN HARPER

Orpingalik, hunter and poet from Pelly Bay. (PHOTO FROM THE REPORT OF THE FIFTH THULE EXPEDITION)

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Rasmussen’s goal was quite different. He wanted to record the social life and the religious beliefs of the Inuit before both were irrevocably altered by an expected influx of white traders. Furthermore, he had an advantage over previous explorers — he was part Inuit and had grown up speaking Greenlandic, had an ear for language and a fascination with dialects, and so could speak to the people he met in their native tongue. The Inuit, unable to pronounce his first name, called him simply Kunu — in Greenland he was known as Kununnguaq.

Already some Netsilingmiut had relocated to the area of Repulse Bay where a trading post had been established. It was from there that Kunu hired two guides, Taparte and Anarqaaq, to lead him into traditional Netsilik territory. His only other companions on this, the first leg of his great sled journey across the top of America, were two Inughuit: Qaavigarsuaq, and his female cousin, Arnarulunnguaq.

Eight days out from Reuplse Bay, on March 28, they unexpectedly met the first Netsilingmiut. Anarqaaq, who was outside repairing the snowhut, removed the snowblock from the doorway and shouted in that he had seen men. Kunu rushed outside and saw two “stoutly built men” approaching the camp.

Meeting strangers was a serious matter in this land. The men carried snowknives and harpoons. Kunu, unarmed, approached them and greeted them in their own language, “You can put your weapons away! We are peaceful people who have come to visit your country.”

The Inuit were astonished to be greeted by a stranger in their own language, and the greeting broke the ice. “We are just ordinary people, and you need expect no harm from us,” they replied.

The two men were father and son, Orpingalik and Kanajoq. They were curious to know all about the trio of strangers who had appeared unexpectedly in their land and shared their language. Kunu and his party soon decamped and moved, at Orpingalik’s invitation, to the latter’s camp, two interconnected snowhouses accommodating eight people. They were on their way to Repulse Bay to trade their fox pelts for guns and ammunition.

Kunu stayed with Orpingalik’s extended family for eight days. He wrote of the occasion, “We met as if we had known one another for years, and an encounter between old friends could not have been more cordial.”

Orpingalik was a shaman who was held in high esteem, well versed in the old traditions of his people, intelligent and witty. He was an expert archer and the quickest kayakman of all his people in pursuing caribou at the river crossings. Kunu’s interest was primarily in folk tales and he collected many from his host. Orpingalik also offered Kunu the words to a number of magic songs. Kunu had to pay for these and he did so by trading magic songs he had earlier learned from the Iglulingmiut. He entitled one of Orpingalik’s songs, in translation, “A poor man’s prayer to the spirits.” It was used when hunting seal in winter:

“You, fatherless and motherless,
You, dear little orphan,
Give me
Kamiks of caribou.
Bring me a gift,
An animal, one of those
That provide nice blood-soup,
An animal from the sea depths
And not from the plains of earth.
You, little orphan,
Bring me a gift.”

Orpingalik was more than a shaman. He was also a poet. Kunu, clearly impressed with the man, described him thus: “His imagination was a luxuriant one, and he had a very sensitive mind; he was always singing when he had nothing else to do, and he called his songs ‘comrades in solitude’, or he would say that his songs were his breath, so necessary were they to him...”

Orpingalik himself said of his love of song: “There are so many occasions in one’s life when a joy or a sorrow is felt in such a way that the desire comes to sing... All my being is song, and I sing as I draw breath.”

On April 5 everyone broke camp. Orpingalik and his family would continue on to Repulse Bay; Kunu and his companions would sled westward. When the two parties were a little distance apart, Orpingalik’s group stopped and waved their hands. The shaman’s son called out, “May we all travel without evil spirits following us!”

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

March 17, 2006

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
March 18, 1875 – The death of a daughter

KENN HARPER

Panik — the most traveled Inuit child of her time. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE HARPER COLLECTION)

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She was born in 1866 in or near Iglulik, the daughter of a man whose name has been recorded as Teeleekum, and his wife, Pukinning. They gave their daughter the name Isigaittuq.

Two years later strangers arrived on Melville Island — an eccentric white man named Charles Francis Hall, accompanied by an Inuit couple from far-off Cumberland Sound, whom Hall called Hannah (her Inuktitut name was Tookoolito) and Joe (whose name was Ipiirvik, which Hall wrote as Ebierbing).

Hall, a printer from Cincinnati, had become obsessed with discovering the fate of the missing British explorer, Sir John Franklin. In 1860, while exploring Frobisher Bay, Hall had met Hannah and Joe, who both spoke English — Hannah more than her husband — as a result of two years they had spent as teenagers living in England. Hall hired the couple as his interpreters and guides and took them back to America two years later. There they suffered their first grievous loss when their infant son, Tarralikitaq — the butterfly — died in New York.

In 1864 Hall embarked on his second expedition in search of the British sailors, this time to the central Canadian Arctic by way of north-western Hudson Bay. At Repulse Bay, Hannah gave birth to her second child, a boy whom Hall named King William, after the island that was the expedition’s destination. The unfortunately-named boy lived only eight months, dying during an arduous sled journey.

Hannah was inconsolable in her loss. So when they met Teeleekum and Pukinning, Hall suggested that Hannah adopt Isigaittuq, now two years old. The mother was willing to part with her daughter, but Teeleekum objected. Hall solved the impasse by buying the little girl, exchanging a sled for her.

Hall took a proprietary interest in this child and named her Sylvia Grinnell, after the daughter of his friend and benefactor, Henry Grinnell, a New York shipping magnate. But Hannah and Joe called her simply Panik — the Inuktitut word for daughter. Hall, whose renditions of Inuktitut words were almost always inaccurate, recorded the name as Punna.

In 1869 Hannah and Joe were happy to be back in Groton. They bought a roomy two-storey house near town for $300. To Panik, who had only lived in snowhouses and tents and the cramped quarters of the whaler, Ansell Gibbs, it seemed a castle. Joe worked as a carpenter, Hannah as a seamstress, making clothes and souvenirs for sale locally. Panik, three years old, made friends easily and went dutifully to Sunday School every week.

The following year, after the ship was released from the ice, a terrible storm arose. Expecting the vessel to sink, nineteen people sought refuge on an ice floe. The ship didn’t sink but the party — Hannah, Joe and Panik, a Greenlander Suersak and his family, Captain George Tyson and a number of German sailors — were stranded on the large floe.

Their floating island, initially 450 feet across, was to be their home for the next six months. The Inuit men had their kayaks and hunting equipment with them, and it is a testament to their skill and loyalty that no-one died during their incredible drift.

Starvation was never far away. Tyson’s journal contains many references to Panik. One reads, “Panik, poor child, is often hungry, indeed, all the children often cry with hunger. We give them all that is safe to use. I can do no more, however sorry I may feel for them.” Once Panik sat staring at him and finally remarked, “You are nothing but bone!” Tyson added, “And, indeed, I am not much else.”

Finally, on the last day of April, the hapless party spotted a ship in the distance. Suersak took to his kayak and paddled to her. After a drift of 1,200 miles, they were rescued by a Newfoundland sealer, the Tigress.

Back in Groton, Panik attended classes at North Lane District School. She especially liked arithmetic and, appropriately, geography. But although she was a happy and contented child, she never regained the robust health she had known before the tragic drift on the ice floe and her repeated brushes with death by starvation. Early in 1875 she came down with pneumonia and died on March 18. She was buried in Starr Cemetery, beside Tarralikitaq, the brother she had never known.

The letters on the simply headstone tell, in abbreviated form, the adventurous life of this much-travelled Inuit girl who died before she was nine. If you pull the grass away from the base of the headstone, you can even make out its final words, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Panik’s headstone near Groton, Connecticut. (PHOTO COURTESY OF KENN HARPER)

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Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

March 10, 2006

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
March 15, 2004 – Sedna in space

KENN HARPER

The discovery of Sedna was announced to the public on March 15, 2004. This may come as a surprise to Inuit who have always known the legend of the woman at the bottom of the sea, but this Sedna was different. The new Sedna was not in the sea but in the sky, far beyond the reach of the naked eye, past the limit of the spirit flights of even the most powerful shamans of the past. Identified the previous November by astronomers from the California Institute of Technology, Yale University and Hawaii’s Gemini Observatory, this object, named Sedna by the scientists, was the farthest — and coldest — object yet discovered in our solar system.

A planetoid, between 800 and 1,100 miles in diameter, Sedna is eight billion miles from the sun, with a surface temperature rarely above minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Its last complete orbit of the sun began when humankind was still living in the ice age, 10,500 years ago.

Astronomers disagree on the definition of a planet, so it is unclear if Sedna, so far called a planetoid, may yet become our solar system’s 10th planet, after Pluto.

So much for what it is. But why Sedna?

David L. Rabinowitz, an astronomer from Yale University and one of the discoverers of this tiny dot in space, explains the choice this way:

“The reason we chose the name Sedna is because the astronomical community has agreed that all the objects in the outer solar system should be named after characters from creation myths (or underworld figures if their orbits are coupled like Pluto’s to Neptune). We might have chosen Greek or Roman gods, but they have all been used. So we looked at Inuit mythology. The Inuit are naturally familiar with the cold appropriate for distant planets. Sedna’s association with the icy seas and sea creatures is also appropriate for the outer solar system since Uranus and Neptune are also associated with the ocean.”

Sedna is one of many names used to refer to a creature from legend, a woman who lives at the bottom of the sea and who sometimes holds back the bounty of the harvest from Inuit hunters. During times of famine, an angakkuq (a shaman) would find it necessary to make a dangerous trip to Sedna’s home to negotiate the release of animals so that hunters might have some success. Her legend is associated with the creation of sea mammals. Some of her names in various geographical areas are Nuliajuk, Taliilajuuq, Nerrivik, Uinigumasuittuq (“the one who did not want to marry”), and Takannaaluk arnaaluk (“the terrible woman down there”).

The name “Sedna” is used in southern Baffin Island, although “Sedna” is a mildly inaccurate spelling for it. In Cumberland Sound, the lady at the bottom of the sea, who controlled the success of the sea mammal harvest, was known as “Sanna”. The earliest written reference to this name is in the diary of Brother Matthias Warmow, a German Moravian missionary from Greenland who spent the winter of 1857-58 in Cumberland Sound and recorded the name as “Sanak” or “Sana.” Charles Francis Hall, who explored Frobisher Bay in the early 1860s and whose spelling of Inuit names was laughably inexact — Zebedee Nungak will be apoplectic at this one — called her “Sidne” and even “Sydney!”

The spelling that has become so popular, Sedna, is that of Franz Boas, the pioneer anthropologist who spent the winter of 1883-84 in Cumberland Sound and wrote the first major ethnological work on Canadian Inuit, “The Central Eskimo.” Boas wrote a great deal about Inuit belief in Sanna, which he spelled as Sedna. His spelling may not even be so far off the mark, for the name may once have been “Satna” — there has been a tendency in recent years in Baffin for the gemination of consonant clusters, and it is only in the past 30 years that Inuktitut spelling has been standardized in Roman orthography.

The name may, in fact, merely be a demonstrative pronoun used, as was often the case in Inuktitut, to avoid using a proper name, especially of one fearful or deserving of respect. The name used in Iglulik, “Takannaaluk arnaaluk” — “the terrible woman down there,” is built on this model, and the first word of it is derived from “kanna” — “the one down there.” Could not “Sanna” be simply a variant of this? (Schneider’s “Ulirnaisigutiit” records “sanna” as meaning “down there” on the Hudson’s Bay coast of Quebec.)

The word has survived into modern times and is used throughout southern Baffin Island. In a Pangnirtung oral history project in about 1986, Qattuuq Evic recounted the times when the Inuit worshipped “a false god who they called Sanah.” In Arctic College’s 1999 publication, “Transition to Christianity,” Victor Tungilik from Naujaat said: “She has been given different names. She has been called Sanna. In my dialect she is called Nuliajuk. Among the Iglulingmiut she is called Takannaaluk.”

Now the name, well-known to Inuit art collectors throughout the world, has transcended the bounds of earth, not to find a lonely haven in the depths of the sea but to trace an orbit through space at the bounds of our solar system. Inuit should be proud.

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

March 3, 2006

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
March 9, 1955 – Matthew Henson: the end of the trail that is always new

KENN HARPER

Matthew Henson: the first black man to reach the North Pole later became a parking lot attendant.

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The debate has been muddied in recent years by the forces of political correctness. Cook was accompanied by two Inuit, Ittukusuk and Aapilak. Peary’s companions were four Inuit, Uutaaq, Ukkujaaq, Iggiannguaq and Sigluk, and one African-American, Matthew Henson. The forces of political correctness have coalesced around the figure of Henson, one of the Arctic’s greatest travelers.

Matthew Henson was born in 1866 in Maryland. Orphaned at 13, he went to sea the same year, and was fortunate to attract the attention of the captain, who recognized the boy’s innate intelligence and taught him reading, writing and navigation. At the age of 21, working in Washington, D.C., Henson met Robert Peary, then a young naval lieutenant, and agreed to accompany him on a surveying expedition to Nicaragua. This was the start of Henson’s long association with Peary. In 1891 he accompanied Peary to northwestern Greenland on an expedition that was the first of many and that would culminate in Peary’s “assault” on the Pole in 1909.

Peary was insufferably arrogant. A biographer once wrote that “many in Peary’s command used to return hating him in a way that murder couldn’t gratify.” He also believed in the supremacy of the white race, believing that Henson and the Inuit were inferior to him. Once he berated Henson for not calling him “Sir” often enough, and wrote that Henson was “as subject to my will as the fingers of my hand.” His opinion of the Inuit was no more complimentary; he felt that “although they were not qualified to lead, they could follow another’s lead and drive dogs much better than any white man.”

Peary may not have respected Henson for anything but his abilities on the trail, but the Inughuit of northern Greenland loved and admired him. He is remembered as an excellent dog driver and the only member of Peary’s expeditions, despite all their years in the Arctic, to learn to speak the local language with native fluency. They gave him a name, Maripaluk, by which he is remembered in north Greenland to this day.

On Peary’s final dash for the Pole, he sent back all his supporting parties to his base camp on Ellesmere Island, proceeding to his final destination with only Henson and the four Inuit. He sent back the last white member of his supporting parties, the ship’s captain, Bob Bartlett, because he was unwilling to share the glory of reaching the Pole with another white man but didn’t mind sharing it with members of what he viewed as inferior races.

Herein lies the irony. In recent years, African-American writers have made the case that Matthew Henson may have been the first person at the North Pole. The reasoning is this: Peary was virtually crippled, many of his toes amputated and his feet badly frostbitten. He rode on the sled while Henson walked ahead. Henson himself wrote, “I who had walked know that we made exceptional distances those five days. So did the Eskimos, for they also walked. Lieutenant Peary... had ridden the sledges the greater part of the journey...” Thus, if Peary reached the North Pole, Henson reached it first.

The result of this reasoning is that those who claim that Henson was the first man at the Pole must also be supporters of Robert Peary, the racist who denigrated Henson’s abilities in everything but sled travel. In doing so, many claim that there was an unspoken bond of friendship and respect between the two men. It’s wishful thinking, not supported by the evidence.

Matthew Henson left a child in the Arctic, a boy named Anaukkaq, his son from a loving relationship with a woman named Aqattannguaq. When I first met Anaukkaq in the 1970s he was an elderly man with an insatiable curiousity about his father, the legendary Maripaluk. He asked what I knew of him and whether he had had any children in the South.

What I learned was the long and sad conclusion of the life of the legendary explorer. The glory was all for Peary. Henson found a job as a parking lot attendant in Brooklyn, and later as a messenger at the U. S. Customs House in New York City. Eventually it dawned on a changing world that this man was a hero. In 1945 he received a medal for his work on Peary’s expedition. In 1954 President Eisenhower received Henson and his wife, Lucy, at the White House. Similar honours were never accorded the four Inuit who had helped Peary achieve his farthest north. The following year, Matthew Henson died on March 9 of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 88.

In 1988 Matthew Henson, in death, was again honoured by the nation he had served. His body was disinterred from his grave in the Bronx and reburied, with full honours, in Arlington National Cemetery, where Peary’s body had lain since 1920. On his tombstone are inscribed his own words, “The lure of the Arctic is tugging at my heart. To me the trail is calling. The old trail. The trail that is always new.”

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

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