Wayfinding Page 4

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  There are arguably few people left whose transition from a nomadic life to modernity happened as quickly and abruptly as the Inuit’s. In a twenty-year period from the 1950s to the 1970s, nearly the entire population shifted from growing up on the land to living in sedentary communities administered by the Canadian government. A cash economy, gas engines, telephones, televisions, airplanes, hospitals, schools, and grocery stores arrived in the north. In a historical blink the Inuit adopted a new language, diet, and transportation. The speed of this cultural transition happened so fast that the Inuit dog, required for survival and travel for thousands of years, nearly went extinct.

  The first interactions with qallunaat likely started in the tenth century with Norse seamen, followed by the European expeditions, and then whalers in the seventeenth century. Whalers and fishermen brought new materials like metal knives and needles, rifles, and cloth. Christian missionaries began arriving and “civilizing” the Inuit through conversion; Anglicans and Catholics competed with one another to gain the most followers. The missionaries imported a syllabic alphabet in order to teach people to read the Bible. Hunters and families were instructed not to travel on Sundays. Shamanic beliefs and age-old practices such as facial tattooing for women were banned. These cultural disruptions from contact with the qallunaat—not to mention the introduction of alcohol and European diseases—were devastating. But several intrinsic aspects of Inuit life stayed constant. Christian or not, people still needed to travel on the land and hunt in order to survive.

  It wasn’t until the Hudson Bay Company, the English-owned trading business, started establishing trading posts throughout the eastern Arctic in the nineteenth century that these practices began to change. The HBC sold furs for European markets, and many Inuit began trapping animals in order to trade the pelts for tobacco, ammunition, and food. HBC posts became hubs of economic activity that drew Inuit families into their orbit, initiating a shift from seminomadism to a sedentary life. The fur trade also had a pernicious effect on the Inuit’s relationship to travel. As the anthropologist Sarah Bonesteel has written, trapping was time-consuming and diverted people from traditional subsistence activities like hunting. In turn, this shift increased people’s dependence on the food the HBC stocked, which only increased the need to trap to make money to buy the food.

  In the 1930s fur prices plummeted and caribou populations dwindled. With many Inuit facing starvation, the Canadian government passed legislation giving itself legal responsibility for their survival. When World War II ended, the Department of National Health and Welfare began implementing paternalistic social engineering programs designed to assimilate the Inuit into white society, ostensibly for humanitarian purposes. Children were legally required to attend residential schools and many were taken from their families. In school they were punished for speaking Inuktitut. The government established permanent settlements and gave the Inuit houses, encouraging them to become wage-earning citizens in mining and labor sectors. Healthcare infrastructure was built, and women were encouraged to give birth to their children in hospitals. Tuberculosis patients were relocated to sanatoria in the south; the Canadian government believed it could administer treatment to the Inuit more efficiently if they were stationary.

  Solomon Awa’s parents experienced these historical events directly. His mother, Agalakti, was born on the land and had an arranged marriage to his father, Awa, at the age of thirteen. In the book Saqiyuq, Agalakti tells the anthropologist Nancy Wachowich how she gave birth to their first daughter, Ooopah, at fifteen. They lived by traveling, hunting, and trading at outposts for the next thirty years. While Awa hunted by dogsled, boat, and foot, his wife sewed caribou-skin clothing for her husband and children. When Anglican missionaries came to one of their camps, Agalakti and Awa were baptized and became Apphia and Mathias, taking Awa as a surname. In 1961 the Canadian government began forcing the Awas to leave their children at residential schools so they would learn English and be prepared for wage jobs. “They had to, that was the law of the teachers, that every student had to go to school. All my children were so young when they went to school. It seemed as if they were getting younger and younger,” explained Apphia in an interview from the 1990s. “We left them there, but we missed them very, very much when they were gone. We missed them so much!”

  Solomon was their eighth child, and when he turned seven years old, his parents asked the government if they could keep him. They offered two of their other children in return, just so they would have one son who could go hunting and camping with his father. They wanted Solomon to learn the Inuit way.

  When a government boat came to pick up the children at their camp outside Pond Inlet, the officials took Solomon on board to treat a burn on his hand, which he had received from a pot of seal soup. But when Agalakti’s husband went to pick up Solomon, he instead found Solomon sitting in the classroom; they had sent him to school. “My husband asked the teacher if he could take his son out of the classroom, and the teacher said no, so they started arguing. They got into a big argument, and then my husband just took Solomon by his hand and walked him out the door. He was very, very angry. He didn’t even stop to get Solomon’s parka. My husband gave Solomon his snow parka on the way back to the camp.” Solomon was the only one of his eleven siblings to grow up on the land.

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  In the Arctic the sun is a fickle navigational aid. Above the Arctic Circle, it disappears in the winter below the horizon and then never sets in summer. There is a short period in March when it rises in the east and sets in the west. In order to deduce directional information from the sun, one has to know its complicated, changing journey through the sky at each time of year, and though many hunters do, it is never relied on as a primary navigation tool. Instead, as Awa explained to me, they use an assortment of aids, often in coordination with each other, to orient themselves in any condition and any landscape of the Arctic. One of these tools is sastrugi, snow that is formed into wavelike drifts by the wind. Imagine you are around Sanirajaq (also called Hall Beach), Awa said. It’s completely flat, there are no mountains or landmarks. But at the beginning of wintertime, new snow falls into soft mounds called uluangnaq, a word that means the shape of a cheek. Then the prevailing wind, called Uangnaq, blows from the west-northwest. Uangnaq erodes the snowdrifts, carving them into new shapes. “They are sticking out like this,” Awa said and stuck out his tongue. The tip pointed downward. “It’s called uqaluraq, a tongue-shaped snow. And it’s pointing north. So you look down on the ground, and that’s how you tell where do I want to go, west or east? You can cross them.”

  Awa picked up the packets of grape and orange jelly on the table and began to arrange them to demonstrate. Say you are going south, toward the ocean, he said, placing a grape jelly at the edge of the table. Or you want to go north, toward land, and he put another jelly packet down in the middle of the table. “When you leave the community, you watch the tongues, which way you are cutting across them. Straight up? Or across? Or cutting at ten o’clock? One o’clock? When you want to come back home, you do the opposite way. If you were cutting straight up when you are leaving, then you cut straight down when you return.”

  Different cultures have invented various ways to classify winds. In ancient Ireland, winds were given a color; a southwest wind, for instance, was glas, a blue-green that translates to “the color of sky in water.” The Inuit classify different winds by their character and moods. Uangnaq is generally considered a female wind: it gusts and dies down, blows furiously and then disappears. It’s these volatile whims that shape the snow into uqalurait, and because it is the coldest of winds, it hardens the snow too. Even if another type of wind blows for a while, the uqalurait keep their form, and if fresh snow falls to cover it up, you can find uqalurait underneath it, still intact. In the book The Arctic Sky, navigator George Kappianaq describes how the Nigiq wind is male. It blows steadily and evens out the ground. Uangnaq and Nigiq have a relationship. When she blows es
pecially hard, he responds by smoothing things over. Uqalurait are extremely important for navigation in flat places like sea ice where there may be no landmarks. The shape of the uqalurait can be discerned even when a storm is blowing and the moon, stars, sun, and landmarks aren’t visible. Around Mittimatalik, where Awa grew up, it’s a more mountainous region, and uqalurait aren’t as necessary. Around there, Awa said he learned to use the Big Dipper, called Tukturjuit in Inuktitut, as a celestial guide, following its position throughout the night in order to tell time and direction.

  In addition to the wind, stars, and snow, Awa explains that there is often a logic to geography. For example, around Iqaluit, he told me, the ridges and valleys all run south into the sea. He can use them as a compass while also recalling their particular characteristics individually and therefore utilize them as landmarks. People from the south would find this hard to believe. The Arctic environment, even mountainous areas, looks bewilderingly homogeneous. The tallest trees are the size of bushes, and the vegetation is more or less always the same—patches of moss and lichen on rocks. One jumble of rocks is identical to the next. Telling the difference between one snow-covered valley and another seems impossible.

  “You go up there and every spot of land looks the same,” Awa concurred. “But they are not! If you watch very closely, this place has a big rock. This other place looks like the same, but it doesn’t have the same big rock. You have to watch for the details.” This skill, according to Awa, is the key to the mastery of navigation: the Inuit people have an ability to perceive the subtlest of variations in detail and commit a staggering amount of visual information to memory. “I myself and everybody else who has gone out to the same spot over time, we know exactly what it looks like. If you are living in a location, you are there every day, you are knowing it like the back of your hand. As the English say.”

  But then, he tells me, many hunters don’t even need to see the details of a place to commit them to memory, they just need to hear them described. Awa told me a story about a friend who had to deliver food from Igloolik to Pond Inlet, a distance of 250 miles as the crow flies. He had never been to Pond Inlet before, but someone who had made the journey gave him a description of what he would see if he followed the correct route. “He was told if you go here, you’re going to see that,” said Awa. “Then you go along the side and follow the valley and the valley ends and you’re going to see a couple of humps, you go over those humps. He was told the story, and he followed through to the sea ice at Pond Inlet.”

  I looked down at our table, strewn in jelly packets. “Okay, but do you think the Inuit and qallunaat remember things differently?” I asked him.

  “We have a hundred megapixels of memory, not one,” he said. “And it’s because we were taught oral history. Our memory is way bigger. I have no scientific information about that. It’s probably the way memory is stored. The words that were taught, the stories, we put them in our memory, the land and visuals, we put them in our memory. That is why they told us to look at the details. When you are traveling, you put that important spot in your memory.”

  Awa’s dinner was waiting for him. As we got up and stepped outside into the sun-drenched, freezing air, I asked him, “Do your children like to go out on the land?” “Oh yeah,” he replied, “they love it. Being out on the land lifts you up spiritually, emotionally, and physically. It gives you medication, or meditation, however you want to call it. I’ll never stop.”

  MEMORYSCAPES

  In 1818 the Scottish captain John Ross launched another polar expedition to the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. Like Frobisher, he carried with him the wealth of Western navigation tools. These had evolved out of concepts of space and time dating back to the Sumerians, who developed the lunar calendar and organized time into hours and minutes and seconds, giving way to the invention of clocks, telescopes, sextants, and cartographic tools and charts.

  During the voyage, he met two Inuit hunters and showed them a basic chart of the area. While the men had never read a map before, they recognized every place between Igloolik and Repulse Bay several hundred miles away, and they showed him their own route to the ship on the map, a journey that had taken nine nights. Then they expanded Ross’s chart, drawing the coastline to the west and north and filling it with capes, bays, rivers, lakes, and camps and describing their favored routes. While Ross was impressed, they seemed to think their skills were nothing special. They told Ross that if he really needed help finding his way, they knew others with even more knowledge. Ross’s journal is a compendium of these sorts of exchanges, in which the Inuit he meets possess an inexhaustible supply of information about the land.

  Similarly, William Parry, who also sought the Northwest Passage, praised the “astonishing precision” of Inuit-created maps in the 1820s and their ability to masterfully depict every twist and turn of the Arctic topography and coast. Without the help of a map made for him by a guide, Parry believed he never would have found a critical passage through the Fury and Hecla Strait. The American explorer Charles Francis Hall mapped the coastline of Frobisher Bay in the early 1860s by asking an Inuk man whose name was Koojesse to sit at the helm of the ship and draw a chart of the coast as they sailed it. Later, when the Danish explorer Gustav Holm spent two years traveling in eastern Greenland in the 1880s, he collected several maps of the coastline from an Inuit man by the name of Kumiti. They were unusual: carved pieces of wood depicting a jagged, complicated coastline. “All the places where there are old ruins of houses (which form excellent places for beaching the boat) are marked on the wood map,” wrote Holm. “[T]he map likewise indicates where a kayak can be carried over between the bottom of two fjords, when the way round the maze between the fjords is blocked by the sea-ice.” The maps are both tactile and visual guides, models in relief of the contours of the country that might have been meant to be felt by the fingers for directions.

  Knud Rasmussen was equally surprised by the inland Inuit, who had never used paper or pencils before but were able to pick them up and draw accurate representations of the land and the best routes to get wherever he asked. He used one of these maps, drawn by a man named Pukerluk, to navigate several hundred miles of the Kazan River in central Canada. “The historical record and modern cartographic research both agree that most Inuit maps, extensively tested through a century of use by non-Inuit explorers and field scientists, were extraordinarily accurate renderings of the landscape as sensually perceived,” writes the geographer Robert Rundstrom.

  Similar exchanges of navigational knowledge were taking place on the other side of the world. When the British captain James Cook sailed to the Polynesian island of Tahiti on the HMS Endeavor in 1769, he met a priest from the island of Radiate. His name was Tupaia, and he told Cook about the long sailing journeys his people took to faraway islands. Cook inquired into their navigational methods and recorded that “these people sail in those seas from island to island for some several hundred Leagues, the Sun serving them for a compass by day and the Moon and Stars by night.” He asked Tupaia to draw him a chart, and once he had “perceived the meaning and use of charts, he gave directions for making one according to his account, and always pointed to the part of the heavens, where each isle was situated, mentioning at the same time that it was either larger or smaller than Taheitee, and likewise whether it was high or low, whether it was peopled or not, adding now and then some curious accounts relative to some of them.”

  Tupaia died from disease in 1770, but his chart became one of the most infamous in the history of navigation—mainly because no one could figure out its underlying logic. It included seventy-four islands spread over a region bigger than the continental United States—one-third of the South Pacific—but the spatial relationships between them didn’t make sense to the Western eye; no matter which way the map was flipped and turned, no coordinate system could crack the system behind Tupaia’s placement of the islands. For the next several hundred years, historians tried to parse the geographical
relationships it depicted. As late as 1965, some historians believed that Tupaia probably didn’t draw it because “a non-literate man was fundamentally incapable of projecting his geographical knowledge on a piece of flat paper.”

  So many first contact experiences seemed to befuddle European explorers. The cultures they encountered didn’t have compasses, astrolabes, ballistellas, or hourglasses, but people could nonetheless find their way across challenging and unforgiving geography.

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  For a long time, a popular theory of navigation was that indigenous peoples found their way by unconscious intuitions because they were closer to animals, whereas Europeans had lost these powers in the course of evolution.

  The roots of this idea go back to at least 1859, when Alexander von Middendorff, a Russian naturalist, suggested that magnetism might explain how birds migrated. Some scientists speculated that this ability might also exist in children and “non-industrialists,” who possessed an imbued sense of direction, an unconscious instinct they relied on to wayfind. One British colonial in India wrote in 1857, “In the flat country of Sind … where one finds neither natural landmarks nor tracks, the best guides seem to count entirely on a kind of instinct … which seems to be the result of an instinct similar to that of dogs, horses and other animals.” When the English explorer Charles Heaphy went to New Zealand in 1874, he described a Maori man, E Kuhu, as having an “instinctive sense, beyond our comprehension, which enables him to find his way through the forest when neither sun nor distant object is visible, amidst gullies, brakes, and drives in confused disorder, still onward he goes, following the same bearing, or divorcing from it but only so much as is necessary for the avoidance of impediments, until at length he points out to you the notch in some tree or the foot-print in the moss, which assures you that he has fallen upon a track.”