Книга - The Long Exile: A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic

The Long Exile: A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic
Melanie McGrath


A chilling true story of deception and survival set amidst the Inuit communities of the Canadian Arctic.In 1922 the Irish-American explorer Robert Flaherty made a film called ‘Nanook of the North’ which captured the world's imagination. Soon afterwards, he quit the Arctic for good, leaving behind his bastard son, Joseph, to grow up Eskimo.Thirty years later a young, inexperienced policeman, Ross Gibson, was asked by the Canadian government to draw up a list of Inuit who were to be resettled in the uninhabited polar Arctic and left to fend as best they could. Joseph Flaherty and his family were on that list. They were told they were going to an Arctic Eden of spring flowers and polar bears. But it didn't turn out that way, and this, Joseph Flaherty's story, tells how it did.












MELANIE McGRATH

The Long Exile

A True Story of Deception and Survival in the Canadian Arctic







‘An Eskimo lives with menace, it is always ahead of him, over the next white ridge.’

ROBERT FLAHERTY




Table of Contents


Preface (#uf552a3a4-587e-5c70-a35f-713f8618a69e)

Chapter 1 (#ub74b4e61-a904-541b-afc7-e069c4413a77)

Chapter 2 (#ua6e84a51-da09-528e-a4f9-505b3b57cbeb)

Chapter 3 (#ucd350d46-89a5-5fc0-8454-9b5342182572)

Chapter 4 (#ue59af22b-7d58-5539-a3ad-f489eb72b30c)

Chapter 5 (#u26c6e7a3-d18a-5a4d-a46a-84759b9c10fd)

Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Selected Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)















PREFACE (#u06f7dce2-da20-55a5-8b36-ee45fafa45ad)


There have been many books written about the Arctic, mostly tales of explorers and derring-do. This book isn't one of those. It is rather the story of a movie and the legacy left behind by its maker. The film is Nanook of the North, which has been described by filmmakers as diverse as Orson Welles and John Huston as one of the greatest pictures ever made. Its Irish-American director, Robert Flaherty, arrived in the small settlement of Inukjuak on the east coast of the Hudson Bay in 1920 to make it. He filmed it in a year, but was haunted by it for the rest of his life. The movie's success helped colour the western view of Inuit life in the Arctic for generations. It does so today. Flaherty never returned to the Arctic, but he left a son there, who grew up Inuit. More than thirty years later, a group of Inuit men and women were removed from Inukjuak by the Canadian government and taken hundreds of miles north to the uninhabited High Arctic. Among them was Robert Flaherty's son. This book is as much about Josephie Flaherty and his family as it is about his father's movie.

It is often said that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow. While this is true it doesn't tell the whole story. The Inuit do have many words to describe snow, but they also differentiate between various kinds of snow those of us who don't live in the Arctic would see as being essentially the same. It's not so much that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow, as that, in the Inuit world, there are dozens of different kinds of snow.

There are also emotional differences in the way Westerners and Inuit view the world. Until very recently, emotions like envy or sexual possessiveness were so perilous to the equilibrium of the Inuit – living as they did in family groups, often separated from each other by thousands of square miles of ice and tundra – that they were vigorously discouraged. There was a time when expressing rage, lust or ambition was considered so threatening to the group's survival that persistent offenders were ostracised from the community and sent to their deaths on the tundra; some persistent offenders were even killed outright, often by their own families. For thousands of years, these threatening emotional traits were suppressed to such a degree that they were rarely felt among the majority. Other, more helpful traits crept in to take their place: modesty, patience, acceptance of group decisions and a sense of being not just bound to the group, but being an integral part of it, a vital organ in the family body. These are more common and more valued character traits among Inuit even today than they are among people living in large cities in the West.

Although it regularly occurs, we are not necessarily aware of a similar process of emotional editing taking place in our own lives. It's not hard to recall feelings those of us living urban lives have allowed to wither: a wonder and respect for nature, a feeling of being at one with the land, an inexorable identification with home and family, a sense of belonging. We may regret the passing of these feelings; indeed, if our appetites for nostalgia are anything to go by, we certainly do, but few of us would want to go back and live as our great-great grandfathers and grandmothers lived; nor must we in order to feel respect, even awe, for what our ancestors endured and the kind of people they were.

It is easy to feel disconnected from human beings to whom we are neither related by blood nor fate and with whom we share few cultural connections; people whose range of emotional expression and personalities may feel very different from our own or from anyone we know.

And so, when you read this story, bear this in mind; however many kinds of snow there are and however many words for them, they all, in the end, melt down to water.




1 (#u06f7dce2-da20-55a5-8b36-ee45fafa45ad)


In the early autumn of 1920, Maggie Nujarluktuk became a woman with another name. It happened something like this. Maggie was sitting on a pile of caribou skins. She had a borrowed baby in her amiut, the fur hood of her parka. A man was filming the scene. His name was Robert Flaherty. Maggie was about to pull the baby out of the amiut and set him to play beside a group of puppies as Flaherty had instructed, when looking up from his camera, he said, ‘Smile’, grinning to show Maggie what he was getting at and told her, through an interpreter, that he had decided to change her name. She laughed a little, perhaps conscious of his eyes, blue as icebergs, then lifted the baby into her arms, placed him beside her and pulled the puppies closer to keep him warm.

‘Well, now, Maggie,’ Robert said. He winked at her, wound the camera and lingered on her face. She watched his breath pluming in the chill Arctic air.

‘How's about Nyla?’ He allowed the name to roll around his mouth. ‘Yes, from now on you are Nyla.’

If Maggie minded this, she didn't say. She already knew she has no choice in the matter anyway.

Maggie Nujarluktuk was very young back then (how young she didn't know exactly), and very lovely, with a broad, heart-shaped face, unblemished by sunburn or frostbite or by the whiskery tattoos still common among Ungava Inuit women. Her thick hair lay in lush coils around her shoulders and her skin and eyes were as yet unclouded by years of lamp smoke or by endless sewing in poor light. Her lips were bowed, plump but fragile-seeming, and it was impossible to tell whether her smile was an invitation or a warning. Beneath the lips lay even teeth that were white and strong, not yet worn to brown stumps from chewing boots to make them soft. And Robert Flaherty had just renamed her Nyla, which means the Smiling One.

Robert Flaherty's movie had begun in something of a rush. Only three weeks earlier, on 15 August, the schooner, Annie, had dropped anchor at the remote Arctic fur post of Inukjuak, on the Ungava Peninsula on the east coast of Hudson Bay, and a tall, white man with a thin nose and craggy features had come ashore with his half-breed interpreter, introduced himself to the local Inuit as Robert Flaherty, and announced his intention to stay in the area long enough to make a motion picture there. The film, he said, was to be about daily life in the Barrenlands.

The stranger moved into the fur post manager's old cabin, a peeling white clapboard building on the south bank of the Innuksuak River and hired a few hands to help him shift his things from the shoreline where the Annie's crew had left them. Among the expected baggage of coal-oil lamps, tents and skins were the unfamiliar accoutrements of film-making, lights, tripods, cameras and film cans, plus a few personal belongings: a violin and a wind-up gramophone with a set of wax discs and three framed pictures, one a photograph of Arnold Bennett, another of Flaherty's wife, Frances, the third a little reproduction of Frans Hals' Young Man with a Mandolin. The number of possessions suggested that Robert Flaherty was settling down for a long stay. Within a day or two of his arrival, he had hung his pictures above the desk in his cabin, lined up his books along a home-made shelf, rigged up a darkroom, setting several old coal-oil barrels outside the door to serve as water tanks for washing film, and found three young men he could pay to haul his water and supply him with fresh meat and fish. By the time a week was up, the cabin looked as though it had always been his home and Flaherty was busy assembling his lights and cameras and running tests. In the evenings, he could be heard humming along with his gramophone (he was particularly fond of Harry Lauder singing ‘Stop Your Ticklin' Jock’) or playing Irish jigs on his fiddle.

The local Inuit were not much used to white visitors, and the new arrival turned the little settlement of Inukjuak upside down. No one knew quite how to place Robert Flaherty. His particular brand of whirlwind energy was new to them. Nor had they ever come across a qalunaat, a white man, with such sturdy warmth and rushing good humour. The fur traders they had encountered were glum and troubled and fond friends of the whisky bottle. News of the stranger spread, and the Inukjuamiut, as the people living around Inukjuak are called, began coming in from outlying camps to inspect this new addition to their world. Flaherty greeted them all with smiles and gifts of ship's biscuits and this, too, felt out of the ordinary. A few wondered, darkly, what the strange qalunaat wanted from them and drifted back out to their camps, but more stayed on, intrigued by the stranger and eager to audition for a part in the movie he said he was about to make.

Flaherty was soon holding try-outs on the river bank in front of the fur post manager's cabin. To play his leading man he picked a strong, good-natured fellow in his thirties called Alakariallak, who was renowned throughout Cape Dufferin for his hunting prowess. Flaherty renamed him Nanook, meaning ‘bear’. To play one of Nanook's wives Flaherty chose a local woman called Cunayou, to play the other, Maggie Nujarluktuk.

This was not Robert Flaherty's first attempt at making an Arctic film, but it was almost certainly his last chance to get it right. A few years later, when he had become famous, a journalist asked him why he had persisted back then, after so many setbacks and difficulties, and he replied, as he often did, with an aphorism, saying that ‘every man is strong enough for the work on which his life depends’. In 1920 Robert Flaherty believed his life depended on this movie. And, as it turned out, he was right.

Flaherty had first pitched up in the Canadian Arctic ten years previously, looking for iron ore, in the employ of Sir William Mackenzie, a Canadian mine owner and railroad baron whom Flaherty had met through his father. Mackenzie had invested considerable capital in a transcontinental railway across Canada and he was planning to lay track as far north as Churchill, Manitoba, a bleak Barrenlands settlement on the west coast of Hudson Bay. Mackenzie's goal was to link the railway with a new shipping route across the bay and thereby create the shortest navigation between the wheat plains of Manitoba and the flour mills of Europe, which were then connected overland and by sea through the St Lawrence River to the Atlantic. There were additional benefits, which Mackenzie, being a good businessman, had not ignored. It was well known that Hudson Bay's seabed was rich in iron ore – for centuries whalers had reported compass interference whenever they sailed there – and some enormous iron ore lodes had been discovered on the east coast of the Bay in the Ungava Peninsula just north of Labrador. Mackenzie reckoned there might be money to be made extracting the ore and shipping it to Europe.

His geologic interest focused on the Nastapoka Islands, a cluster of granite nubs lying just off the east coast of Hudson Bay at 57° North. The Nastapokas had figured in some prospectors' logs as being worthy of exploration. Inuit had been living in the area for thousands of years but the place was only scantily mapped and virtually unknown to white men. Mackenzie needed someone young and ambitious with courage and flare, even a little recklessness, to blaze a route through. In 1910 he chose Robert Flaherty. The railroad baron had employed Flaherty's father, Robert Flaherty Snr, and knew the family from the old days, when the American frontier was still open and the Flaherty family had helped to settle it. At 26, Robert Jnr already had a reputation for adventurous prospecting in the northern forests of Canada and although he had had no direct experience of the Barrenlands, Mackenzie felt inclined to take the risk on him.

The Flahertys had come over from Ireland sometime during or just after the potato famine and, travelling south from Quebec, they had settled in the tough mining country of Michigan. There Robert Jnr's father, Robert Henry Flaherty, had met and married Susan Klöckner, the daughter of Catholics from Koblenz. Robert Henry had done well for himself, buying up a modest little mine at the foot of Iron Mountain, Michigan, where Robert Joseph was born, on 16 February 1884, the first of seven children.

The family lived a comfortable upper-middle-class life. Robert Jnr grew up with a love for the outdoors and a disdain for civilisation which was remarkable even among boys living in the wilds of Michigan. This untroubled existence came to a sudden end, though, in 1893, when the price of iron ore slumped and Robert Snr was forced to lock out the miners at his Iron Mountain operation and later, when things did not improve, to close the mine down altogether. Of necessity, he took up a position as a mining engineer in the tiny backwater of Lake of the Woods in upper Ontario, leaving his wife to bring up their children alone.

Susan Klöckner was a loving, devout and uneducated woman and she did her best to raise Robert Joseph in the fear of God, but none of her sermonising appeared to have the slightest effect on her eldest son. If there was a god in Robert Flaherty's life he was to be found in the woods with the bears.

So the boy grew up wild, and when Robert Henry returned to Michigan his son begged to go with him on his next posting to a remote outpost, the Golden Star Mine in Rainy Lake, Ontario. It was a Huckleberry Finn kind of a life and Robert Jnr took to it like a trout to tickling. For two years father and son camped out in the woods, hunting rabbits, tracking bear and learning woodcraft from the local Ojibwa Indians. During the long winter nights, the boy lost himself in the adventure stories of James Fenimore Cooper and R. M. Ballantyne and in the long summer evenings Robert Snr taught his son to play the Irish fiddle. Robert Jnr learned some sharper lessons from the Ojibwa too. Years before, miners and fur trappers had brought booze and misery into the lives of the Indians living in northern Ontario. The sight of strong, capable men staggering around begging moonshine off the miners crept across the young Robert's tender heart like a shadow. If this was what men called civilisation, then he wanted no part of it.

When Robert Snr's two years in Rainy Lake were up, the Flaherty family moved on again, to the Burleigh Mine back near Lake of the Woods. Deciding their son needed some formal education, Susan and Robert Henry dispatched Robert Jnr to Upper Canada College in Toronto. The college was run with the rigid discipline of an English public school. It was intended to whip the boy into shape, but only made a square hole for a round peg. Robert Jnr soon contrived to get himself expelled, returning to Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay) on Lake Superior, where the Flaherty family were then living and enrolling in the local school. Even there Robert Jnr chafed against any kind of formal instruction, preferring instead to spend most of his time with the English mining engineer and adventurer, H. E. Knobel, who encouraged the boy's fiddle playing as well as his fantasies.

It was through Knobel that Flaherty first heard tell of Hudson Bay, a remote seaway bitten out of the eastern Canadian mainland. Knobel had been canoeing there and had stories to tell of the rapids he had paddled, the portages he had passed and the Indians and Inuit he had met on the way. The young Robert was so taken with Knobel's stories of adventure in remote places that, after a final and brief flirtation with book learning at Michigan College of Mines, he gave up formal education altogether and went north, into the woods to prospect for ore, hoping, one day, to travel as far as Hudson Bay. When, in 1910, Sir William Mackenzie asked him to lead an expedition to the Nastapokas, Robert Jnr felt his destiny calling. He did not hesitate.

Taking his tent, his rockhound kit, canoes and an Indian guide, the 26-year-old Flaherty paddled along the Mattagami River north, across some of Canada's toughest portages, then followed the Moose River as far as the Hudson Bay trading post at Moose Factory in James Bay, a broad finger off the southernmost curve of Hudson Bay. At the factory, he stopped briefly to resupply, then took a boat to Chariton Island and hitched a ride on a schooner going north to Fort George. There he came upon an encampment of Inuit who guided him to the Hudson Bay post at Great Whale, otherwise known as Kuujjuarapik, a tiny settlement on the tree line, at the edge of the Barrenlands.

Flaherty was used to wilderness, but no wilderness he had ever experienced matched this. The Barrenlands made the deep, silent forests and rugged hills of his childhood seem as safe as apple orchards. He felt the flinty, lichen-painted sweep of the tundra and the great expanses of sea and ice and sky as a swelling in his chest. The starkness of the place enthralled him. It was as though every step further north was a footfall on a new discovery. The tundra rolled out, empty and uncompromised, all around him. If any land could be said to be the antidote to the diseased, corrupted, famine-ridden Ireland of his ancestors, it was here, where there were none of the tired overlays of human history, only the shallow sun and the shadows of low clouds chasing along the rock. Nowhere, not even in northern Ontario, had Flaherty felt more free.

He took on some Inuit guides at Kuujjuarapik and was soon as captivated by them as he had been by their land. These men understood the Barrens in a way Flaherty had never understood Michigan or lower Canada. Only now, in all this emptiness, did he begin fully to comprehend the fullness around him. He watched these men pull their living from it. He saw them moving over the fearsome weft of ice and stone as if it were a carpet and across the sea as if it were a lawn. He had grown up a witness to the demoralisation of the Indians who lived to the south. But these Barrenlanders were different. They still seemed in possession of a raw, unquestioning confidence, a strong, visceral simplicity which had long been lost at the tree line and, further south, in the hubbub of the cities. This huge, open terrain lived in them. You could not separate them from the environment, as the Indians had been separated from theirs. Without the Barrens, they would cease to exist. It dawned on Flaherty that he was witnessing something unique and precious, a window into an older and, perhaps, a better world.

The Inuit were not the first people to visit the Arctic. That accolade belongs to the Indians. As early as 5500 BCE, Indians had been moving from the forest on to the tundra in summer, following the migration routes of caribou, and they continued to move seasonally on to the Barrenlands for the next 2,000 or 3,000 years, until a change in the climate drove them back down south. It was not until some time between 3000 BCE and 2200 BCE that the Inuit crossed the Bering Strait, which was then a land bridge, into what is now North America, and spread eastwards until, by 1000 BCE, they had reached Labrador. The Inuit were the first people to occupy the Arctic permanently and they brought with them two technologies essential to their survival there, the bow and arrow and the kayak. From time to time they encountered Indians and when they did there were skirmishes, but for the most part they lived, untroubled, for 2,000 years or more until around 1000 AD when they had contact first with Vikings then with European adventurers, the best known of whom was Martin Frobisher, who arrived on Baffin Island in 1576 looking for gold. By the seventeenth century whaling ships from Scotland and North America were making regular forays into Arctic waters and overwintering in Hudson Bay. There they set up whaling camps to which the Inuit were drawn by the promise of paid work and by metal knives and, later, by rifles.

The Inuit were friendly towards Robert Flaherty, perhaps because they sensed his admiration for them. He was genial and gave off an air of integrity without ever being stiff or formal. Unlike most qalunaat he seemed genuinely keen to learn Inuktitut and the Inuit at Kuujjuarapik quickly got the sense that he saw them as equals and understood that, in the Barrenlands, it was they and not white men who were kings. His good manners, amiability and his fiddle-playing all helped endear him to them, as did his willingness to pay for the guiding and hunting they did for him. In the long history of contact between whites and Inuit, he was, they could see, someone quite rare. White men like Flaherty were hard to find in Inuit country.

From Kuujjuarapik, Flaherty continued north, and, after four months of travelling, he finally reached the Nastapoka Islands in January 1911. He and his guides set up camp and he began immediately to explore, digging through the hard-packed snow for rock samples and documenting everything he saw with photographs. He also took pictures of the men and women he encountered along the way. In their company, he began to feel both recognised and exposed. Their resilience, their competence and their good humour touched him. More than that, he felt drawn to their wildness and after only a few days in the Nastapokas he began to sense his destiny lay not in the rock but in these people and the way they made him feel.

After returning to Toronto to report his findings, Flaherty almost immediately found an excuse to go back up north. This time his aim was the Belcher Islands, an obscure cluster of rocks off the coast of Cape Dufferin, just south of the Nastapokas. The cape occupied an area the size of England and had a population of 200 Inuit, some of whom hunted walrus out on the Belchers. On the Nastapoka trip he had been told of the existence of a large island in the Belcher group whose tall blue cliffs bled when scraped and this suggested to Flaherty the presence of high-grade iron ore there. The island did not appear on any of the maps and there was no mention of it in any navigation charts, but Flaherty had witnessed the precision with which the Barrenlanders memorised their landscape and were able to recall its contours. He decided not to believe the maps but to put his trust in the Inuit instead.

The following year, he set out in the 63-foot sloop, Nastapoka, but was forced back to Kuujjuarapik by bad weather. Running low on supplies, he sailed south to Fort George to restock and when the sea froze over some months later he took off once again, this time by dog sled, intending to cross the Ungava Peninsula to Cape Dufferin, then complete the remainder of the journey to the Belchers on the sea ice. That far north, he figured, the ice would be stable. He was wrong. The ice proved so turbulent that year that Flaherty had to abandon his original plan. Instead, he decided to cross the Ungava Peninsula and try to reach Fort Chimo, or Kuujuak, on the eastern side. It was a crazy plan. Ungava was an unmapped, treeless tundra the size of Norway. No white man had yet crossed it from one side to the other, partly because travelling in the interior was exceedingly dangerous. Away from the coast, the only available food, aside from the odd Arctic hare, lemming or fox, was caribou and the caribou populations had been radically reduced since the introduction of rifles to the region. The adventurer Albert Peter Low had recently been forced to turn back from the Ungava interior to the coast on the point of starvation and Flaherty had none of Low's experience.

Undaunted, Flaherty hired three Inuit guides, ‘Little’ Tommy, Tookalok and Wetallok, and the four men took off on three dog sleds. For several days they followed Wetallok until the guide finally admitted that he had no idea where they were but had been too proud to say. Poor weather set in and the men, weary and hollow with hunger, had no choice but to stop and dig in. Over the next few days, frostbite got to them, snow blindness followed close behind, but they could do nothing except sit inside their snowhouse waiting for the storms to clear, making mental lists of the dogs they would eat and in what order. Flaherty wrote in his diary that the temperature fell so low the dogs vomited from the cold. The four men survived, but did not reach the Belchers.

Flaherty set out again to go north the following year, 1913. In St John's, Newfoundland, he bought a 75-foot topsail sloop, Laddie, and had her rerigged and belted with greenheart to withstand ice. He loaded up his rock hammers, his acids, litmus and sampling bottles and this time he took along a Bell and Howell movie camera, portable lights, film stock and a developer and printer. His photographs had generated some interest in the south and he wanted to capitalise on that. By now, Flaherty was a good deal less interested in iron ore than he was in the ordinary life of the Barrenlanders. Wherever he went, he sensed that Inuit culture had already been compromised by contact with whaling crews and white explorers and he was desperate to film a way of life whose existence was fragile. He begged to be taken along on kayak trips and to be taught how to flense seals and sew clothes from caribou skins. At every opportunity he got out his camera and filmed. On one of his filming expeditions to the interior of Baffin, Flaherty's komatik, dog sled, broke through some rotten ice and his film fell into the water and was ruined but with his characteristic aplomb Flaherty took this setback in his stride. When Christmas came that year, he threw a party and Inuit sledged in from camps two days away at Fair Ness and the Isle of God's Mercy and Markham Bay to see what the qalunaat had to offer. Flaherty treated them all to ‘varicoloured paper hats’ and to tinned sardines. He was delighted by his new friends and, by and large, they returned the compliment.

On 14 August the following year, Laddie sailed into Hudson Bay on a course for the Belchers. A week later the islands hoved into view, exactly as the Inuit had described them: a hand of long, icy fingers the chief of which bore blue spiny cliffs. The Laddie moved towards this largest island but as she did so, a terrific gust of wind roared out of nowhere, blew her on to a reef and tore a hole in her hull. The crew piled into the whaleboat and made for the shore. Flaherty decided there was nothing to be done but to get on with what he had come here to do. Once the prospecting was done, they would have to rely on the little whaleboat to get them across the notorious waters of Hudson Bay back to the safety of Moose Factory. Over the weeks that followed, Flaherty collected samples, labelled and weighed, took pictures and sketched plans of the location and distribution of the iron ore. Then he and his men clambered into the whaleboat, said a quick prayer, and turned south.

Late August/early September is storm season in the eastern Arctic and the little whaleboat was buffeted around like a twig in a stream. It took them ten days to travel the 800 miles south. Several times they considered themselves as near to dead as made no difference. Eventually, the outline of the Moose Factory post came into view and they raced towards it, feeling they were finally safe. When they got close they noticed that the post flag was at half-mast and assumed some dreadful calamity had befallen the post. They disembarked with caution and were greeted by Monsieur Duval, the post factor, dressed in linens and a straw hat, who explained that he had set the flag at half-mast because he missed his beloved Normandy and longed for a little Camembert and a glass of apple brandy and sensed that France and all her loveliness was for ever lost to him.

Before leaving on the Belcher expedition, Flaherty had used his time in the south to court Frances Hubbard, the daughter of eminent geologist Lucius L. Hubbard. Now he returned to her and, despite rumours that Flaherty's affections were not confined to Frances alone, the couple were married in New York City on 12 November 1914, with Frances buying the ring. A friend of theirs later noted that Robert ‘was like a light and [Frances] was like a sensitive photographic plate’. The couple passed their first winter together editing what remained of Flaherty's film of Inuit life and the following spring they showed a rough cut at the Convocation Hall in the University of Toronto, where the picture was met with a wall of polite incomprehension.

By the autumn of 1915, Robert and Frances were apart once more. Robert spent that Christmas back at the Belchers, feasting on pea soup and currant buns and whiling away the time it took for the sea ice to freeze solid teaching the Inuit how to sing ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’. Between times he set his camera rolling. The following September he headed south, with 30,000 feet of exposed film.

The Flahertys worked through the early winter of 1916 and by Christmas they had a rough cut of the new film prepared and printed. This they sent off to Harvard in the hope that the university might screen it and Robert set himself to the business of refining the edit. As he was sitting over the negative one day, concentrating on the frames, a cigarette dropped from his fingers on to the film can, and the film flared, and burst into twists of flame before finally slumping to the floor in a heap of blackened celluloid. It was a bad film, Flaherty said later. He would just have to go back out to the Arctic and make a better one.

But not on Sir William Mackenzie's time. Flaherty's old benefactor had long since turned his real attentions away from Arctic ore to the war in Europe. There was no money to be had for Flaherty's adventures from that quarter and Flaherty had none himself. For a while, he ploughed his energies into the lecture circuit and making babies. Frances gave birth to three girls in close succession: Barbara, Frances and Monica. The new family moved to Houghton, Michigan, to stay with Frances' parents, then found a house of their own in New Canaan, Connecticut. But the empty spaces of the Arctic tapped on Flaherty's heart and he longed to return.

In the early spring of 1920, he saw his chance. At a particularly dreary cocktail party in New York he was introduced to Captain Thierry Mallet of the Révillon Fréres trading company. Flaherty was a warm, convivial man, and he was used to people gravitating towards him, rewarding them for their attention with his rough-tough tales of the kind of pioneer life which already seemed to belong to another, more fascinating, age. Thierry Mallet was no exception. Mallet knew the settings of Flaherty's tales. Révillon Fréres had recently opened posts in the Ungava Peninsula to capitalise on the Arctic fox populations there. The fur trade was picking up after a long wartime stagnation. As Mallet told Flaherty, a good white Arctic fox pelt was now selling at the wholesale fur market in Montreal for C$25 and Mallet's company was feeling buoyant. Its great rivals still needled it, though. The Hudson Bay Company was celebrating its 350th anniversary that year and Révillon Fréres was hoping to outdo its rivals when it came to celebrating its own 200th anniversary in three years' time. Did Flaherty have any good ideas, Captain Mallet wondered.

As it happened, Flaherty did. His idea, he told Mallet, was to make an adventure film about an astonishing group of people living in a world of unimaginable harshness, a world in which Révillon Fréres also operated. It would be the first film of its kind, a genuine trailblazer and he, Flaherty, would be willing to sell Révillon Fréres the rights to it. Flaherty saw Mallet's eyes take on a new intensity. He was in.

A few weeks later, the venerable Révillon Fréres company signed a contract promising Flaherty C$11,000 in exchange for the rights to his as yet unmade Arctic adventure film and on 18 June 1920 Flaherty found himself at the railhead in northern Ontario with some new camping equipment, a canoe, a Haul-berg electric-light plant and projector and two movie cameras. Just over two months after that, on board the schooner Annie, Flaherty ‘let go anchor at the mouth of the Innuksuak River and the five gaunt and melancholy-looking buildings’ of the post ‘stood out on a boulder-ridden slope less than half a mile away’, as he wrote in his diaries.

By the time he reached Inukjuak in 1920, Robert Flaherty had a good sense of what he needed to do and how to do it. Before he left New York he had paid a visit to the Craftsman Laboratories to get advice from Terry Ramsaye and Martin Johnson, who were trying to put together an adventure film from Johnson's various travels in the tropics. Film-making was new and, in spite of his experience filming on Baffin Island, Flaherty was unsure about the grammar of film sequences and shots. He had also updated his equipment. The Akeleys he had bought to replace the earlier Bell and Howell used graphite for lubrication rather than oil so they were less likely to freeze. They were also the first cameras to be fitted with gyroscopic tripod heads allowing the camera to be tilted and panned by a single movement without too much jerking. Eastman Kodak had provided an old English Williamson printing machine, which Flaherty screwed to the wall of his cabin beside his Frans Hals print. He had also brought developing fluid and a small battery of lightweight lights and a Graflex stills camera, and soon after his arrival in Inukjuak he fixed up a rudimentary darkroom with a drying annex, heated by a coal-burning stove, in which to dry the developed film.

So Flaherty finds himself in this tiny, remote settlement, with nothing but his equipment, a few pictures, his gramophone and a tremendous sense of his own destiny. He is keen to begin filming before the weather closes in and ice creeps across the sea so he takes Alakariallak, Maggie and Cunayou out along the coast and he films his first sequence, of hunter, wives, children and dogs all emerging, one by one, and as if by magic, from the one-man kayak seat. It's a bit of a joke, a moment of comedy in what will, he hopes, be a tense and dramatic tale of survival against the odds. He films Maggie pulling the baby from her amiut and setting him down among the husky pups. He watches her smile through the Akeley. He says, ‘Smile!’

A few days later, Flaherty sets up the projector in his cabin and invites his cast in for a viewing. He offers round hot tea and sea biscuits and quickly discovers that Maggie, Alakariallak and the rest have no idea what a film is or, for that matter, what the images represent. When he shows them stills of themselves, they hold them upside down and he has to take them to a mirror before they are able to understand what it is they are looking at. Finally, when everyone is crammed in and settled and seems to have at least some idea of why they are there, he runs the rushes, noting with satisfaction, later in his diary, the gasps and giggles of his cast as they recognise themselves in black and white and two dimensions.

Summer is short in the Arctic and this one is quickly done. By mid-September the summer birds are gone and the long winter is once more closing in like a fist around Inukjuak and the business of making a movie suddenly becomes a good deal more complicated. Inukjuak lies south of the Arctic Circle but by October the light is already limited to six hours a day and by November there is only sufficient daylight for three hours' filming. The water for washing the film begins to ice up and, as winter grips, Flaherty's helpers are forced to cut a hole through six feet of ice, pull water up in buckets, pour it into barrels and load it on to a fourteen-foot-long sled hauled by a ten-dog sled team to the little cabin. A constant wind sends smoking whorls of dry snow blasting into the camera lens, blizzards break open and in a matter of minutes the cast are unable to see as far as their own hands. As temperatures drop, film shatters inside the cameras from the cold and the men are forced to stash the retorts and sometimes even the cameras inside their parkas to keep them warm enough to work. The moment the cameras are brought into the relative warmth of the cabin, they frost up and have to be taken apart and dried piece by piece. One time the Graflex is so badly affected by condensation that Flaherty has to dismantle it completely only to discover that he cannot recall how to put it back again and one of his Inuk helpers has to sit down at his table and gradually, by candlelight, put it back together.

Flaherty constantly finds himself having to charge after hunters too excited by the prospect of a kill to stop and remember to pose for the camera. He spends a good deal of time trying to persuade the Inuit to repeat their actions or simply stand where they are told. Maggie and Cunayou fall out. There are disputes over pay.

But none of these setbacks seems to discourage the filmmaker for long. He bounces from day to day in a kind of ecstatic trance. In his spare time he fiddles for the locals, or sets up impromptu screenings of his rushes. In all the excitement, the contradictions of his ambition pass him by. Here he is, a white man banked by a fur trader, making a film about an idealised kind of Inuit life which, if it ever existed, has long since been turned upside down by, among others, white men and fur traders.

By November the sea around Inukjuak is frozen firm and by December it is stable enough to travel on long distance. At Christmas, Flaherty throws his customary party for the Inuit, serving up sardines and sweet tea, and making a space in the fur store to dance square reels and Irish jigs. When the New Year arrives he decides that what his film needs is a polar bear hunt. The bears are rarely seen around Inukjuak but Alakariallak says that female bears often pass the winter with their cubs in dens at Cape Sir Thomas Smith, 200 miles north along the Ungava coastline, and so, on 17 January 1921, Flaherty sets off with Alakariallak and another man he has nicknamed Harry Lauder after the singer and the party turns north. They reckon on being away a month, allowing ten days each for the journey there and back and another ten for bad weather, stopping to film wherever they find polar bear. But the going proves difficult, the ice near to the coast pushed into mountainous pressure ridges and the dogs hard-pressed to pull the sleds over broken ice fields and knife-sharp candle ice, and when eventually they reach Cape Sir Thomas Smith there are no polar bears. For a few days they meander across the cape, one time travelling all day and night only to find themselves within two miles of their starting point. No bears. The dogs become more and more desperate from cold and hunger until they eventually stage a rebellion, making a dash for the shelter of the hunters' snowhouse and refusing to allow themselves to be harnessed, and Alakariallak has to carry the lead dog to the sled whimpering with misery and cold. Still, they see no bears. One by one the dogs begin to starve. The men are so cold now and so low on fuel, they are reduced one night to burning the cross bars from the komatik (the sled) to keep them warm. The following night they have nothing left for a fire but film. Four 200-foot rolls are sacrificed to boil water for their tea. They lose two dogs to starvation before Flaherty finally makes the decision to turn back for home. In eight weeks away they have not run into a single bear. They begin the return journey by day, travelling in small bursts, walking beside the sleds whose dogs are by now too weak to pull them. The sea ice pours on either side, as flat and formless as a newly ironed sheet. As they walk, Alakariallak keeps them cheerful with stories of the bears he has killed the year before. At night they build a makeshift snowhouse and he sings them versions of the songs he has heard on Flaherty's gramophone. The following day they stumble into Inukjuak, dark with snow blindness, their hearts like old stones, their noses half eaten by frostbite, their feet frozen into their boots, hardly able to believe they are alive still. The Révillon Fréres post manager, Stewart, comes out to meet them, brings them back to the cabin, unwraps their feet and sets them up with mugs of hot, sweet tea. Only the week before, he reports, two huskies dug a female bear and her two cubs from their den a couple of hours' travel away from the settlement. The bear and her cubs battled it out against the dogs and sent them spinning into the air and sliding back on their bellies. There was no need to have gone all the way to Cape Sir Thomas Smith. For a moment silence falls. Then Alakariallak grabs his sides with both hands and laughs and laughs so hard that tears leak from his eyes.

Perhaps it is this brush with mortality which draws Robert Flaherty closer to Maggie Nujarluktuk. In any case, he begins to spend more time with her. Everything about Maggie must seem so fresh, so unpolished and innocent, as different from the huddle of sophisticates Flaherty knows in New York as snow is from Shineola. Of course, he knows nothing about what she is thinking or feeling; neither, really, can he imagine it. She is unexplorable, a terrain that even he cannot reach nor will ever fully know. This, precisely, is her charm. Who knows why she goes to him? Ambition, curiosity, love even? He cannot tell, and it does not matter.

As winter deepens, Robert Flaherty and Maggie Nujarluktuk become lovers. They conduct their affair in the clapboard cabin, overlooked by Frances Flaherty and the boy with the mandolin and a pile of cameras. After a while she moves from her family snowhouse to live with him. No one expects it to last and this, too, is part of the beauty of it.

All through the winter, Robert Flaherty continues filming, developing the film as he goes along and staging little shows of the rushes in his cabin with hot tea and sea biscuits and, often, music and even dancing. As winter gives way to the spring, bringing long, clear days of brilliant sunshine, Flaherty films Alakariallak cutting snowblocks with a walrus tusk snow-knife, heaving them one on top of another to form a dome, while Maggie goes in after to caulk the joints between the blocks with dry snow, packing the surface smooth, the baby tucked safely in her amiut. When it proves too dark to film inside the snowhouse, Flaherty has Alakariallak and his friends build a half-dome exposed to the daylight as a prop. For two days they labour but each time the structure proves unstable and collapses and Flaherty stands by while the Inuit laugh out loud at their mistake and set themselves to the task once more. At the end of the second day, a stable half-dome stands on the sea ice. They build a sleeping platform of snow inside and line it with skins and Maggie sets a qulliq, or blubber stove, burning with seal fat. While Robert Flaherty winds his camera this made-up family goes through the routine of turning in for the night, Alakariallak sliding under the sleeping skins while Maggie and Cunayou undress the children and slot them in their places, before pulling off their own sealskin parkas and slipping naked between the children and their man.

Spring gives way eventually to summer and finds Robert and Maggie still together, communicating, now, in a mix of Inuktitut, English and sign language. The tundra, too, ends its silence. By late June, the snow is melting on the tops of eskers and hills, then later on the lower ground. The sun warms the black soil and speeds up the process. Where the tuff gives out to lake water or streams, seams of ice-free water appear. The night shrinks into a thin, blue glimmer. Heather begins to uncurl and grow buds. Summer birds appear from the south, rustling among the willow collecting twigs for their nests and, later, insects for their young. The air whines with bees and mosquitoes, pink saxifrage bursts from the willow bed, the grasses grow cotton tops and, when the Annie drops anchor at the mouth of the Innuksuak River in August 1921, the lovers already know that Robert Flaherty will be heading south alone. He will leave Maggie Nujarluktuk there, on the shores of Hudson Bay, with their baby swelling in her belly.




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The Inuit settled back into their habitual routines and the events of the previous year faded to the stuff of campfire stories. In New York City, Robert and Frances Flaherty shut themselves in a room in a walk-up apartment and edited 75,000 feet of film. By November they had a rough cut and were touting around town looking for a distributor. Just before Christmas, the Flahertys managed to persuade Charlie Gelb at Paramount to screen a version of the movie, now being called Nanook of the North, before an invited audience at Paramount's screening rooms. It had taken Flaherty a decade to get this far and he knew that Nanook was his last chance. If it failed, he would have a hard time finding another backer. But his movie-making career was not the only thing on the line. Flaherty had poured his passion into Nanook. For ten years, he had brooded over the Arctic and its people. Up in Inukjuak, he felt he had witnessed something great and timeless about the human spirit which it was his duty, even his destiny, to pass on. At the time, he had written in his diary that he wanted to capture ‘the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible, before the white man has destroyed not only their character but the people as well’. He still felt that way. He had documented a disappearing world. He had to hope that Nanook would go down better in New York than his first effort in Toronto. If it did not, it would be too late to make another.

The hour or so that followed would be one of the most agonising, and most important, of Robert Flaherty's life. As the opening image of ice and rock and dark water flooded the room, Flaherty felt the audience tense. The intertitle appeared. ‘No other race could survive,’ it read, ‘yet here live the most cheerful people in all the world – the fearless, loveable, happy-go-lucky Eskimos.’ Alakariallak's image faded up and cut, eventually, to Maggie pulling the baby from her amiut, the faces so familiar to Flaherty but so distant now. The audience went quiet. He saw one or two of them straining for a better look at the screen. Maggie and the rest spilled from the kayak. A few people laughed. The film segued from one sequence to another until, in the final moments, they were witnessing Alakariallak and his family going to bed in anticipation of another day. The end credits appeared, the lights went up and the audience began streaming out but Robert Flaherty was left with no clue. Some were smiling, others looking dazed, even grim, a few wearing no expression at all. He waited with Frances. When the room had finally been cleared, the screening room manager sidled over to him. Well, he said, Nanook of the North was a brave film all right, and he could see that Flaherty had put a great deal of time and effort into making it. The manager knew what he was about to say would not sit easily but the plain fact of the matter was that the movie was unwatchable. A bunch of strange-looking people dressed like animals eating walrus meat. Who in their right mind would pay to see such a thing?

Robert and Frances Flaherty spent the holiday season licking their wounds. One thousand, twelve hundred and fifty miles away in Inukjuak, the Révillon Fréres factor gave a Christmas party for the Inuit, with ship's biscuit, tinned sardines and bannock bread. People sledged in from all over Cape Dufferin, danced a few Scots reels and some American square dances and staged sled races. When the light failed they bundled inside the fur post, drank sweet tea and sang songs about the old ways.

One of the few who did not join in the festivities that year was Maggie Nujarluktuk, who spent Christmas Day in her family's snowhouse, giving birth to a baby boy, Robert Flaherty's son.

Early in the New Year, Robert and Frances began once more to look for a distributor for Nanook of the North. Flaherty showed the picture to First-National, who turned it down, then to Pathé in New York, who agreed in principle to distribute it. Some time in early spring, Pathé struck a deal with the owner of the Capitol Theatre in New York City to show the picture on condition that Pathé package it with something more commercial. Pathé had just taken on a distribution contract for Harold Lloyd's first big feature, Grandma's Boy, and this they decided would be just the thing to tin can with Nanook: Capitol okayed the package, sight unseen. When the manager of the Capitol Theatre actually saw the Arctic picture he tried desperately to backpedal, but by then he was locked in, and so, on 11 June 1922, Alakariallak and Harold Lloyd burst on to the New York scene together. Even by New York standards, it was an eccentric coupling. About the only thing Alakariallak and Harold Lloyd had in common was that they both smiled a lot. Grandma's Boy went down tremendously well, but not half as well as Nanook. The audience took to the Inuk man in an instant. Here he was, a decent, hard-working, good-natured individual, hemmed in on all sides by natural terrors, cheerfully carving out a life for himself, for Nyla, his sweet-faced wife, and their romping children, with no sense of how much easier and more comfortable were other lives being lived by men and women only a few hundred miles to the south. Sure, the movie was disjointed and rough in places, but it was filled with bright, unforgettable moments; Nanook struggling to extract a seal from its breathing hole, Nyla pulling a boy from her amiut, the family diving under their sleeping skins at the end of another frozen day. To this audience, still reeling from the trenches and the mustard gas of the First World War, Nanook and Nyla were innocent wanderers in an as-yet unblemished world. They saw in Nanook of the North a story of love and through love, survival. What they were watching was not simply some performance put on for their entertainment. At some level, at least, it was the truth. Grandmas Boy could wait. What New Yorkers wanted was Nanook.

Word spread and soon people from all over the city were flocking to the Capitol Theatre. Pathé hastily expanded its distribution and, before long, Nanook was playing in theatres as far away as Tennessee and Nebraska. By September 1922, three months after its first release, Flaherty's ‘adventure picture’ had crossed the Pond and was playing to sellout audiences at the new Gallery Kinema in London and at the Gaumont Theatre in Paris. From there it went on to Bangkok, Peking and Moscow, picking up ecstatic audiences everywhere. Nanook was fast becoming a huge, global hit. Confectionery manufacturers began turning out ice creams with Alakariallak's face printed on the wrappers and, before long, he was unwittingly advertising everything from chocolate bars to cleaning fluid. In Los Angeles, a three-man team of songwriters whipped up a popular song about him, with a chorus which began ‘Ever-loving Nanook/Though you don't read a book/But oh, how you can love/And thrill me like the twinkling northern lights above …’ Thousands of miles away, in Malaysia, Nanook entered the language. Even now nanuk in Malaysian means a strong man.

And so Alakariallak and Maggie gradually became famous. But it was an odd kind of fame because neither Alakariallak nor Maggie knew anything about it. What little mail reached Inukjuak came once a year on the annual visit of the Hudson Bay Company supply ship and almost all of that was for the post trader. The Inukjuamiut rarely received any news from outside Cape Dufferin, and when they did, it was often so garbled that it made little sense to them. Eventually they heard that Nanook of the North had opened in New York City and that it had gone on to England, France, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand and China, but all these were places they knew nothing about and had a hard time imagining. Even their own country, Canada, seemed so remote to them as to be the stuff of dreams, or, rather, of nightmares, since they knew it principally as the place in the south to where Inuit people were sometimes transported when they were ill and from where, generally speaking, they never returned.

Four years after the film's first showing, Robert Flaherty's charming, violent depiction of the lives of Alakariallak and Maggie Nujarluktuk in the Barrenlands had grossed US$251,000, five times its initial cost, and Robert Flaherty had become a household name. He was taken out to fancy dinners and asked to speak at meetings and conventions. Louis B. Mayer called, as did Irving Thalberg and an assortment of other producers, agents and managers. Everyone wanted the same thing. Another Nanook.

Flaherty took his new-found fame in his stride. He was already 38 years old and from a very early age he had marked himself out as having some special place in the world. Now others were simply confirming his opinion. After ten years in the Arctic he felt he had earned his reputation.

Of the legacy he had left there, he knew very little. News of Inukjuak reached him only rarely. When he left, Maggie Nujarluktuk had been five months pregnant so Robert could not have been in any doubt about her condition, but sex was different up on Cape Dufferin and it was custom, sometimes, for a woman to sleep with more than one man. Flaherty may well have told himself that the child was not his. And if it was his, well, then, he may have thought that his wilderness baby was best left up in the Barrenlands.

If he did think of his bright-eyed, smiling Inuit girl from time to time, if his heart occasionally hollowed for her, then he kept the feeling to himself. In any case, he was not given to introspection. The plain fact of the matter was that he already had a wife and daughters back home and they were where his heart ultimately lay.

Alakariallak continued to hunt and Maggie Nujarluktuk took care of her baby. The winter of 1923 was brutal. Sea currents broke the ice into floes and the prevailing westerlies turned to the north, roaring across Hudson Bay and pushing the floes together into monstrous pressure ridges which rose like great walls from the sea. For a time, hunting seals became impossible and Alakariallak was forced to take his dog team inland in the hope of finding caribou, but after days of sledging he failed to come across a single animal. He turned back west towards the coast and began to make his way home but he and his dog team were caught in a blizzard. They carried on as best they could but at some point the dogs must have grown hungry and exhausted. Although they were now only a few days' travel from the coast, they stumbled and began to die, until there were no longer enough dogs left alive to pull the sled. Alakariallak, too, was spent. As the blizzards blew up again, the great hunter and – though he didn't know it – international movie star set about making himself a snowhouse for a shelter, then spreading his sleeping skins inside he lay down to die.

A few miles to the southwest of Alakariallak's lonely grave, on the coast at Inukjuak, Maggie Nujarluktuk pulled a little half-breed boy from her amiut and set him down on a pile of caribou skins beside her.




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In 1902 the geologist A. P. Low had wintered at the mouth of the Innuksuak River and named his campsite Port Harrison after the director of the mining company he was working for at the time. To the Inuit the place had always been Inukjuak, which means ‘many people’ or ‘great people’ or, sometimes, ‘giant’. The elders could remember a time before the whalers came when beluga whales had congregated in the little bays around the river estuary to breed and Inuit had come in from their camps all along the eastern shoreline of Hudson Bay to hunt them. They still spoke of that time with a longing and sometimes with a dread born of the memories, which had never quite left them, of bad seasons which had pushed their families so near starvation they had had no choice but to brick their babies into tiny snowhouses and leave them there to die.

No one knows exactly when the first Inuit arrived on Cape Dufferin. The earliest occupation is marked by rock circles and, here and there, by the crumbling remnants of ancient huts. The men and women who built them, people the anthropologists now call the Dorset Culture, arrived from the northwest some two or three thousand years ago, having made the long, bleak trek across the Canadian Barrenlands from Asia by foot and by sled. The Dorset people were nomadic hunters, moving with the herds of caribou which then populated the tundra. They lived in small houses half buried in the shale and kept no dogs and although they spread through the Arctic their culture was, relatively speaking, short-lived. When the climate began cooling, around 500 BCE, their populations dwindled. They were followed, or pushed out, no one knows which, by the Thule people, named after the site in northern Greenland where, in the early 1920s, Therkel Mathiassen first unearthed their remains. The Thule arrived from the west around 400 CE, when the Arctic climate became drier. They lived semi-nomadically, settling for short periods near the coast, erecting huts from mud or slabs of sod and living off the great whales they hunted from their kayaks. A single 40-ton bowhead whale could feed 5 families, between 25 and 50 individuals, for a year. The Thule were one of the great early human cultures, as wondrous in their way as the Aztecs or the Babylonians, their technologies so beautifully adapted to the terrain that they were able to survive and to prosper in a place no other people had been able to settle. Where they encountered Dorset people, there were sometimes skirmishes, which the Thule, with their superior technologies of tailored skin clothing and bow and arrow, the metal arrowheads fashioned from scavenged meteorites, usually won. In the eastern Arctic, the Thule reached as far north as Ellesmere Island at the 80th parallel and as far south as Labrador at the 50th, a distance of some 1,800 miles. The Inukjuamiut were their descendants. They were, and remain, the Arctic's most successful colonisers.

At the southern fringes of their world, where the Barrens met the ragged northern tree line of white spruce and alder, the Thule clashed ferociously with Indians, who had taken occupation of the northern boreal forests many thousands of years before, venturing out on to the Barrens only during the short Arctic summers. Eventually, the forest dwellers and the Barrenlanders reached a kind of uneasy truce, the Indians remaining in the forest, the Inuit in the tundra, their mutual hostility confined to a band of stunted conifers where one world met another. On the eastern shoreline of Hudson Bay, the line is drawn at Kuujjuarapik, or Great Whale, at 56° North. South of there, the world belongs to the Cree. Maggie's ancestors (and Maggie herself) knew them as ‘head lice’. The disregard was mutual. Everything above Kuujjuarapik was Inuit land. The Inuit became, almost by definition, people of the tundra. Even today, they cannot be understood in any other context. They have lived successfully on the Barrens all these years because the Barrens have lived in them.

The Ungava Peninsula, of which Cape Dufferin and Inukjuak are a part, is a diverse region and, around the time of the birth of Maggie's son, Josephie Flaherty, it had a population of around 1,500 souls, almost entirely Inuit and Indian. In the north, the land is a high relief of acid granite and gneiss, pitted with volcanic rocks, among them the vivid green soapstone the Inuit use for carving. It slopes southwards until, just south of Inukjuak, it stoops and embraces the sea. Everything to the north of Inukjuak as far as Cape Jones is high coast, everything to the south, low, horizontally orientated and blessed with coves and wide beaches. Though Inukjuak lies at approximately the same latitude as, say, Inverness, Scotland, it is, all the same, resolutely Arctic, thanks in part to the uncompromising winter ice which stills the waters of Hudson Bay for eight or nine months of the year. The interior is a plateau of granite overlaid with glacier-scoured limestone which the Inuit call sekovjak, a word meaning ‘resembles landfast sea ice’. What constitutes the Arctic is often disputed, though never by the Inuit, for whom it is simply home. Some non-Inuit commentators define it as the area north of the Arctic Circle at 66° 33', but this merely marks the point where there is midnight sun at summer equinox and no sun at all at winter equinox. Others claim it is most easily characterised by the presence of permafrost, but that, too, is a problematic definition, because at lower latitudes the permafrost is patchy and often incomplete in places which seem to be, in every other way, part of the Arctic region. Surprisingly for a region so often characterised by its coldness, winter temperature is a bad indicator of where the Arctic might begin and end. Nowhere in the Canadian Arctic does the winter temperature routinely fall below −46°C and, when it does, it rarely stays that way for long, while parts of Siberia regularly experience winter lows of −73°C. The Yukon and other subarctic Canadian regions can sometimes be colder in winter than parts of the country further north. In the end, low temperature matters less than the persistence of permafrost and ice, or even aridity.

A working definition on which most people agree is to say that the Arctic begins where trees end. The tree line is not really a line at all. It is rather a zone, or an uneven strip, where candelabra spruce gradually give way to ever smaller, simplified specimens until the entire species becomes so stunted and so widely dispersed that it takes on the appearance not of a tree but of a gnarled finger. A little further north trees of any kind give out altogether. Those trees which do persist in the northernmost reaches of the tree line ‘zone’ are unable to produce seeds, but reproduce by layering, sending a branch to the ground where it roots and grows a clone of the parent tree. In some parts, this strip of dwarfing, scattering and layering is hundreds of miles wide, in others, it narrows to just a mile or two. Nor does it appear at any particular latitude. In the northwest of the continent, near the Mackenzie delta, there are trees as high as 66° North. The tree line drops to lower latitudes as it meanders east, largely as a result of the freezing action of Hudson Bay. The area at the tree line may well be solid permafrost or, as around Kuujjuarapik, the permafrost may appear in patches, but it will follow a single rule. Above the ‘line’ the temperature on an average July day will remain below 10°C, the temperature necessary for tree growth. By this reckoning, the Arctic proper begins roughly at the tree line and the subarctic region lies in the northern boreal forests below. Thus the Arctic begins at latitudes as high as 60° and as low as 55° North. By this reckoning, the Arctic and subarctic regions of Canada together make up 40 per cent of the country. The region is almost mind-bendingly vast.

Barrenland tundra, the region of land above the tree line stretching across the whole of Canada, has many unique characteristics not found in any other land formation. The Arctic tundra looks the way it does first and foremost because of the action of ancient glaciers, which have for eons ground up rock and dragged it down to the sea. In Ungava, glaciers also carved out a flotilla of basin lakes and channels which now sit stranded on the plateau, giving it, at least from the air, the appearance of an old bath sponge whose pores are baggy with wear. Lakes, rivers, summer run-offs and spills are all extremely common in the Barrenlands, though many of them may either be solid with ice or dry through most of the year. There are more lakes in Arctic and subarctic Canada than in the rest of the world put together.

Glaciers are also responsible for dumping sand and gravel into ridges, or eskers. In the deep interior of the Ungava Peninsula, where Alakariallak met his end, the eskers sometimes rise a hundred feet into the air and they are broken by spillways and erosion gullies. Many are marked with inukshuks, the man-shaped mounds of rock built by Inuit to act as pathfinders. Arctic foxes and caribou also use eskers as lookouts, so they have historically been good places to hunt. Despite all this glacial carving and dumping, the low, scoured hills around Ungava are, relatively speaking, not deeply eroded. The tops of what were once hills have been reduced to naked rock but you find none of the horns, corries, U-shaped valleys or fiorded coasts that there are further north, on Baffin Island, say, or among the islands of the Queen Elizabeth Group. In Arctic terms at least, Ungava is a gentle, open land with less to hide than its more northerly neighbours.

Its relatively mild nature does not render Ungava any less bleak. There is plenty of naked rock. On the edges of the eskers no plant-life is able to endure the relentless, desiccating westerly winds and in the absence of any firm purchase for plant roots, these formations are usually naked. The worn slopes of the granite hills are also bare, partly for the same reason and partly because no soil is able to settle there. But the westerlies are not all bad. In the summer they bring cloud and summer fogs and so, in spite of the drying effect of the wind itself, the area is damper than much Arctic tundra, and there are grey-green lichens to be found in every sheltered spot.

Arctic soil everywhere is, unsurprisingly, poor and nitrogen deficient, but on the rocks beneath bird colonies or on perching knolls or fox lookouts, nitrates accumulate and there the tangerine splash of nitrophilous lichen, Caloplaca elegans, blends with the more familiar grey-greens creating points of brilliant colour. More important than the clouds and wet fog to plant growth is the permafrost which keeps the moisture brought by the westerlies in the topsoil allowing dwarf shrubs to thrive across much of the inland plateau. The areas not directly fringing the sea are covered by scrubby heathland. As in the rest of the Arctic, the growing season is too short for annuals, but on the heathland below the nubs of rock and esker, the ground is carpeted in creeping willows whose branches can reach as high as two feet in sheltered spots. By Arctic standards a willow that high is as much of a giant as a sequoia in Yosemite. In Arctic conditions a willow may take as many as 400 years to grow as thick as a man's thumb.

Around Inukjuak itself, dwarf willows are the only tree-like shrub, but south of Inukjuak a few dwarf birches grow, though these rarely venture out more than six inches or so from the root. Among the perennials are the Arctic heathers, Cassiope, and Arctic cottonheads, whose stems Maggie Nujarluktuk gathered to serve as wicks in her stone lamp. In September, the berry-bearing members of the genus Vaccinium growing on Ungava's southern slopes produce the tiny blueberries and lingonberries so beloved of Ungava Inuit and of their children in particular. Furry mosses grow around Ungava, too, and, in summer, Arctic poppies, rosy sedges and pretty, bobbing saxifrage poke up from the willow carpet. On alluvial flats beside the Ungava's many rivers, cotton grasses wave above the thick cushions of sphagnum moss which the frost heaves up into tussocks. Where the rivers disgorge into the bay there are white strands of sand, and in the pockets of soil trapped by boulders, sandworts and scurvy grass flourish. Sea pinks raise their heads above the rocky parapet and crowd the tops of the low cliffs where the air is warmer than at the frosty selvage of the shoreline.

In Ungava human life has always been concentrated along the coast where there are seals, walrus, beluga and, in the past, large whales. By comparison, the interior is forbidding, and in Maggie's time it had become more so, because the once dense herds of caribou had been reduced by the introduction of rifles. Before 1900, the caribou were uncounted and uncountable. Like the American buffalo, they ranged in herds with no discernable beginnings or ends. In 1900, when naturalists, sensing a sudden and dramatic drop in their numbers, began counting, there were something like 1,750,000 caribou living in the Canadian Barrens. Fifty years later this figure was 670,000, 60 per cent down on the previous half-century and in 1955, only five years after that, the herds had diminished to 277,000 individuals, 60 per cent down again. Changes in the pattern of the weather and gradual variations in the tree line have always made caribou populations vulnerable to catastrophic but temporary declines but nothing had done anything like the damage caused by the rifle. By the fifties, those quarter of a million or so surviving caribou were scattered across land larger far than western Europe and locating them had become a hunt for needles in haystacks. Between 1900 and 1950, caribou had virtually disappeared from central and northern Ungava and Inuit living around Inukjuak were forced to paddle south by kayak or umiak, often as far as Richmond Gulf, near Kuujjuarapik, a round trip of 400 miles, to stand any hope of hunting them. And hunt them they must, not so much for the meat, nutritious though it is, but because the animals' skins were absolute necessities of Inuit life. Caribou hair is cone-shaped and hollow, making its insulating properties second only to those of musk-ox hair, while being a good deal lighter and more flexible. Without caribou pelts for clothing and sleeping bags, neither Inuit nor any other human being would ever have been able to settle in Arctic conditions.

In Maggie's time, Arctic hare and fox remained relatively plentiful in Ungava and there were trout in the lakes and Arctic char in the rivers. The waters of Hudson Bay have always been home to large numbers of sculpin, harbour, ring and bearded seals and, more rarely, beluga whales and walrus. Ravens and ptarmigan have always been permanent Ungava residents and migrating birds arrive in their millions as early as July and stay until the September snows. The islands off the coast of Cape Dufferin are so densely populated with birds during the summer months that the rocks and cliffs at the shoreline seethe and foam like pots of boiling milk. At McCormack Island, 20 miles north of Inukjuak, vast colonies of murres nest on the leeward side along the headlands and in the hollows carved by glaciers beneath them. Nourished by their guano, clumps of deep, luxuriant moss grow. Fantastic numbers of geese and ducks gather on the rocky edges of the Hopewells, the Sleepers and Nastapokas. All along the island festoons of the Belchers, one of which now bears Robert Flaherty's name, eiders, snow-geese and American pintails make their summer homes. During the annual moult, when they temporarily lose their flight, Inuit would go out in boats and scoop them off the beach.

Autumn arrives relatively late at Inukjuak and is relatively mild. The first snows begin in September, but it does not start snowing heavily until October. By November the snow is so dry and wind-packed you can walk on it with the same ease as asphalt. The days draw in and the nights are coloured by displays of the Northern Lights. The snow continues to build up through December. In January, conditions change sharply as the sea ice in Hudson Bay thickens and stabilises. It stops snowing and temperatures plummet. The air becomes crystalline. The Arctic midwinter begins. In contrast to the summer, with its bustle of insects and yammering birds, midwinter is almost deathly silent. There is rarely a sound to be heard beyond the rush of the wind and the cracking of the ice, a terrible, raw, geologic sound. Midwinter is all about ice. A short way out to sea an ice foot forms, its base lying on the beach. Beyond it sits a rough strand of barrier ice, which takes the brunt of the tide. Further out still, the land-fast ice stretches smooth all the way to the floe edge. The pack ice, or floe, slides over and under the land-fast ice and grinds against it, lifting pressure ridges as solid as ice walls or as jumbled as ice boulders. As the tide pulls out, a hinge appears where the barrier ice and the land-fast ice join and the floe edge separates more widely from the land-fast ice, creating a tumbled mass of ice which moves with the tide. Frost smoke, ice flowers and hoar crystals appear where the floe edge pulls away from the land-fast ice, exposing liquid sea. These movements all have their own sounds. As children, Inuit become accustomed to them and learn to distinguish between them but to any outsider it can seem as though they herald the end of the world.

In Ungava, the temperature rarely slips below −40°C in winter and in the blaring January, February and March sun it can feel much warmer. Conversely, when a northwesterly wind is blowing, the windchill can take another ten or fifteen degrees off the ambient temperature. January is often still, though, and January, February and March are all good months for hunting seals at their breathing holes and for trapping foxes. The wind is low, the snow is packed and the ice is stable. The sun shines for at least a few hours on most days and by March the days are long and almost blindingly bright. In April it snows again but this snow never really dries and hardens. By May it is beginning to soften, by June it is in full rot and ice is beginning to melt from the edges of the lakes and at the shoreline. Summer arrives in July, along with the birds.

Generations of Maggie Nujarluktuk's family had made this land their home. Ungava was all they knew and all they were. They were bound to it by blood and by the spirits of their ancestors. Their stories were all here. For centuries, Ungava Inuit had moved around the coast following the migration of whales and birds, jigging for fish in the lakes and rivers and hunting seals, walrus and whales just off the coastline in the bay. They had married and given birth and died. They had played drums and cat's cradle, staged sled races and played football using walrus skulls for balls. They had sung their songs of great hunting exploits and passed them down to younger generations. At times they had eaten well, at other times, starved.

Contact between the Ungava Inuit and white men had been infrequent and short-lived. Every so often an explorer and his crew would overwinter somewhere along the east Hudson Bay and hire a few locals to hunt or sew skin clothes for a few months. The explorers often traded metal needles, harpoon heads and blades, tobacco and cooking pots in exchange for the Inuit's skins and meat and, sometimes, for sexual favours. While they stayed, the whites seeded a few half-breed babies and passed on their diseases, but for the most part, life on the east coast of Hudson Bay went on as it had ever since the Thule had settled the place.

Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, whalers came into the bay, and although whaling along the eastern shoreline never assumed the large-scale industrialised killing that was taking place along the bay's western coast or off Baffin and Herschel Islands, the presence of the whaling ships and, in particular, of those from New England which, unlike the Scots, overwintered in the region, increased the fraternising between white men and Inuit, with mixed results for the natives. Tuberculosis, measles, diphtheria, syphilis and missionaries spread through the region with equal enthusiasm. Entire families died of TB, whole settlements were ravaged by influenza. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the entire population of Southampton Island, around 300 souls, was wiped out in a measles epidemic.

The first mission was established by E. D. Peck in 1894 at Kuujjuarapik. 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 paddleless 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 starving 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 around the Arctic fox. Unlike its cousins further 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 Révillon Fréres Company set up the first permanent fur post on the banks of the Innuksuak River at Inukjuak. Around the same time, the Fréres' 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 Fréres 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 Fréres', 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 Révillon Fréres 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 great – and as it turned out, final – battle 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 than 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.




4 (#u06f7dce2-da20-55a5-8b36-ee45fafa45ad)


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 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 women 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 28.

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 28 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 accept 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 oversensitivity, 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 to 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.

For the next three days they would all be treated to the bounty of the Hudson Bay Company and the government of Canada combined, which is to say that once the ship was unloaded, the bill of lading checked, the cargo neatly stacked in the Hudson Bay Company store, there would be a ‘mug-up’ and all the sugared tea the Inuit could drink accompanied, perhaps, by some hardtack biscuits and a sardine or two. The mug-up would give way to races, a cat's cradle competition and, perhaps, a football game, the prize for which might be a can of sardines or, perhaps, a tin of hardtack. The following day there would be more tea, a solemn sermon from the visiting priest (Anglican), followed by a photography session during which various qalunaat would snap Inuit stiffly sporting their best ceremonial parkas. These same qalunaat might then buy a few souvenirs, sealskin clothing, ceremonial drums, soapstone carvings and the like, before boarding the ship once more. After that, the Inuit would be sent to the Nascopie's medical rooms for a cursory check-up and a reward of a box lunch of hardtack biscuits and sardines. Finally, there would be a showing in the Hudson Bay Company store of a movie, often something with a sea or sailing theme. Though you might think it an obvious choice, so far as we know, Nanook of the North was never shown.

The Nascopie also brought the annual mail. For the first thirty-three years of his life there was never anything for Josephie, which was okay since he could not read.

The day after the screening, at some point during the night, the Nascopie would weigh anchor and began its 400-mile journey west to Churchill, Manitoba, on the other side of Hudson Bay. Some of the Inuit would paddle with the ship for a while, others would watch from the shore, then they would change back into their workaday clothes and would begin to gather their belongings for the journey back to their camps. Those who had credit at the store would stock up on ammunition, flour, lard, tobacco and tea before they went. The remainder would have to make do until the winter trapping season began once more. Within a week, most of them would already have left the settlement. Another year would go by before they would hear again from the other world to the south.

And so the years floated inescapably by. Josephie grew taller, angular, nervous and quick to smile. His contemporaries had him down as a watcher, one of those people who are forever to be found on the edges of things, looking in. In January 1929, when Josephie was just 7, Thomas Mayne ‘Pat’ Reid piloted the first plane across Ungava. It was a fine, sun-dazzled winter day, the sky vivid, cloudless, the air crystalline and smelling of electricity. The first hint that this day was likely to be any different from the last was when the dogs started to become restless and shift about. A long while later, an unfamiliar whirr was carried in on the wind. People emerged from their snowhouses, tied their snowgoggles to their faces, gazed up at the sky. The noise did not go away. Instead, it devolved into a tremulous buzz. Children clamped their hands to their ears. Their mothers gathered them up, shooing them back into the snowhouses, whilst the men grabbed their guns and stared at the clouds, waiting, until the throb accreted into a whine and the whine slid into a sound something, but not quite, like the clash between two bull walruses and a giant mechanical mosquito suddenly appeared, dipping dementedly through the sky towards the settlement. The machine continued along the shoreline, swooped down momentarily, then passed by, gradually diminishing until it disappeared in a band of coastal fog, the final remnant of its existence an almost imperceptible shivering in the air, an electric smell not unlike the Northern Lights and a distant sound like the burr of bees.

For weeks after this event, no one could speak of anything else. Inuit families sledged between camps and into the settlement, trying to glean more information. The Inuit rapidly found in it a rich vein of humour. A giant mosquito with a man inside! The post manager's explanation seemed just as unlikely as the creature itself. Why would anyone have wanted to cross so much land when there was already so much nearby?

As for Josephie, he just watched.

Pat Reid's remarkable fight came to be seen as the last good thing to happen in Ungava for a very long time and it marked the end of Josephie's untroubled early life. Later that year, the price of fox fur plummeted. A creamy, unblemished pelt which, the preceding winter, would have sold for C$7 or C$8 fetched only C$1.50, not much more than whalers would have paid for it a quarter-century before. To add to the problem, the Hudson Bay Company acquired a controlling stake in Révillon Fréres and had taken out the competition. As prices slipped further, trappers were soon forced to go out to their trap lines every day, extending them beyond their usual confines into unfamiliar terrain. But foxes were scarce that year and no rise in the numbers could in any case make up for the fall in the price of a pelt. The Inuit held on, expecting things to change. Within weeks, they had eaten all their credit at the store and by 1930 the situation was becoming desperate, as the principal markets for Arctic fur sank further into the slump. For the first time in a decade, the hunger the Inukjuamiut had so happily forgotten roamed around the camps once more.

Though Josephie was unable to comprehend the vagaries of the Montreal fur market or, on a larger scale, the fragilities of economic cycles and stock markets, he was as well able to feel his empty stomach as anyone. In Arctic conditions, a human being requires three times the number of calories that he might in temperate zones. From time to time and for short periods during Josephie's early life the Nujarluktuk family had gone hungry, but this new hunger had certain novel qualities. First, it seemed unrelated to any physical conditions. The weather had not changed, the fox cycle was unaltered. The abstract nature of this famine made it peculiarly frightening. Added to that was the fact that the concentration on trapping had left many families more dependent on store-bought food. Had the starvation hit a decade before, many families would have had dried meat and fish and meat cheese cached away, but they had grown used to buying flour and sugar, and their meat and fish caches had dwindled. Lastly, no one travelled as far and as often as they once had done, so the camps were closer together and the population less widely scattered. Each family's hunting grounds now overlapped more widely with those of its neighbours. Hunting and trapping trips began to take on a relentless, desperate quality.

About that time, so the story goes, Maggie Nujarluktuk's husband's sled was found out on the sea ice and, beside it, a neat, man-shaped hole. Of the truth of this, there is still no knowing. Of the man himself, there remains no trace. An accident would have made sense but whether it was an accident or not, the timing of the death of Maggie's husband could not have been worse. For a while Maggie and Josephie got by on soup boiled from the stomach contents of seals and walrus given them by their relatives, but with no hunter in the family, it was not long before they were forced to move in with the dead husband's brother, Paddy Aqiatusuk. From then on, they were Paddy's charges, their survival in his hands.

Luckily for Maggie and her children, Aqiatusuk was no ordinary Inuk. People went to Paddy when they had family disputes, or decisions to make. They went to him with their sick children or their hungry dogs. They sought his advice on camp politics, on alliance-making and settling scores. If they had a disagreement with the fur post manager they would ask Paddy to act as advocate. He was the nearest thing the Inukjuamiut had to a marriage broker, psychologist, politician, sage and benign patriarch.

Paddy Aqiatusuk was also an artist. In his spare time he took pieces of green soapstone and walrus ivory and carved. And what carvings! Bears, walrus, hunters, seals, that would make you forget everything except their cool, seductive contours and graceful lines. In time, Paddy's carvings would grace museum collections across North America and Europe.

And so it is easy to imagine Josephie, shy, self-effacing and at an awkward, in-between sort of age, advancing towards his new stepfather with trepidation and a kind of puppyish awe, and his mother, amused and a little embarrassed by her son's zeal, scolding the boy, with something like, ‘Don't tail after the man, you'll bother him.’

But Josephie Flaherty did not bother Paddy Aqiatusuk. Between the growing boy and the sculptor a firm friendship began. No Inuk boy could have wanted a better teacher, no Inuk man a keener student. True, Aqiatusuk was demanding and often grumpy (too little ihuma, undoubtedly), but it was through being in his salty, bear-like presence that Josephie began to leave behind his childish sense of the world and find his way as a hunter and a man. All through the early 1930s, Josephie and Aqiatusuk were companions on the land. During the soft summers, they paddled their kayaks across the swell of Hudson Bay while the sculptor pointed out the unexpected currents, odd tides and anomalies of beach and shore and the boy noted the bays and inlets, taking in the contours of the coast. For days they paddled along the Hopewell Islands, out west to Farmer Island as far as Kogaluc Bay in the north, to the Nastapokas, the Marcopeet Islands and the Sleepers in the south. From these expeditions, Josephie learned to predict the tides, the effect of the winds and the rain and the sun on the sea. He became familiar with the ice and the currents. He discovered where to look for bearded, harp and ringed seal, walrus and beluga whale.

His education continued through the hard winters. From Aqiatusuk he learned how to harness dogs and ice the runners of the komatik and to pack a sled so that it did not topple when the going was rough. Together they drove out across the land-fast ice, through pressure ridges, to the pack ice beyond. They ranged way beyond the low hills, where Josephie and Maggie had stopped to pick willow, to the huge, empty spaces of the interior. Aqiatusuk showed Josephie how to lead the dogs, reading their mood, sensing when it was best to run alongside, when more prudent to ride on the komatik with the whip, when to discipline the team and when to give them their freedom, when to offer them meat and when to let them go hungry. Gradually, young Josephie distinguished the different and subtle ways in which dogs use their intelligence. By his mid-teens the son of Robert Flaherty was an expert in dogcraft.

Those trips were Josephie's introduction to the tumultuous churn of ice. Slowly, he learned how to recognise the thin sheet ice which formed from freezing rain and could cover the lichen and starve the caribou. He learned how to spot the thick layer of frozen melted snow which could conceal deadly melt holes below. He sensed when the sikuaq or ice soup, which began to form in the sea at the end of August, had become thick enough to bear weight and, later in the year, he recognised when the ice was likely to candle, throwing up the sharp spines that sliced sled dog paws. He learned to watch for ice rising up at the hinges between the ice foot and the shore-fast ice and to predict where it would rear up to form the turbulent, slabby ice ranges the Inuit called tuniq. He observed the shadows on the sea left by black ice, and those accompanied by frost smoke which marked open water. He discovered where treacherous ice skins were most likely to be lying across leads and where tiny tremors and a blanching of the air signalled there was land ahead.

Under Aqiatusuk's guidance, he acquainted himself with the habits of Arctic animals, where each preferred to live and how and what it ate, where it travelled, how it paired and bred, for how long the young remained close to their mothers, where they were at their most vulnerable. He learned how to stalk caribou on the flat, wind-blown tundra, and how to use a white fur baffle to outfox seal. He came to a precise understanding of where and when to fling the harpoon or release the bullet that would make a creature his. He discovered the arts of flensing and butchering meat and where to store it so that wolves, foxes and dogs could not take it. When Aqiatusuk had fox pelts to trade, he took his stepson with him. The boy learned how to talk to white men and how much not to say.

Another winter approached and Maggie Nujarluktuk took sick and, within a few weeks, she died. Her body, wrapped in skins and buried beneath the rocks, joined the company of silent souls out on the tundra, their skeletons kept from the prying paws of wolves and foxes, their stories meshed into the tangle of willow. The exact cause of her death remains unknown. In the 1930s, 740 of every 100,000 deaths among Inuit were unexplained, twenty times the rate among the population of Lower Canada. The family said a prayer, burned Maggie's clothes and returned to their lives. Josephie was not encouraged to cry, nor to vent his rage. No one thought to write to Robert Flaherty with the news, nor did they look for explanations. Death was the well-worn path, too familiar to be mapped.

Josephie found himself alone in the world. Alone, that was, but for Paddy Aqiatusuk, from whom this shy, sensitive, loyal boy began the slow process of learning, as he was never able to learn from his real father, how to become the son to a man. Maggie's death brought them closer. They would not realise quite how far each depended on the other until they were forced apart. But for now, all that lay ahead in a distant future neither could predict and to which, in the Inuit way of things, neither gave much thought.

Josephie Flaherty's knowledge of the world beyond the limits of Ungava remained as thin as summer ice. He got a taste of it in 1934, when the governor of the Hudson Bay Company, Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, arrived in Inukjuak on the Nascopie and was borne ashore to the accompaniment of a personal piper. An inspection of the newly painted clapboard Hudson Bay post followed, and Sir Patrick distributed a few cans of sardines, the odd tin of hardtacks and a good deal of ill-conceived advice. After his inspection, he emerged to address the assembled Inuit in English.

‘Now that we have seen you,’ declaimed Sir Patrick, ‘we are happy and will leave you with the confidence that you will work with our post manager as one large happy family, you following his advice as if he were your father, for he does the things which I tell him and I want you to do the things which he tells you.’

The speech was later published in a book and distributed around the Hudson Bay posts of the eastern Arctic. Josephie never saw this book. Nor did he or any of the other Inukjuamiut ever master what it was that Sir Patrick wanted or why the piper had piped him in. Around Inukjuak, the incident became an old itch or, rather, the memory of an itch. From time to time someone or other scratched it. Between times, it was forgotten along with the world below the treeline that it represented.

From Inukjuak, the Nascopie travelled on that year to Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung and to Pond Inlet at the northern tip of Baffin Island, picking up 52 Inuit, one Hudson Bay Company post manager, 109 dogs and various possessions and transferring them all to new fox-trapping grounds at Dundas Harbour. When hunting was hampered by rough ice, the manager sent half the party to Crocker Bay, 30 miles west, where they proceeded to starve. The whole party was then transferred back on to the Nascopie, the Cape Dorset and Pangnirtung Inuit were returned home while the Pond Inlet Inuit were taken to Arctic Bay. When Arctic Bay proved uninhabitable the Nascopie transferred the Inuit once more, to Fort Ross near the entrance to Bellot Strait, where they passed the next ten years scraping out a meagre living from a landscape of rock and gravel. When the Hudson Bay Company post at Fort Ross was closed in the summer of 1947, the survivors from this company experiment were again moved, west this time, to Spence Bay. They were never returned to their homeland.

In 1939, five years after the visit of Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, an ex-Hudson Bay Company fur trader called James Cantley arrived in Inukjuak and set up a rival trading post a little further upriver, calling his new enterprise the Baffin Trading Company. The Inuit found him abrasive and mean. He did not rate them either. For a while, the price of fox fur rose steadily, the competition between the Baffin Trading Company and the Hudson Bay post keeping the price paid for pelts in line with the growing demand for Arctic fox in the southern fur markets. The Inuit of Inukjuak did their best to shrug off the horrors of the past years and settled back to their customary lives.

Far away, a war began in Europe.




5 (#u06f7dce2-da20-55a5-8b36-ee45fafa45ad)


Supposing the bad times to be over, at least for a while, Paddy Aqiatusuk married a widow. Mary brought four children with her, all a little younger than Josephie: two boys, Elijah and Samwillie, Anna, a delicate little girl left crippled at the age of two by an outbreak of polio and a baby, Minnie. There were now five more mouths to feed in Aqiatsuk's camp and among them no adult hunters.

During the winter of 1939 snow crept across Ungava from the east, melted in a brief, warm spell, then froze hard over the tundra. Unable to scrape through the ice to feed on lichen clinging to the rocks, what few caribou remained on the peninsula began slowly to starve, their living bodies nipped at by wolves until they were little more than walking skeletons, flesh trailing in ribbons behind them as they stumbled to their deaths. There was no point in hunting them, so little nourishment remained on their bones.

By Christmas the meat caches in Aqiatusuk's camp were empty. There were seal, still, and some walrus, but they had to be hunted ever further from the settlement, either at the floe edge or out on the islands. Paddy Aqiatusuk and Josephie Flaherty were often away for days at a time, moving their trap lines further and further out along the coast, camping at the floe edge where the seals swam.

Whenever they were sure they would not be going too far from camp, Josephie and Paddy would take Paddy's stepson Elijah along to hold the dogs and act as lookout. The trips exhausted the boy, just as they had exhausted Josephie before him, and before Josephie, Aqiatusuk and Aqiatusuk's father, in a continuum of extreme physical endeavour stretching back into the dimmest reaches of the past. It was a brutal regime and by the time the three of them reached the home camp they were so grim from the day's exertions that it was all they could do to sit, mug of tea in hand, sucking in the smoke from their cigarettes and staring at the icy floor. Within minutes the boy would be fast asleep, in place, chin folded on to chest. The two men would sit awhile, saying nothing. Paddy Aqiatusuk suffered from back pain and odd, inexplicable twinges which kept him from sleep. He often passed the night hours carving hunters and polar bears, building living armies of greenstone and ivory, against the time when he might have to call upon them.

The early years of the war passed Ungava by. Then, in 1941, the US air force began to build a wartime air base at Fort Chimo, or Kuujuak, in eastern Ungava and American troops poured in to staff it. Inuit employed at the Fort Chimo base passed through Inukjuak on their way to other bases in the eastern Arctic, bringing with them stories of the war, but no one in Inukjuak, least of all Paddy Aqiatusuk and Josephie Flaherty, could quite believe them. There had been skirmishes between Inuit and Indians at the tree line for 3,000 years, but the Inuit had lived all this time in the Arctic without an all-out war. Of the First World War, which had ended only shortly before Robert Flaherty had arrived in the settlement with his cameras, they knew nothing.

For now though, Josephie had more important concerns. A tiny, fresh-faced girl called Rynee had entered his life and become the woman he was to marry. The love he felt for Rynee was something new. The Inuktitut word for love means ‘to care for’ or ‘to look after’ and all Josephie knew was that he wanted to care for Rynee, that he wanted to look after each delicate little part of her. Where had they met? All these years later Rynee finds it difficult to remember the exact moment, the one precise and telling detail. Perhaps it was at a drum dance, or on a camp visit or at the trading post in Inukjuak, their mutual attraction revealed in stolen glances and open, toothy smiles. Perhaps there was some slow simmer, a layering of casual meetings over days or weeks or months, culminating in an accretion of feeling, a bubble suddenly bursting at the surface. However it came about, this miniature woman was everything Josephie wanted in a wife, beautiful and healthy, with seaweedy hair and berry lips that spoke to Josephie of quick and happy Arctic summers. It was easy to imagine her frying him bannock bread and sewing him a pair of kamiks, the bread soft and as fat as summer bees, the kamiks tough and more waterproof than ducks' wings. Before long, family alliances were hinted at, gifts promised. Until they married, the couple would live apart, and see each other when Josephie sledged past Rynee's camp or, in the summer, when he borrowed his stepfather's kayak and paddled up the coast.

Out on the sea ice, one spring day, Josephie Flaherty and Paddy Aqiatusuk found themselves beside the Belchers, those islands whose bleeding cliffs Robert Flaherty had once explored and the largest of which now bears his name on maps, though the Inuit have long had their own name for the place. The hunters had been sledging out for the bearded seal which sometimes basked on the shore-fast ice and, finding none, decided to make for their usual landfall. Though there were fishing nets still littering the beach and other evidence of recent occupation the island seemed on this occasion emptied out, as though a great gust of wind had come down and swept away its heart. Usually someone would come down to greet them, but today no one appeared. The reason emerged later. A man called Charlie Oujerack, had been given a Bible in Inuktitut and taught how to read it by the mission at Inukjuak. After shutting himself away to study the book further he had formulated the view that he was Jesus Christ come to save the world, and that he would start with the Belchers. His first apostle was his sister, Minnie, who succeeded in making a few other converts among the tiny population and in silencing everyone else. The fantasy was harmless enough until Charlie Oujerack landed on the idea that true believers must prove their faith by walking out across the sea ice naked, as a result of which the lives of three adults and six children were lost and the remaining islanders plunged into despair.

Among the Inuit, the event was seen as the sign of a bad spirit abroad, some malcontented ancestor or river soul out to trip up the unwary. Christianity had never wholly won them over. To the missionary and the RCMP constable at Inukjuak, it was just one further piece of evidence that Inuit were best treated not as the adults they thought they were, but as the children that they had, by this small piece of lunacy and in a million other ways, proved themselves to be.

For a while, the incident became the chief topic of conversation enlivening the qalunaat 's otherwise humdrum weekly bridge and poker parties. In Robert Flaherty's time the sole white occupant of Inukjuak had been the Révillon Fréres trader but by the mid-1940s, and partly as a result of the war, more and more qalunaat had begun to arrive. In 1945, the qalunaat population consisted of the Hudson Bay post manager, a Mr Trafford and his wife, Trafford's rival at the Baffin Trading Company, James Cantley, his assistant, a Swede by the name of ‘Slim’ Carlson, the missionary, the Reverend Whitehead, and a Mr Doubleday who ran the radio station and his wife. They were joined in summer by the odd geologist, naturalist or geographer working for the Canadian Geodetic Service. Living on the opposite bank of the river were the detachment policemen, generally a corporal and a constable, and from 1943 onwards, the chief operator of the new Radiosonde station.

Before the war, most ordinary Canadians rarely thought about the great lands lying to the north. Robert Flaherty's film had left them with a strong sense of the dignity and courage of the Inuit way of life, but then it had allowed them as quickly to forget it. The Inuit were not much more than colourful characters in the press reports and in the movies, and, as Flaherty had said, ‘happy-go-lucky’. To all but a few, the 200,000 square miles of its northern territories were not in any real sense Canada.

The eastern Arctic archipelago and its inhabitants were particularly obscure. The islands had officially become part of Canada after they were transferred by Great Britain in 1870, but for the next 70 or 80 years the question remained as to whether or not Great Britain had the right to title in the first place. In 1904 the Canadian cabinet asked Dr William King, the Chief Astronomer of Canada, to report on Canada's Arctic possessions on the grounds that ‘Canada's title to some at least of the North Islands is imperfect’. On maps of the time, Ellesmere Island, the largest in the High Arctic Queen Elizabeth group, was represented as a US possession or as unclaimed. Three years later, on 20 February 1907, Canadian Senator Pascal Poirier tried to clarify the issue by presenting a motion to the Senate formally claiming all the territory between two lines drawn from the North Pole to Canada. The Russians refused to acknowledge this ‘sector principle’, as did the Americans. All through the twenties, as Josephie Flaherty was learning about ice, the Norwegians and the Danes were making tentative claims to those parts of the archipelago which had first been mapped by Norwegian and Danish explorers. These claims were gradually shrugged off and by the time Josephie reached eighteen and the Second World War began, Canada's legal right to the eastern Arctic archipelago was no longer hotly in dispute, though a question mark did still hang over whether the seas around the islands belonged to Canada or were international waters, an issue so complex that it remains a matter of contention today. The issue of sovereignty in the eastern Arctic archipelago did not entirely go away, though. The region was now shown as part of Canada on maps but as part of the war effort, the United States had constructed five airfields in Canada's Arctic zone and even though Canada officially bought these after the war for US$78.8m, they often remained staffed, at least in part, by American personnel and the American military and some of its various satellite departments often acted as though the territory was still open. In 1946 some US newspapers carried recruiting advertisements for young men to work at a series of new weather stations in the Canadian Arctic which Canada knew nothing about. After some frosty enquiries by the Canadian government, Senator Owen Brewster of Maine hastily introduced a bill into the US Senate to establish these proposed stations as joint US–Canadian operations. All through the forties the stations continued to be supplied and serviced by US planes and ships and it was only in 1954 that the Canadian Department of Transport was able to take over sea supply.

By then, the Arctic had been drawn into the Cold War, and the Americans were announcing plans to build airstrips capable of landing heavy jets and cargo planes at the remote northern Ellesmere Island weather stations of Alert and Eureka, points on the North American continent only 1,200 miles across the Arctic Ocean from the plains of Siberia. A Canadian Department of External Affairs memorandum of 1952 drew anxious attention to the US presence and predicted that the number of US citizens in the Arctic District of Franklin, encompassing the eastern Arctic islands, would soon outstrip the population of ‘white Canadians’ living there. In the same vein, a Privy Council memorandum predicted that the airstrips ‘would probably assume the character of small US bases and Canadian control might well be lost’. The memorandum continued, ‘Our experiences since 1943, have indicated the extreme care which we must exercise to preserve Canadian sovereignty where Canadians are outnumbered and outranked.’ In January 1953 Canadian Prime Minister Louis St Laurent went so far as to say that ‘US developments might be just about the only form of human activity in the vast wastelands of the Canadian Arctic’.

To counteract this new American occupation, and to provide more support for the Canadian Inuit, a string of Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachments was quickly opened across the Canadian Arctic. The joint US-Canadian Arctic weather stations were built and the Canadian government set up Radiosonde posts to collect meteorological data for the newly opened transpolar aviation route between North America and Europe. All of this, it was hoped, would provide jobs in Arctic settlements and put the Canadian Arctic once and for all in Canada's hands.

The RCMP arrived in Inukjuak in 1935, the Radiosonde post was built in 1943 and a joint US–Canadian weather station opened there in 1946. Qalunaat moved up to staff them.

One of the side effects of the war was that it gave thousands of American soldiers their first experience of Arctic conditions and their first real sense of Inuit lives. While the war was on, attention was focused elsewhere, but once it ended, stories began leaking out from the American service personnel of the terrible conditions they had witnessed during their Arctic tours of duty. Many Inuit living around the American airfields, among them Fort Chimo on Ungava, appeared to be poorly clothed and thin and under constant siege from white men's diseases. They noted the Inuit's cruel and arbitrary dependence on fox fur prices which meant that any surplus a family was able to accumulate during a good season was immediately wiped out the moment fox prices fell. They saw how, if an Inuk man got ill, then his family often went hungry because the extended family, though anxious to help out, had nothing to give. If the illness was protracted, the entire family would wind up dependent on the goodwill of the local Hudson Bay factor, or they would starve. The RCMP detachments were too widely spaced to be of much use. In extreme cases, whole families died together. These were tough men and women, living in the most extreme conditions, hard-working and uncomplaining, Canadian citizens whom Canada seemed to have forgotten. The stories coming from the Arctic were a far cry from the cheery, upbeat world of Nanook, and the American press jumped on them. The Boston Globe was among the first to run scandalised reports. Other newspapers followed.

As Southern Canadians and Americans were beginning to learn the truth about life for many Inuit, Josephie Flaherty's fortunes changed for the better.

Out of the blue, the Radiosonde manager offered Robert Flaherty's son the job of station piliriji or choreboy. Why he picked Josephie out is not clear, but it may have had something to do with the fact that Josephie was a half-breed and as such was considered, somehow, more suited to the job. It may simply have been that Josephie was strong-looking with competent hands and a diligent manner and that he smiled a good deal.

Accepting the job meant, for Josephie, having to leave Aqia-tusuk's camp and going to live in the choreboy's hut beside the station. This Josephie was at first reluctant to do, feeling pushed and pulled by the competing claims of his stepfather and the Radiosonde manager, but he soon saw that by this one small sacrifice, his family could be relieved of some of their insecurity. With the meagre allowance from the choreboy's job he could at least look after himself and help them out and in some way help pay back the family for the years of care they had given him, even though he was only partly theirs. Accepting the job also meant being able to marry the woman he wanted. Finally, and this is not a trivial point, saying yes meant that Josephie would not have to say no to a white man. And so for the first time in his life the young Josephie moved far from his family camp into a hut on the south shore of the Innuksuak River in the settlement of Inukjuak and became a wage earner.





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