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.
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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.
