All the Way (2 page)

Eventually, when I got to talk to the man himself, I was even more impressed by his carefully measured words and his thoughtfulness. Of course his play has thrilled me since his games with the Team Canada juniors. What a story! An Inuit kid becoming the first of his people to play in the NHL. An artist on the ice whose grace and speed match his fists of fury. Jordin Tootoo from the beginning is a truly epic Canadian story. There's no doubt about it. And just under the surface of this recounting of a life so far is the release of past burdens so that this man might move forward with true dignity.

Perhaps when Jordin does finally decide to hang up his professional hockey skates years from now, he'll choose something that both surprises and doesn't at all. Keep in mind that one of the toughest men in the NHL also travels great distances to speak to youth across Nunavut about the importance of finishing high school and of understanding that if you can imagine your dream, if you can see it in your head, then you simply have to pursue it with a doggedness that does in fact challenge the odds stacked against all of us. His message is at once simple and complex; it is both artful and tough; it is highly sensible yet so highly lofty that many youth must feel he's asking them to do the impossible. But just watch him on the internet speaking to these youth and you can see the awe, the deep appreciation in their eyes. His straightforward words brim over with truth.

Maybe Jordin will eventually choose politics. It's not that far-fetched. He has the charisma, he has the respect of his people, he has both the message and the real-life experience to back what he says, and his family certainly has their fair share of politicians. Jordin's father, Barney, while he holds no official title, is certainly considered a “chief” in his community of Rankin Inlet. Jordin's uncle was a Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, and Jordin's cousin was a Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut. Or perhaps I'm just projecting my expectations and desires on him. I'm certainly not the only one who does so. Time will tell what path he takes next, but what's sure in my mind is that he'll apply the same work ethic, the same single-minded focus and will that he always has.

The title of this book,
All the Way
, might be one of the most
telling and personal aspects of Jordin's autobiography. These words come from Terence, jotted down in what became his last note to his younger sibling, urging him not to give up and to always look after their family. “Go all the way.” At once a simple statement, it also carries the weight of their world together. “Take care of the family. You are the man.” And with those few words, Jordin was left alone in what should have been the greatest year of his life, having not long before that been drafted into the NHL.

Like I say, this is a devastating story, it is a triumphant story, it is a story of succeeding despite the odds, the first act in the tale of a very special man who is as controversial as he is enigmatic. Yes, he is an agitator and an enforcer, but more importantly, he is a truly gifted hockey player. More importantly still, Jordin Tootoo is an Inuk. He is the son of his father; he is the son of his mother; he is a survivor. And if you will allow me to speak it out loud: Jordin Tootoo has the gift of the warrior poet inside him. Like much of my favourite writing, this story, on the surface, is simply told. But it carries the weight of thousands of years on the land. It carries the weight of great victory and even greater loss. But what it truly promises is that there's so much more to come.

Joseph Boyden
Paris, France
June 2014

T
he sun has been up for a long time, though the truth is it barely sets in high summer. The others are still sound
asleep in a ten foot–by–ten foot cabin, a bare-bones wooden box on the shores of a northern lake in the middle of a landscape I am struggling to absorb. The sky and the water are deep blue. The brownish tundra unfolds endlessly in all directions, broken only by huge boulders. It is silent, absolutely silent, save for the whistling wind, which never seems to die completely, a blessing when it keeps the clouds of mosquitoes at bay, and for the occasional squawks of the huge storks that spend their summers here. Beyond that, there are no real signs of life, except for the Great Horned Owl we saw perched on a rock during the long, rough ride in on quads. Somewhere not so far away a grizzly bear has been spotted heading in our general direction, and so even on a short stroll a rifle is necessary, though the truth is, with me packing, the bear has absolutely nothing to fear.

We are here—my son Nathaniel and me; Jordin Tootoo; his father, Barney; and his young nephew Terence, named after a brother and son lost—to fish for giant lake trout. The water is so clear you can watch the fish chase the lure back to the boat, though it's not so easy to convince them to bite. We cast for hours and hours. We pause occasionally to eat from the mixed bag of goodies packed in the grub box: kielbasa sausage, peanut butter cookies, all manner of snacks, plus traditional Inuit country food—air-dried char that Jordin's mother, Rose, caught and prepared and that is a delicate orange-pink and retains the subtle taste of the sea, and muktuk, the layer of blubber found just beneath the skin of a beluga whale and the kind of thing you serve to southerners just to see how they'll react. It's extraordinarily chewy and doesn't taste like much of anything, which may explain why the preferred method of preparation, after methodically cutting each tiny strip, is to smother it in China Lily soy sauce.

“We are going out on the land,” Jordin told me shortly after we first met. “So you can understand.” You miss it the first few times, the article in that sentence, but eventually you come to understand its profound significance. Not “our” land, because here that is selfevident, but “the” land. It has no borders, other than the arbitrary political lines drawn around the territory of Nunavut, which was carved out of the larger Northwest Territories in 1999. The vast tracts above the treeline, not just here but in northern Quebec, Alaska, the tip of Labrador, and Greenland, are the domain of the Inuit people, and for them, possession and sovereignty have never been a matter of debate.

Neither is being “on the land” the same thing as camping, or fishing, or hunting, though it involves sleeping rough, catching fish, and being prepared at all times to kill whatever useful beast or bird might come along. It's not a recreation. It's holistic. It's living. And although back in the town of Rankin Inlet there are all the conveniences of modern life—the internet and satellite television and grocery stores selling all manner of food at inflated northern prices, not to mention a Tim Hortons—it's out here, on the land, where life is lived as it has been for centuries.

After the rest of the group wakes—the southerners have slept wrapped in their outdoor clothes, shivering, while the Inuit have slept stripped down to their underwear, sweating—Barney Tootoo surveys the horizon as we motor down the lake in our boat. He points to stone markers on a hillside. “That's where the caribou herds come down to cross,” he says. Later, he spots a lone caribou in profile, standing on a distant rise. A rifle is readied and the caribou is put in the crosshairs, but it's too far away to take a shot.

We cruise farther along the lake and Barney points to a stone inukshuk, which may have been assembled there five days ago, or five years ago, or five hundred years ago. Its meaning, though, is clear to him. In this bay, which to my eyes looks identical to myriad other bays we have sailed right by, somewhere in time someone experienced good fishing. We drop anchor and within five minutes a twenty-pound laker is flopping around on the floor of the boat.

As the air begins to cool in late afternoon, though the sun is still high and bright in the sky, Terence finds a warm place to nap tucked inside the boat's bow. Jordin stays outside, scanning the water, casting for fish over and over again, following his father's lead, every moment one of learning, of reading the landscape, of greater understanding. How often has this scene been repeated with other fathers and other sons, stretching back to when men first arrived here?

Jordin was right. This is where the story begins. On the land. This is where it has to start.

Stephen Brunt

ONE

O
n the land is where you understand how simple life is. It really brings you back down to earth. It's so humbling and so peaceful. You go to Toronto or New York and everything is moving at a hundred miles an hour. You come up here and you put your phone away and nothing else matters. You are in the moment. You have to be.

When you're out on the land and meet people out there, it doesn't matter if our families are feuding back in town. Out there you help each other out. All of that other stuff is left behind. It's like when I go to the rink and I leave everything at the door. I leave all of my personal issues outside when I walk into the arena. It's the same as here—when you go out on the land, you leave everything behind, all of your fricking problems.

The land is my dad's getaway. He's my go-to guy because he knows how life is out there. That's his comfort zone. When I go out with my buddies it's awesome, but it's not the same as being
with my dad. You don't have that same sense of peace. My dad always knows what's going on.

We first went out on the land when my brother, Terence, and I were little kids. My mom used to go too, but now she's not all that gung-ho about it. She likes going to our cabin, which is a fifteen- or twenty-minute quad ride from the house, where we net the char, but really going out on the land is my dad's thing. His parents lived out on the land until probably halfway through their lives. They would follow the caribou herds. Then they moved into the community in Churchill, Manitoba.

These days, people don't actually live out on the land full time, but in the spring they will go out for a month to camp when the weather is nice. In the winter it's just too harsh. I couldn't imagine what it was like fifty, sixty, or seventy years ago, when they were actually living out there all year round.

Being out here is part of our culture and lifestyle in the north. You go out with people who know the land and eventually, as time goes on, you learn the ropes—and you have to learn, or you'll get into trouble. In summer, if you go off the trail, you won't know where you're going unless you remember landmarks. That's what people do when they go out hunting. In the winter, it's totally different. The landscape and the landmarks that you see in summer have disappeared under the snow. You lose your sense of direction. You can get lost just like that. People get lost all the time—people who don't know the territory. They say they're going out hunting for the day, the day turns into two, and then search-and-rescue has to get out there to find them. A storm can just turn around on you within hours.

I don't really care to go hunting or fishing down south because it's not like it is here.

When I say “hunting and fishing,” people envision going to a camp where dinner's served and you have a guide and everything's taken care of. They don't understand how tough it is here, that you're on your own. Like that caribou we saw. You may want to shoot a caribou, but then you have to deal with the fucking mosquitoes and cutting it up and hauling it out. Your regular hunter down south has people to do that for him.

When my buddy Scottie Upshall came up here, I told him we're going to jump on the quad and go fishing. For him, jumping on the quad meant riding on a road, a paved road, for a couple of hours nice and easy, because that's what they know down south. It's not that you break your own trail and it's hard. I think it came as a bit of a shock to him, getting knocked around like that.

When I was a kid, as much as I loved the fishing and hunting, the best part was all the other shit we had to do: packing up, making camp, unpacking, tying everything up. That's really hard work, but for my dad it's just second nature. You tie everything up and when you think it's tied well enough, he tells you it's not because he knows how rough it is out there. Knowing those little things, that's what I really admire about my father—that he has all those skills and that survival mindset. I think that's how I learned to go into survival mode when I'm out on the ice. That comes from all the trouble I've seen out on the land growing up, because even when things are going okay, something bad is going to happen eventually
and you've always got to prepare for it. Out on the land, you never know.

MY PEOPLE, the Inuit people, are very humble. And they work together. When times are tough, they depend on each other. As an Inuk person, when I go home and look at our elders, I know that life is very simple for them. As long as they have their traditional foods and culture around them, life is good. All of this other materialistic stuff means nothing. I think that's what's great about being an Inuk. Whatever is put in front of you, you deal with it and go from there. For my family, everything has always been pretty simple. We don't need a nice car and we don't need the best Ski-Doo to be all flashy and be the cool guys. Up here, being a good hunter and a good family guy is all that matters.

I come from a mixed race family, but there's not a lot of talk about that in Rankin Inlet. A lot of white people come up here for jobs. It's the same in a lot of the remote communities. Race is less and less of an issue because there are white people who have lived here for generations. Here, you are really defined more by your surroundings. A lot of white people move up north, people who have grown up in well-off families and had everything given to them. They come here and it kind of brings them back to earth. They start to realize that what is most important is living a simple life and being able to provide for your family. That's why knowing the land, going out hunting and fishing, and knowing the tradition of living the Inuit lifestyle are more important than
race. At the end of the day, people who move up north from down south aren't going to change how life is up north because that's simply reality. Instead, they have to become Inuit in their own way. They've got to live the Inuit lifestyle or the community isn't going to accept them.