The Long Exile (9 page)

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, windblown 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 tree line 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 fifty-two 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, thirty 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 lames Cantley arrived in Inukjuak and set up a rival trading post a little farther 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.

S
UPPOSING
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 Aqiatusuk'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 farther 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 farther and farther 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 U.S. 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 losephie Flaherty, could quite believe them. There had been skirmishes between Inuit and Indians at the tree line for three thousand 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, losephie 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 losephie 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
qalunaathzd
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, lames Cantley; his assistant, a Swede by the name of “Slim” Carlson; the missionary, the Reverend White-head; 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 seventy or eighty 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 U.S. 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 losephie 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 losephie 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Senate to establish these proposed stations as joint U.S.-Canadian operations. All through the forties the stations continued to be supplied and serviced by U.S. planes and ships and it was only in 1954 that the Canadian Department of Transport was able to take over sea supply.