In the Empire of Ice (23 page)

“Crowding is one of the worst problems in Igloolik. There are 62 families on the waiting list for houses. The once yearly sealift barge failed to bring the components, so they have to wait another year. Without hunting, there’s a big vacuum in people’s lives, and lawlessness erupts frequently despite the strong presence of the RCMP,” she says.

Mitch says he was called at his office by two high school girls. “They said, ’Thirty dollars for one, fifty dollars for two.’ I said, ‘No thank you’ and hung up.” Alcohol can be obtained legally only by applying to the community’s Alcohol Education Committee, which turns down the worst offenders. Most alcohol flows into the community via bootleggers. A bottle of bootleg vodka runs about $300, a can of beer is $10 to $15, a joint is $30. Suicide rates are 11 times higher than the national average. Only one in four students graduates from high school, and teenage pregnancies are soaring.

Sonia: “I walked in on one family where the older daughter was on drugs, and she flipped and was threatening to kill her mother. Her partner comes in and there’s a brawl. The mother calls the cops, so the daughter trashes the house. By the time the RCMP arrived, they could only ask the mother what she wanted done, and she said, ‘Nothing. Leave us.’”

To deal with such problems, there’s a justice committee of elders who handle minor infractions but not violence. They have a counseling group that meets with couples or families. They try to work things out locally, but when the binding threads have been pulled out of a society, nothing makes sense anymore.

“A tenth of the violence isn’t even reported, and almost no one is prosecuted,” Sonia says. “A judge came for one day in November. He’ll come back in May. The attorneys meet their clients for the first time in court. Ninety percent of the clients don’t show up at all.

“Once the whole community was on lockdown,” she tells me. “They flew in 25 RCMP. Leah’s mother said it was so ridiculous. They could have had an elder go in and solve the problem. The justice system is alien to this culture. They’re used to handling things on their own. If a couple has a fight, they’re separated, or the violent one is sent to another community. They want things to remain confidential.

“In the old days the elders got together and talked things out. Women weren’t treated well by our standards. They were told not to upset their partners. The traditional thought was that, if there’s abuse, it’s the woman’s fault.

“There’s also racism here on both sides,” Sonia says. “Most of the Qallunaat—the white people—live on the Anglican side up here where we are. The white contractors and technicians don’t seem to have much interest in knowing Inuit families. John and Carolyn, of course, are the great exception. To take two such different cultural systems and blend them. Maybe it’s not possible.”

Mitch is restless. He gets up, paces the room, and sits down again: “I see more similarities than differences in how the older generation thinks and makes decisions. But the younger ones—well, the unemployment and suicide rates tell the story. The prognosis is not good. What we have here is aboriginal rednecks. The society is coming apart. The elders are dying, and each loss has a huge effect on the youngsters. Each generation has less and less authority. Elders are being replaced by a void. There are some good leaders stepping up, but not enough of them. It has become a culture of entitlement.”

At school, he tells me, everyone passes. There are special cases for fetal alcohol syndrome kids who can’t function at all, and in other classes the teachers are just trying to keep things under control. “When the kids aren’t taught properly and can’t read or write, they act out,” Mitch says. “They think school is for losers. They stay up all night. A girl will throw over a boy for some white guy who has more skills and money. Then the Inuk boyfriend hangs himself. There’s violent crime in every village—breaking and entering, stabbings…. We can’t leave our houses untended for an hour, much less a day, without double locking them. That’s the reality of Nunavut. But out on the land, it’s different. The people are great. There’s a welcoming community anywhere you go who do things the old way.”

In 21st-century Igloolik, as in other Arctic communities, the opposing worlds of “town life” and subsistence hunting life out on the ice and land are warring forces. Is it possible to live in such an inhospitable place if you are no longer an “ice-adapted” hunter? “It’s like watching a death spiral in the making,” Sonia says. “Think of it: It costs $250 in gas for the snowmobile to go out and get a seal. How can you expect people to live traditionally?”

The seasonal cycle in Igloolik now is very different from 75 years ago. In the fall the annual sealift arrives, bringing a year’s supply of fuel, building materials, snowmobiles, fire trucks, guns, ammunition, food, televisions, and clothing. In January, when the sun appears, there’s a townwide celebration with a qulliq-lighting ceremony, a feast, games, and a talent show. There’s singing and dancing—not just traditional Inuit dances but the whalers’ square dances, accompanied by an accordion with Inuktitut calls.

Sonia has recently met some young hunters who go out every day and hunt for their families and are committed to living a more traditional life, drug free. “There are about a hundred of them,” she tells me. “They’re wonderful young men, and their wives are trying hard too. There’s always hope, isn’t there?”

DINNER PARTY. Carolyn has made one of her amazing patchwork meals with piquant tastes of curry, Mexican spices, homemade wine, and fresh-baked bread. She has invited Georgia, a tiny, sassy, spry woman who is nearly 80 but looks 60. She says she came to Igloolik one summer as a young woman to help the local priest and never left. She’s written a lively diary of her early years here. American born, she changed her citizenship quickly to Canadian, dropping her surname in protest against Operation Surname. “Now I’m just Georgia. That seemed like enough.” She has done a little of everything in town and helps Carolyn at school, teaching reading and writing. “I live in a tiny house in the Catholic part of town. I like it there just fine,” she says.

Sonia walks up the stairs, followed by Mitch. He tells the crowd he has just been relieved of his job. “Too bad,” John says. “I claimed you were personally known by every polar bear between Greenland, Ellesmere Island, and Igloolik.”

Mitch tells of a time out at spring camp when the aurora came all the way down to the ground. “There was no ice and the water was crackling,” he says wistfully, then tells us that Igloolik is the area in Nunavut with the most biological diversity. “We have bowheads, belugas, narwhal, harp, ringed, and bearded seals, arctic char year-round, and caribou.”

The subject quickly turns to money problems in town. John says that money has taken the place of food. “It is shared out amongst family members. But somehow it’s not the same. It’s crass. Like begging for handouts, not getting a piece of meat and cooking and eating together with the family.”

Carolyn passes bowls and plates of food around the table for a second time and says, “Mothers who work for Head Start are asking for food instead of money, because the kids and men in the family just gamble it away.”

John chimes in: “Gasoline here is highly subsidized. It’s $1.15 per liter. People in need are given money, and their rent is reduced to $60 a month if they don’t have a job. It’s ordinarily $1,500, so what’s the incentive to work?”

Mitch: “The purchase price for a house like mine with crummy fixtures and no insulation is $250,000. Who can afford that except a government type like me? Phone reconnections cost $250, so if anyone fails to pay their phone bill, they can’t then afford to have it hooked up again.”

Carolyn: “There are no jobs. And no one from the Qallunaat community can dictate what economic priorities they must hold to. Suggestions can be made, but we can’t meddle in how money is spent.”

John: “It’s estimated that each kid in town spends $5,000 a year on soda pop at $2.50 a can. It’s emblematic of the great boredom here. On the other hand, money is still used in the old way—the sharing aspect of the Inuit community.”

Mitch: “The elders who are getting their compensation checks of $40,000 are preyed upon by their own families. There’s pressure to share it all. The old ways of sharing don’t always translate well into the 21st century.”

John: “And no one is paying attention to population growth. There are 50 to 60 live births per year here. In ten years there will be another 600 people in Igloolik. It’s already too crowded. No one can provide wild food for their families when everyone is putting pressure on the same resource.”

Sonia: “There’s some work being done on the drug and alcohol problem. In Clyde River they’re teaching hip-hop. You have to be drug and alcohol free to come to the class. No more drum dancing, I guess.”

Mitch pushes back from the table and gazes out the window. He looks sad and drawn. “I won’t miss town, but I’ll miss being out on the land. Last spring I saw a Thule site with a whalebone arch on Devon Island. It was the most beautiful house site in the world.”

We move into the small living room, its bookshelves lined with tomes about the Arctic. I thumb through a book of old photographs of igloos. John says, “The hunters still build igloos when they’re out, but kids kick out the walls of them if they are built too close to town—just to be mischievous.”

Sonia: “Did I tell you about book burning?” I shake my head. “The Pentecostal Church that arrived here in the 1980s is having another book burning soon. They burn videos, shamans’ drums, porn, and my meditation manuals. The last time, they said the smoke from burning books took on the form of
Satanisti
—Satan.

Mitch: “A deaf mute in town robbed a grave and put the corpse on a widow’s doorstep.

John: “There are only two interesting things about love affairs: How they begin and how they end.”

Mitch: “Like the one I had with a polar bear I’d caught. I tranquilized it and was tagging it, when it rolled over on top of me. I couldn’t get out from under it. Maybe I should have stayed there.”

Later in the evening we discuss the famous adaptability of the Inuit. “It is predicated on the traditional hunting life,” John says. “When the bowhead whale was hunted to extinction here, people moved to other areas to access other kinds of animals. It’s absurd to think that the resources right here, a day’s snowmobile ride from town, can support an expanding community. And yet the ethical question arises: Do we leave people alone to live their ice age lives? Or do we make generous offers to provide for the welfare of all Canadian citizens but insist on a centralized delivery system, which, in turn, annihilates the culture?”

Sonia: “For every life saved from TB, how many suicides, stabbings, alcohol- and snowmobile-related deaths are there?

John: “As our mutual friend, the anthropologist Hugh Brody, says, it’s not a matter of choosing between the traditional as opposed to the modern, but the right of a free indigenous people to choose the components of their lives.”

IT’S LATE AND WE’RE STILL TALKING. Improbably, Carolyn’s potted hibiscus has sent out another pink blossom as if in anticipation of spring. In a few weeks the first sun will appear. When people lived out in their camps year-round, she tells me, they celebrated the first day of the sun by blowing out the blubber lamps and relighting them. If the sun returned before the first new moon of the year, spring and summer would be warm; if it came after, it would be cool.

John says that in some Arctic encampments the sun was greeted atop igloos with a barking shout of joy, and people claimed that afterward, they could hear the sun’s hiss as it quickly set again.

After dinner I walk Mitch and Sonia back to their shared house. Bands of teenagers roam the streets. Three boys hit hockey pucks back and forth on the icy streets. A young kid on a snowmobile jumps over a hummock of ice, catching air and slamming down so hard that a piece of metal flies off. He continues on, laughing.

An RCMP truck is parked at the medical clinic. “That means something bad has happened,” Mitch says. Inside his house we make tea and talk until two in the morning. I walk home alone. A few groups of teenagers are standing around idly. The RCMP truck hasn’t moved; the clinic is ablaze with light.

I can’t sleep. The windowless room pushes in on me. I’ve been feeling ill and doze off but wake suddenly, gulping for air. Lucien Ukaliannuk had said, “Peculiar things happen when someone is going to pass on. As people, we make our own future. Very much so.”

I’m not sure how to make sense of what I’ve seen here. There are stories of diminishment all over the Arctic-—not just here. This is the somber tragedy of the subdued, bewildered, canny, fate-befallen Inuit people, their dazzling genius draining away with the melting ice. They have in their cultural baggage all the skills to survive, but time is not in anyone’s favor these days. In Igloolik and other Arctic villages, the elders who remember life before moving to town and can teach the young ones about it are dying. Youth abounds, but their threads to the past have been cut by the sharp edge of the modern world.

MORNING IS TWILIGHT. Something has happened and I don’t know what. I come up the stairs from the basement to a room stiff with grief. Outside the sky is violet, inside nothing looks human. John’s and Carolyn’s faces are shells. They are doing things: packing up blankets and food,
pajuktuijuq,
food gifts that will be sent to another’s household.

The room seems dark, though it isn’t. The human world of passion and communication has been erased. I think of my dreamed-of eye that began this chapter, roaming the room, asking to see its own death. John and Carolyn move like shadows. It is a room where too much has been seen. Earlier it was cluttered with the paraphernalia of active lives, with the circumpolar moon shining in. Now it feels like a place that can no longer hold light.

“What happened?” I ask.

John looks at me. “Leah Otak’s brother was stabbed to death by his girlfriend last night. He was the last one in the family who provided food for Leah and the adopted children she is raising. That brother was the favorite child. Now she has lost her mother, both brothers, and a niece who was killed in Hall Beach.”