In the Empire of Ice (6 page)

He talks about the importance of remembering the covenant between humans and animals, of the necessity for awareness and respect. One day he shot a bear that wouldn’t die. “It didn’t even get wounded,” he said. “Then it turned around and looked at me and I saw a black mark on its rump. My dad told me never to shoot a bear with such a mark. I was careless. I felt so bad. That was another kind of bear, you know, the kind that has come to live among us, the kind that can’t be killed at all.”

In the old days animate beings had a dual existence. In some places, like Nelson Island, animals were thought to be the descendants of an all-encompassing ancestor in whom there was no boundary between human and animal. The one was incomplete without the other. They belonged to the same circle, mouth to tail, tail to mouth. That is why one could take the appearance of the other. The passageway between them was open. The way was cleared. Dances and feasts were common then. Masked dances were offerings of prayer for times when food was scarce. The ceremonial masks, made by the shaman, were used for healing and gaining awareness. Such efforts were equated with peeling back the skin of an animal to reveal the
inua,
the soul of the fused human-animal being. Now the Earth is thick—that is, noisy, congested, and secular. There seem to be plenty of boundaries, but no trans-species passages.

When Ray leaves, Joe wanders around the rooms of the community center like a caged lion. “We’re like sitting ducks,” he says. The whiteout intensifies. He puts his nose against glass: “Even if we could see, there’s probably not much to see. The old ways are gone.”

Joe stirs water into a packet of freeze-dried soup. Later, he starts remembering. He remembers his father’s skin boat, his umiaq, made of two and a half split walrus hides. The skins lasted two years, he tells me, three at the most, and the old ones were recycled and used to patch the holes.

He remembers knives made of carved ivory being thrust into a ringed seal’s heart. He remembers eating fresh walrus breast: part meat, part milk. He remembers dances that lasted a week or a month, before the idea of schedules was imposed from the outside. He remembers a ghost in the family’s shed down five snow steps from the house where the skins and hunting gear were kept. The ghost was a neighbor lady who sat in the corner chewing tobacco and sewing.

He remembers the Wales man who fell in love with a woman up the coast from Wales at Cape Espenberg, who drove his dogsled out onto the moving ice in the spring—he knew which way it would drift—and used it as a way to visit his girlfriend.

He remembers a person on Little Diomede Island who became a walrus. When that walrus-person returned to live among humans, he found he could no longer stand their smell, so he lived alone at the edge of the village. “Maybe I feel a little bit like him now,” Joe says. “Not repulsed, but apart from everyone here.”

Early stories of life along the Bering Strait shaped the mind, as much as humans shaped the story. A man named Apakak from Nunatak River said: “
Tulungersaq,
Raven, formed all life in the world. He began in the shape of a man and groped around in blindness. He was squatting in darkness when he discovered himself. Where he was he did not know, nor did he know how he had come to be there. But he breathed and had life. Darkness was all around him and he could see nothing. He felt with his hands. The world was clay, everything around him was dead clay. He passed his fingers over himself, and felt his face, nose, eyes, mouth. He was alive.”

The multi is empty and the lights are out. Snow light flickers, a kind of polar cinema. Joe says Apakak’s origin story is also a description of an artist at work. “We all live in darkness; we all made things here in Wales, we are all blind most of the time. Some things we made were for survival and some for sheer delight. One was not deemed better than the other.”

It comes like a flood, Joe’s remembering. He remembers the bowhead whale and bearded-seal hunts in the spring and fall, hunts that were central to life from Wales to Point Hope. As soon as breakup occurred in April or May, a “road” was cut though pressure ridges and the umiat were dragged out to the open leads beyond the ice edge. Bearded seal, ugruk, were especially abundant. The women processed the blubber and meat and preserved them in seal-intestine bags for the winter.

To be hunted and to hunt, to eat, share food, to thrive and be abundant, to shake the mind with mask dances and animal stories represented a continual, trans-species cycle of necessity, generosity, and gratitude. Once broken, the essential bonds of every Inuit nation fell apart. Kirk Oviok from Point Hope said: “The whales have ears and are more like people. The first batch of whales seen would show up to check which ones in the whaling crew would be more hospitable to be caught. Then the whales would come back to their pack and tell them about the situation, stating, ‘We have someone available for us,’” as if to say they were looking for a hunter to take them, willing to give themselves as gifts to the people.

Finally, this extraordinary story told to Joe by his father: “When the whaling people came to Wales, they were bartering with us. The captain was kind of pompous and had a new flintlock pistol that he was showing to the people. They had never seen a gun. He guessed we were warlike, and he was right. We didn’t want outsiders to come and tell us how to live.

“The captain looked at the Inuks who were greeting him and picked out one guy, brought him up on deck, and said, ‘We come from a place with lots of power. See that seagull up there?’ He pointed the pistol at the bird and shot, and the seagull fell out of the sky.

“The Inuk watched but didn’t say a word. Instead, he took out his knife and started sawing around his own neck. He pulled his hair up and cut off his own head. Holding it in his hand, he climbed down the rope ladder, dipped the stem of his neck into the sea, climbed back up, lifted his head onto his neck root, rubbed around on his neck with his hand, and healed the wound. Then he said, ‘OK. I saw what you can do. Now you’ve seen what we can do,’ and walked away.”

WHEN THE WIND CALMS, Joe and I walk. “My name, Senungetuk, is really spelled Sinanituq. It means ‘a person who likes to follow the shore.’ My Inupiat name is
Inusunaaq
—‘one who would like to live longest.’ Maybe you could say that I am a long-lived shore-walker.”

Across the half frozen lagoon, over the wooden bridge and the Village River that divides the settlement in half, we walk toward the Old Lady of the Mountain in the distance. Most of the buildings are new: a high school, a store, and houses built so close to the water that they are now exposed to the ravages of erosion. Joe is pacing in front of three old houses. They are boarded up and splintered by cold and wind. He’s trying to remember which one was his but is having difficulty.

A man from St. Lawrence Island described his house: “Summertime we live in just the frame covered with walrus skin. Then, when cold weather come, move into what you call ‘in-the-ground house.’ Three sides place for sleep and one above, just something like a shelf. Then what you call an entrance, way to go in, kind of a narrow hole toward the sea, and build an extra frame of wood and cover on top, cover with sod. Leave just a little hole on the corner for come out, go in. Then we stay there until the month of, sometime January, February. Come out after that.”

When Joe was born in the 1940s, his family no longer lived in a sod house but in what they called a lumber house. “There were five of us children and two adults living in a house with a single main room 10 by 14 plus two storage rooms tacked on in the front. Lumber was scavenged from the beach. There was a woodstove and a shelf or two for drying mittens and mukluks. The bunk bed where my sister, brothers, and I slept was four feet wide and five feet long. One bed accommodated all five children: three above and two below.”

In Wales there were four, sometimes five winter
qasiit
(the plural of qasig)—dance houses. The entry, a long, low passageway, was paved with whale vertebrae, the main room made with whale-rib rafters and roofed with cakes of ice. The room was dark. Six or seven drummers sat on one side beside huge stacks of whale, walrus, and bearded-seal meat, and buckets full of snowballs used to cool children’s faces and to revitalize dried-out drum skins. An elder tended a large seal-oil lamp. The heat was oppressive. Youngsters wore no clothes. Halfway through the six-hour-long ceremony, gifts of seal gut, carved ivory, mukluks, mittens, and trade items were given out. Puppets carved from driftwood provided shadow play. Sometimes a shaman drummed while a masked whaling crew danced, reenacting the hunt. Stickpaths, shaman’s apprentices, were called on for help. A man might be speared, as if he were the whale, and blood was seen pouring from his back, but once the masks were removed, no blood was visible.

Joe remembers only a single qasig, perhaps the last one to exist here, made of driftwood, walled with sod and lined with sealskin and caribou or reindeer hides. As in all the houses, a seal-gut or walrus-gut window let in light and could be removed to let smoke out when a fire was built inside or to let in fresh air. In the summer, people came and went through that top hole.

Much of the village activity occurred in the dance room. On a winter day like this, when the snow was blowing hard and it was impossible to hunt, stories were told and the shaman was busy healing the sick and appeasing Sedna—also called Nerrivik, the goddess of the sea—if she was angry and withholding marine mammals. The shaman traveled through mountains and under the ice to the bottom of the sea to entreat the powerful spirits there to release animals to the hunters and to ask for good ice and good weather.

In earlier years the qasig was the domain of men. No women entered except to bring food during dances. Later, the ceremonial house doubled as a guest and community room where walrus hides were split and sewn, ceremonial masks were made, walrus ivory was carved, and the Bear Dance was held. “Enormous quantities of meat were cooked and taken to the qasig on large wooden platters,” Charlie Johnson, an Inuit polar bear biologist from Nome, wrote. “The hunter sat in the middle of the room with the bear’s head before him, as people feasted. An improvised song was sung about his courage and the bear’s ferocity. The balloon of a seal’s bladder was burst to mark the hunter’s turn to dance. He leapt and shouted as if in a struggle with the bear. His wife danced with him. When she became tired, his mother took his wife’s place, then an aunt, until everyone wore out. Then the bear’s skull was thrown into the sea.”

Joe remembered celebrations that lasted a week. “Time was bigger then,” he said. Time was elastic, measured by migrations and seasons, light and dark, dancing and rest, hunger and satiation. Before they lived by the white man’s clock, inserted into the culture by missionaries to remind people to come to church on Sunday, the minute and hour hand didn’t exist. No calendars hung on the kitchen wall. Time was told seasonally, by snow and sun and the arrival and disappearance of bowhead whales.

Joe and I are still walking. The wind begins to howl as Joe scrutinizes the tiny, caved-in houses. He looks puzzled. “I don’t know which one was mine,” he says solemnly. “Did I ever really live here?” he asks. “This is the dilemma of modern man facing backwards. Can we go back? Where is forward?”

A Bering Air plane lands. It’s possible to order a pizza in Nome and have it delivered in Wales when the plane makes its daily scheduled run. Yet there’s almost no food on the shelves of the general store. When I ask why, Joe shrugs. “I guess the people running it aren’t doing a very good job. Didn’t pay their bills. Now the wholesalers won’t deliver food.”

Joe sees the scarcity of store-bought food as part of the general poverty that infects the villages of the Seward Peninsula. “Despite the wealth brought in by the oil companies, this village is below poverty level,” he says. “No insulation in the houses, no food in the stores, and no flush toilets. We still use honey buckets like always.” Material wealth is a kind of poverty. “We don’t need white man’s crap,” Joe says. “So it’s important to redefine poverty. For example: It’s true that in the old days, before white men arrived, we had no doctors and not much in the way of formal education, but we were rich in food and imagination, and something else we don’t see much of, which is gratitude.”

The people of Wales invented and made everything they needed, Joe tells me. They made kayaks, umiat, harpoons, bows and arrows, soapstone stoves for heat and light; used skins for clothing and shelter; had dogs to help transport their things from camp to camp; and along the way told stories, sang songs, and made carvings. “We hunted and were hunted by weather and spirits and polar bears. Accidents occurred and death was frequent. But we expected nothing less. We weren’t looking for salvation. We just lived.”

Late in the afternoon a young woman, Metrona, comes to visit Joe. Inuit people still have famine in their stomachs. They have memories and stories like the one from Barrow about the girl and her brother who were eaten by wolves and subsequently became caribou. “We were warriors and we were cannibals,” Joe reminds us, smiling.

Metrona: “You could say that we Inuit are always looking for something to eat. You might see a pretty hillside: We see it as a place to look for berries.”

In her 30s, she’s bright and self-possessed and not one to pass up an opportunity to make a little money. She has come to sell us her crocheted hot pads, mittens, and caps.

“Not many people live here,” she says, her eyes sparkling, “but it’s home. I can’t wait for summertime. We pick a lot of greens. When they’re real young, wild potatoes, onions.
Shusha
greens,
eviks,
sour docks,
putnuqs, koonaliks, evalunks,
and many more. Those are just the ones that grow here. There are others on Little Diomede. We preserve them in seal oil in big glass jars. They stay good all winter. We also pick a lot of berries, cranberries, blackberries, blueberries, and salmonberries, and make jam. We pick them up on the mountain and go over to the other side. But last winter, the weather was strange. It rained a lot and froze some, and the flowers blew away and the leaves froze, so we didn’t get many.”