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Where had all the people gone? What had become of them?

I turned to Ohoto, but he was not his usual helpful self. He would tell me nothing except to mutter a few words about ”the great dying.” And he was very anxious to be gone from this place of his ancestors. When I started scratching around inside one of the circles, he abruptly abandoned me and trotted off toward our own camp, paying no attention to my attempts to persuade him to return.

Annoyed, I continued on alone around the shore of the bay past a series of paired stone pillars that had once supported kayaks and came upon an even more extensive settlement site of more than two dozen tent rings, some as much as twenty-four feet in diameter. The tents raised over them must have been the size of small houses.

This camp was protected on the landward northern side by massive granite outcrops frost-fractured into a chaos of angular fragments and studded with odd-looking
protuberances. When I climbed up to investigate these I found they were rock-built graves. Although originally roofed with flat stones, many had been opened by wild weather and wild animals. Human skulls gaped up at me from the mossy depths of some.

Unnerved by so many dead (I counted thirty-one clearly recognizable graves among many more reduced to mere piles of rocky rubble), I returned to our outpost, but found little comfort there. Andy had just returned from a long trek across the plains to the north and gloomily reported having seen neither caribou nor recent signs of any. Ohoto was in a despondent mood from which he emerged only long enough to assure me he would not go near any more old encampments of his people. Tegpa alone seemed cheerful, and it was in his company that I continued my attempt to discover what I could about the empty camps – and the full graves.

Although examining the graves was an unsettling and unsavoury business, I hoped the tools, weapons, and ornaments placed in them for the use of their occupants in the afterlife might be revealing of how these people had lived.

One thing was evident: they had not suffered from any shortage of material goods. Many well-made hunting and household artefacts of flint, soapstone, bone, and wood, together with trade goods including guns, iron snow-knives, steel hatchets and knives, and copper cooking pots accompanied most of the dead.

The majority appeared to have perished during one relatively brief period. The first to go had been buried in well-constructed graves farthest from the camp and provided with ample grave goods. Later victims had been interred ever closer to the tent circles, in increasingly makeshift graves,
and with fewer grave goods. The last burials hardly deserved the name. One that I literally stumbled across was no more than a jumble of human bones (of an adult and a child) scattered
within
one of the tent rings, suggesting that no one from this tent had survived to bury them.

Starvation could hardly have been the killer since the many stone-built meat caches sealed with heavy rocks standing in and around the camp were full of animal bones, suggesting that the meat which had once clothed them had gone uneaten except by worms.

Neither was there any indication of assault by other human beings. The bones of the dead were not broken or cut, nor had the graves been pillaged. Furthermore, kayaks and dog sleds (among the most precious possessions of the deer people) had not been taken. I found the decayed remnants of at least seven kayaks crumpled between stone pillars that had once raised them out of harm’s way.

The evidence was unequivocal – many people had once lived around the shore of Kinetua Bay.

Now there were none.

In the mid-eighteenth century, when Europeans first began exploiting the central Canadian Arctic, the Barren Lands were home to inland-dwelling Inuit who had very little knowledge of or congress with the sea and with Inuit whose way of life was dependent on sea mammals. The inland people relied almost exclusively on caribou.

These people bore a number of tribal names but shared a common way of life vigorously and successfully maintained until 1867, when Father Gasté, a Roman Catholic priest of the Oblate order, set out by dog sled from a mission
at Reindeer Lake to proselytize ”some pagan savages” whose existence in the Barren Lands to the northward he had heard about from some of his mission Indians.

Gasté persuaded some of the latter to guide him to the head waters of the Kazan River. There they encountered a group of ”Esquimaux living more than three hundred miles from the sea where is the natural home of this people.” Although the ”Esquimaux” were friendly and hospitable, Gasté was quite unable to interest them in Christianity. Defeated, he retreated back into the forests, happy to have escaped from the ”Barren Lands, that dreadful wilderness.”

Although he himself never again ventured to the Kazan, Gasté’s visit resulted in a trade link being established between the inland Inuit and the outer world. A few of the most enterprising Ihalmiut began daring the two-hundred-mile winter journey south through mostly Indian territory to trade white fox furs with the mission or at a Hudson’s Bay Company post of Reindeer Lake.

Contact had been established; nevertheless, the world of the Ihalmiut remained essentially unaltered. Only a few Ihalmiut of each generation undertook the long and arduous journey south and, until just before the turn of the nineteenth century, no white strangers followed Gasté north.

Then, in 1894, Joseph Tyrrell and his Iroquois canoe-man came paddling down the Kazan.

Tyrrell was astonished to find twenty-three populous villages (he called them ”camps”) on the river’s upper reaches. In his official reports he estimated the big, conical skin tents in these camps were then home to five or six hundred Eskimos. However, shortly before his death in 1949 he told me he believed that at the time he came among them the Eskimos
of the Dubawnt and Kazan systems together may have numbered
as many as two thousand
men, women, and children.

Confirmation of that estimate exists in the reports of another Oblate missionary, Father Turquetil, who between 1901 and 1906 ventured into the Barren Lands from the west coast of Hudson Bay and made brief contact with the Ihalmiut. Turquetil estimated that ”850 souls” then lived along the Kazan and that the inland Eskimos of Keewatin numbered between one and two thousand.

In their heyday these people of the deer may have constituted the most numerous and cohesive Inuit group anywhere on earth. Unlike their coastal-dwelling relatives they were
not
nomads but a people of relatively settled residence, mostly at or near major caribou routes and crossing places where huge herds of
tuktu
regularly
came to them
.

As wealth was measured in Inuit society, the inland dwellers were rich and, for the most part, blessed with all they required in the way of food, clothing, and shelter. Fleet kayaks and sturdy dog sleds enabled them to travel swiftly almost anywhere they chose, at any season. The summers of the Long Day were times of leisure and abundance. The winters, far from being times of dread and hardship, provided opportunities for feasting, story-telling, dancing, singing, and love-making.

Above all, they possessed an abundance of that most precious of commodities – time itself. They had ample time to remember their past, to celebrate who and what they were, to dream, to work with words and thoughts, and to play.

Despite living in what
we
might consider extreme discomfort – even bitter adversity –
they
appear to have been well content.

Such was the world of the Ihalmiut in the second decade of the twentieth century, when the Great Dying came upon them.

Death burst out of an Ihalmio returning from a trading trip to Reindeer Lake and leapt from camp to camp along the Kazan with appalling swiftness, emptying the topays and filling many graves. By the time the caribou returned that spring much of the Ihalmiut country had been virtually denuded of human kind.

Word of what had happened was slow to reach the outside world. Not until two years later did Father Turquetil, in charge of a mission at Chesterfield Inlet, learn that a burning and fatal fever (which he thought might have been influenza) had decimated the inland people. He estimated that ”between five and six hundred Esquimaux of the interior perished in this great dying.”

Some of the Ihalmiut survivors sought sanctuary where the Kazan debouches out of Ennadai. But the Kazan River – Inuit Ku, the River of Men – was now a river of the dead.

The survivors of the Great Dying knew only brief respite. By the turn of the twentieth century white fox pelts had become the white gold of the north and when it was discovered that the so-called Barren Lands were inhabited by multitudes of white foxes a tide of
kablunait
trappers flooded in. By 1920 some had reached Ennadai and the Kazan.

These interlopers were servants of commercial behemoths that battened on fur. Now the Ihalmiut became serfs to the servants. They found themselves impelled, if not compelled, to spend the bulk of their time and energy killing inedible little animals which they then exchanged for
high-powered rifles and other marvels that vastly increased their ability to kill caribou.

The white trappers penetrating the Barren Lands typically ran traplines of enormous length (a hundred miles was not exceptional), servicing them with teams of up to fifteen huskies. One such team could consume an entire caribou carcass every day or two. In addition, the bait used for trapping foxes, wolves, and other fur bearers was almost always caribou.
And
the trappers fed themselves and their dependants on caribou. During the peak period of the white fox bonanza many Barren Land and taiga trappers routinely slaughtered four or five hundred caribou a year: a profligate butchery of large mammals on a scale not seen upon this continent since the virtual extinction of the prairie bison.

Little wonder that the river of life which had sustained the peoples of taiga and tundra since time immemorial began drying up.

The harried deer abandoned ancestral migration routes and their behaviour became so erratic it was difficult to know where, and when, the remnant herds might be encountered. During the autumn of 1924, only a scattered few caribou came within reach of the remaining Ihalmiut. And that winter one outpost trader recorded the deaths from starvation of fifty of ”his” Inuit. As many as two hundred others are thought to have perished along the Kazan and Thelon rivers that same hungry winter.

The diminution of the caribou and the disruption of their age-old migration patterns struck a deadly blow at indigenous human life both in the northern forests and on the Barren Lands. The Inuit (and Chipewyans) became more and more dependent on the fur trade for survival. Then, in
the late 1920s, the already beleaguered world of the Ihalmiut was invaded by a new and singularly rapacious wave of white trappers.

The new intruders seldom employed steel traps, which were expensive, heavy to transport, and cumbersome to use. They preferred poison. Every autumn they would slaughter caribou over as large an area as possible, and later seed the far-flung carcasses with strychnine or arsenic.

Some white trappers preyed even more directly on the Inuit by engrossing native traplines, robbing native meat caches, and, in general, taking whatever they pleased, including women.

One such white trapper entered the camp of Igluardjuak (one of Ohoto’s uncles) and at gun point took a dog team, a sled, and Igluardjuak’s wife. Doubtless he believed the ”huskies” would not dare retaliate. Next day Igluardjuak borrowed a team and drove off into the winter darkness. He returned several days later with his wife, the stolen team, and the sled. He never spoke of what he had done during his absence but when spring came the bloated body of the white trapper was found bobbing among the melting ice pans on Ennadai Lake.

Roaming at will over the Barrens, white trappers took most of the available fur, leaving little to sustain the people of the deer who had now become trappers themselves. The caribou slaughter continued unabated. During the decade following the First World War the Inuit population of the entire Canadian Barren Lands fell well below four hundred, of whom perhaps a hundred and fifty were Ihalmiut.

When in 1929 the Great Depression overwhelmed most of the Western world, white fox pelts became virtually
worthless. Most free traders decamped, as did the majority of white trappers. Many outposts, even of such old established trading firms as the Hudson’s Bay Company, were abandoned.

The Ihalmiut became people of the dole. And it proved woefully insufficient to hold body and soul together.

Although the remaining Ihalmiut now retained unchallenged possession of their country, its nature had been fatally changed. The seemingly infinite multitudes of caribou had been savagely diminished. The silken fur of the white fox could no longer provide a substitute. Famine and disease became almost permanent residents in the few remaining Ihalmiut camps.

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Ihalmiut numbered just 139 men, women, and children.
^*
During the ensuing five years, even these few disappeared from the peripheral vision of the outside world. If anyone in authority gave the Ihalmiut a thought, it was to assume they had become ”non-existent.”

The assumption was not far from the reality. During the autumn and winter of 1943, forty-four Ihalmiut starved to death. During the summer of 1946, the survivors were smitten by what may have been diphtheria and fourteen children and young adults died. That winter, twelve more perished of starvation.

By the time Andy and I came to Kinetua Bay, only forty-seven Ihalmiut still survived in all the wide reaches of a land that had once been vividly alive with men and deer.