Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past (5 page)

Lastly, the speaker will tell the people to turn their faces to the sky-world where the Creator resides. “Let us put together our kindest and most loving words,” he will say, “and throw them skyward to give Him our thanks for everything He has provided for us on this earth.

“E'tho niyohtónhak nonkwa'nikon:ra,” he will add. “Nyeah!” the men will respond.

Only when this sometimes lengthy ritual is finished can a meeting, or anything else, be started. And at the end of the meeting, before everyone goes home, a man will stand up and once again recite the verses of the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen; the speaker reciting the reasons for being grateful and urging everyone to come to one mind, the men chorusing agreement.

The Thanksgiving Address, which constitutes the first words and the last words spoken at all of our gatherings, is a beautiful and impressive
reminder of the abiding and loving relationship we are to have with one another and with all the works of Creation, and it reminds us that our relationship with the earth and our obligations to the Creator are more important than the day-to-day affairs of human beings.

“Nyeah!”

IMAGE CREDIT: CANADIAN MUSEUM OF CIVILIZATION

I
ASSUMED, IN SETTING OUT
to write this story, that I would require some psychological time travel. I should have known better. One forces nothing upon the Arctic, it seems—not even in fiction.

It was an understandable error. After all, from 800 to 1200 AD, the world was warmer, drawing the dogsledding progenitors of Inuit (“Thule”) culture out of Alaska, overlapping the ancient habitations of their now-extinct cousins, the Tunit (“Dorset”). This story explores a possible meeting between these peoples, and one other, along Baffin Island's eastern edge.

When I step out in early summer, however, I still step onto the same land. I walk in the same hills that newly arrived Inuit walked in. I see the same orange lichens, the same spectacular purple of flowers in bloom, the same fat black spiders racing through the moss. The persistence of this land forbids true time travel. Instead, I can only drift, ghostlike, between the worlds of then and now, whose differences lie far more in people than in the land itself. For if the Arctic regarded itself, it would recognize no change, and the peoples that have settled or passed over time would be no more noteworthy than the spiders in the moss.

This leaves only a familiar challenge, that of dealing with culture. You see, I'm already a bit of a time traveller, old enough to remember a crazy shaman who used to get stuck in trances (needing my dad to snap her out of it) and young enough to remain sore about my mother smashing my Rolling Stones records. I've never had trouble reconciling “then” and “now,” so I've been happy to explain my culture—whether through fiction or exposition—to others.

Which is exactly why I'm
avoiding
doing so in this story.

Some of the characters in this tale are bound to be doing and believing things that are puzzling to non-Inuit readers. Good. We live in a time when critical thinking is not “hip,” when we demand a thorough explanation of everything presented to us, preferably in easy-to-read, brochure form. While this facilitates speed, it is also the cognitive equivalent of living on marshmallows.

I could go into great, galloping detail on how Inuit hold individual freedom to be sacred, about how open displays of violence are forbidden, or how confrontation is traditionally avoided. I could include an “inside” look at shamanism, making it accessible. But is this truly charitable? No, my feeling is that if the reader wants to understand a people, he or she has to live with those people for a while. And a story is the ultimate magic by which this may occur. Let the reader puzzle out those alien behaviours, as children might among adults. Let the reader feel the uncertainty of living in a little-understood land, as newly arrived Inuit might. Let the reader not feel comfortable with unseen powers seething in the very air, but instead feel the trepidation, uncertainty, and outright horror that early peoples knew.

Welcome to the land before it was named.

Skraeling

Kannujaq stood atop a ridge, while ravens wheeled and cursed from violet slopes.

He was soaked with sweat, but a chill nevertheless ran through him. It was unusually cold for spring, true, but no cold could so disquiet him. It was what lay among the shallow, winding valleys. Upon the hills.

All around him were
inuksuit
—structures of rock, in the image of men. Kannujaq recalled his grandfathers tales of how these were made by the Tunit, the elusive people who had occupied the land long before Kannujaq's people arrived. This was the way in which the Tunit hunted. Every year, the caribou would take paths that avoided the
inuksuit
. And every year, the Tunit herded them into kill zones. Kannujaq's grandfather had seen one such site: there the Tunit had left piles of bones, piles that could have accumulated only after generations.

Who would live like this?
Kannujaq thought.

Being unmarried, Kannujaq travelled alone. He had almost become complacent over this last winter, used to being in one place. It had been a sweet, rich autumn of good fishing, better seal hunting. He had lived under a shelter of interlocking whale ribs, found all over the rocky shores
of this area. There he had practised patience while living alongside the family of his hunting partner. Elders had spent all season telling him about the much harsher winters in the times of their forefathers. He had managed to escape around the time the ravens, those first nest builders of spring, began their nuptial dances in the sky. It had been a long winter.

(But, oh, how he and the others had brought in
tuugaaliit
, those small, dark whales with the spiralled tusks!)

For it was whales that drew Kannujaq, like everyone else, to this place, and ever eastward, deeper into the unknown lands, just as whales and walrus had lured his father, and his father before him. Kannujaq's father had not been much of a storyteller, but his grandfather had been an endless source of tales, most often of the lands their family and others had passed through, of how there probably was land and islands and hunting forever ahead.

Kannujaq could never know that his grandfather was wrong. What lay east of them was mostly a vast ocean. On its opposite side, there stood the Byzantine Empire at its strongest, the envy of lands Kannujaq would never know, places steeped in centuries of iron and bloodshed.

Kannujaq's grandfather also told of the trees back west, supposedly thicker and higher as one moved southward. Among these lived the Iqqiliit, tall and painted and fearsome. The old man could never have imagined that, even as he spoke his words to young Kannujaq, a Mayan king stood atop a pyramid temple engineered with advanced mathematics, sacrificing his sacred blood to bring victory in war.

Kannujaq would never know that, even as he recalled his grandfather's tales, another man, named Alhazen, who had been studying lenses in a land called Egypt, was pondering his findings on the nature of rainbows. Alhazen's young religion, called Islam, was only now losing momentum after sweeping across a world that, strangely, subsisted almost entirely upon grains.

In fact, if Kannujaq had known even one hundredth of what was occurring while he was staring across the amber hills, he would have been immensely grateful for his relative isolation.

He was spared the knowledge, for example, that the great lust of many peoples was for a substance called gold, which had just brought African Ghana to its peak. He had no idea that the world could hold so many people who would demand such trivialities. In a place eventually known as China, commerce was flourishing under the nascent Sung Dynasty, ruling over sixty million souls. Its emperor was even now troubled by distant, distant relations of both Kannujaq and the Tunit—called Mongols.

Kannujaq might have been even more confused by the place called Europe. There, the empire of Charlemagne had finally fragmented, its western portion becoming young France. France had been having a difficult time, having had to placate a force of Scandinavians, called Norsemen, by handing over Normandy to them.

These Scandinavians were not only a problem for France. Over the last few generations, Danes had taken over more than half of an island called England.

If Kannujaq had known anything at all about these Scandinavians, he would have been as terrified of them as the Europeans were. A tribe of them had already founded Russia. The Nordic kingdoms of Denmark and Norway were vying for supremacy. Scandinavians had already discovered Iceland, and completely dominated the Irish coastline. An exile called Eric had recently used Iceland to hop all the way across the ocean, founding a colony in a place he liked to think of as “Greenland.”

Kannujaq would have been most startled to learn that these were the End Times. A Catholic church was telling all of its flock to expect judgment; for, by their calendar, it was 1000 AD.

And their world was in the grip of the Viking.

Kannujaq was regretting having taken this detour. It had led him away from the coast, and his dog team was having a rough time among the rocks.

He sighed and started back down to his sled as a low howl began to make its way over the wind. In a moment, it was joined by another, then
several more, until there was a mad cacophony rising and falling among the hills.

Not wolves
, he thought.
Tunit. Driving the caribou by imitating wolves
.

The Tunit were hunting here. He tried to suppress the creeping nausea that ran through him at their howls, comforting himself with the thought that the Tunit—while immensely strong—were supposedly cowards, running whenever they saw real people. They might resemble humans, albeit shorter, more squat, but they were little more than beasts.

Kannujaq decided not to bother them, slipping and sliding his way back down to where his dogs awaited.

Soon the sled was again making its tortuous way back toward the coast, rushing ahead on the occasional patch of snow, sticking, rushing ahead, sticking again.

Despite the tongues lolling from their heads with overexertion, Kannujaq began to notice that his dogs were growing excited, and it took him a moment to realize that this meant they were smelling a community ahead—a potential source of food. Kannujaq was fond of the idea as well.

The timing was perfect, for a storm was moving in and the light snowfall interfered with his distance vision. Fortunately, the days were growing long, so there was still enough light for Kannujaq to spot twisting lines of smoke in the distance, where the ground levelled out.

Kannujaq grinned as several figures came into sight. Camp dwellers. He began to urge his dogs forward, but paused. Something bothered him about this place.

Where are the dogs?
he wondered.