The Shaman's Knife (3 page)

As to single-parent families, she only said, “What's that, anyway?” I had to smile. Obviously the very phrase bugged her. She'd come from a nomadic time all across the Arctic when people moved together according to the seasons, sharing hardships, food, hunger, responsibility for children, and sometimes sex partners.

Anyway, as she told it, that night she had stayed home with the kids. When Annie came in tired and went to bed, my mother and the kids were playing cards, finishing one more game before bed. They'd been hard at it when this almighty ruckus started in the house next door, thumps and screams and voices sounding through the thin common wall to the next unit. Annie grumbled sleepily in her room upstairs but didn't wake up. As the uproar went on, Mother finally went next door to check, with the results we'd already heard. That, she said, was about all she knew about the matter.

The young man from Justice waited a minute to see if there was more, then shut off the tape.

When he left, Erika stayed, making occasional notes as she went to talk to the quiet and shy Inuit women who'd been watching and listening. I could see her getting names and taking pictures, for whatever she was going to do with this. Mother sat quietly, smoking her pipe, looking quite content while she and I chatted about matters of the moment, the impending springtime, her thoughts about whether she should go home to Holman or back to Sanirarsipaaq. I didn't advise her on that one way or another and after a few minutes other thoughts took over.

I knew I should report in person to headquarters here, Yellowknife being the administrative centre for the RCMP's huge G Division, covering detachments large and small, mostly small—a man or two—throughout the whole Northwest Territories. Then I should call Ottawa to see if they'd heard anything new on the case. I was rising from Mother's side when I caught, across the room, a look from Erika as she returned from a phone call she'd been called out to take.

“This might be nothing,” Erika said, “but we've got a young Inuk, Byron Anolak, graduate of Arctic College journalism, can't get a regular job but strings for us in Sanirarsipaaq.

“He just called. Of course, everybody's talking up there about who could have done it, and so on, but he said on the phone—said it in a low voice, actually, I had to get him to repeat it—that there's some talk that shamanism has something to do with the murders.”

I don't think I showed it, but I felt a jolt. There hadn't been a shamanistic-connected murder in my lifetime, that I'd ever heard about. Of course, the reference was to men and women who, as shamans, were the chief instruments of the fairly complicated set of tribal beliefs and legends that all our people once lived by. That was before Anglican and Roman Catholic missionaries spread through the Arctic building churches and teaching the Christian version of what life was all about. Harvesting souls, they saw it as. “Bringing in the sheaves . . .” I remembered the hymn.

But whatever the missionaries did, or thought they did . . . well, you can't wipe out ten or twenty or thirty centuries of beliefs, including shamanism, just by teaching a lot of people to sing “The Old Rugged Cross,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and the like. There were shamans around still. Their activity certainly didn't exist anymore on the old scale, but in most communities the elders kept in touch.

It was true that a lot of our people, even most of them, did go to church, or mass, for reasons that ranged from real Christian belief to just the idea that most of the missionaries did help people in various ways, and it was only polite to show gratitude. Going to church and listening to a priest or lay reader denounce booze (easily agreed with) or find fault over sex or whatever, pleased the missionaries, so why not?

Still shamans remained, more active in some communities than in others. One Anglican priest had told me on my last trip north that there was an upsurge of interest among the young—even a worrying rumor that, in some places, Satanism had been involved, imported from the south, a frightening perversion of what the old shamanism, mostly helpful, had meant to our people.

Defensively, to Erika: “But shamans—I knew some when I was a little kid, and not such a little kid, and still know a few now—are almost always trying to help somebody. Drive out sickness or madness, bring changes in weather, improve the hunting. Except in some of the old stories people tell I've never heard about shamanism being connected to killings, unless it was to help people who'd asked for help and were being threatened in some way.”

“What about Sanikiluaq back in the early forties? The famous Belcher Island murders? What was it, nine murdered? Or eleven?”

I sighed. Once I had dug out and read the transcript of the 1941 trial of the Belcher murders, as well as microfilm of stories written by a
Toronto Star
reporter, William Kinmond, who had flown in to cover the case. That terrible few weeks in the Belchers, an island group in the southern part of Hudson Bay now called Sanikiluaq, was a black blotch in the north's history, a terrible reminder of what a tiny sampling of a new (to them) religion can do to primitive people.

What happened was that a missionary had come in, holding revival meetings, thundering away about the second coming of Christ, the holy trinity, and so on. Then the missionary had left, never to return, the damage done. In the dark days of that winter one man, hallucinating, gone mad, whatever, had convinced himself that he was Jesus, back to save not only the sinners of the Belcher islands, but the world. Another had got on the bandwagon with the red-hot news that he was the Holy Spirit.

These and their few followers were steadily and sanely opposed by people who knew these claimants to such high estate were not holy spirits at all but ordinary humans who somehow had become full of shit. These opponents were methodically, madly, shot or beaten to death or both by the new deities and by their followers. One woman left her husband's bed (he was an unbeliever, later killed) in favor of the new Jesus's. She subsequently led other women and children out onto the ice, exhorting them in the name of the Lord to take off all their clothes, that they did not need clothes when going to meet their Maker. Some argued and turned back but others died, frozen, out on the ice.

“The Belcher murders had nothing to do with shamanism!” I said, raising my voice. I saw Mother turn her eye to me, puzzled at my tone. She could not have understood the words—in her time and for many years later there had been none of the boarding schools that took kids away from their families and insisted that we all learn English. “That was nutty Christianity! Or black Christianity!”

But abruptly I thought, there is at least one shaman that I've heard of in Sanirarsipaaq, a famous carver named Jonassie. Also, somebody had told me that almost all the Sanirarsipaaq carvings and drawings even these days had shamanistic themes; a much greater proportion than was found in the many other communities where Inuit art flourished. That didn't necessarily mean anything, but . . .

“How did your stringer link shamanism to what happened?”

“I don't know. I don't think he knows. I asked him. He just said some people around town were talking like that . . .”

Even the mention of shamanism having some evil intent had made me feel uneasy. I was usually easy with Erika. She quickly noticed the change and changed gears, saying hastily, “I just thought I'd tell you . . . As I said, maybe it means nothing.

“Anyway, mostly what I want is”—and she said it very simply—“to know more about your mother. Often when I interview elders they're shy, or the translator is shy, I have the feeling I don't get it all. I don't have that feeling with you and your mother. I'd just do anything for another few minutes with her!”

I laughed. She was like that sometimes, a whiz at overstatement. “
Anything?
What d'you have in mind?”

She flushed, then laughed. “You can go to hell! But I
would
buy you lunch.”

Another few minutes' delay in making my rounds wouldn't hurt. Our people are wonderful storytellers. Until we had a written language, telling stories was the way our culture survived. As a boy and young man I'd been in many a snow house redolently jammed with fur-clad bodies and ringing with laughter and sighs and groans as stories were told and centuries of the real and imagined unfolded, including accounts of shamanism. Now here at Franklin House in downtown Yellowknife, an alien city far from their roots, we were in a room of Inuit waiting in deep boredom and loneliness for life to begin again when they could go home to their relatives, children, open spaces, their real lives. Some talk about our people's past might help some feel that this too, their stay in Yellowknife, would pass. A lot of old Inuit women had stories. I felt love for this particular one. Every time my mother spoke about the past I knew a little more about both of us.

“Okay,” I said to Erika, and told my mother that Erika wanted to ask some questions, not about the murders, and we began.

Erika asked politely what life was like among my mother's people when she was a girl. I translated. Mother's level husky voice began.

In the earlier questioning, she had caught the rhythm of speaking, pausing, me picking it up and then pausing when it was her turn again. I didn't always translate verbatim . . .

“When my mother was a child, she says, she used to travel with her family and friends or relatives on the ice or land or water, depending on the season, along the coast of the Beaufort Sea and Amundsen Gulf and sometimes inland, always pursuing food. When the children were hungry they cried, so if there wasn't enough food for everyone, adults went without, because when they were hungry they did not cry. When there was lots of food they ate when they felt like it, not at any set time. When she became older and had a man, in the summer she would rise each morning and prepare what food they had, in good times any kind of meat, whale, seal, caribou, musk-ox, Arctic hare, ptarmigan; in bad times little or nothing until a hunter was successful. Then she would do other jobs left to women in a camp, cleaning seal and caribou and other skins to sell or sew into winter clothing that could be used or sold, making mukluks (boots), fetching water in summer or melting snow in winter to make tea.

“In the fall when the cold weather came they would freeze caribou, seal, sometimes bear and other meat by cutting it in strips and laying it on top of the tent or igloo. If there was tea they would have it to drink, but if they had run out of tea the women would make tea out of berries. In those days almost all the time was spent hunting or traveling to find places where there was food to hunt.”

“Ask her more about what the hunting was like,” Erika said.

“When she was a young girl, before almost all hunters had guns and ammunition from trading furs at Hudson Bay company posts, the most dangerous hunt was for the polar bear, using spears and knives . . .”

I interrupted myself to say to my mother in Inuktituk, “Most dangerous? What about the barrenground grizzly?”

That is the fiercest Arctic animal of all, now dwindling in numbers, endangered. This question, which I then translated, was entirely for Erika. I knew the answer.

“No hunt!” my mother burst out. “Run!”

In the ensuing laughter, mother went on about polar bears, squinting her single eye not only at Erika and me but at others around the room who had stopped everything to listen.

“If the hunters had no guns or ammunition, the dogs would get the bear stopped by circling him. When he swatted at the dogs on one side, others would dash in and out nipping and biting, so he was always whirling, but for a hunting party with no guns the hard part was getting close enough to stab the bear. They would try various means. Such as, tie a knife or spear to a pole and try to stab the bear on one of its front feet with that or a long-handled spear. If the bear was stabbed on a front foot, it would be unbalanced and not as good at swatting with the other foot.”

She thought for a minute and then continued.

“Or a hunter might dive under the bear and stab it from below . . .”

I couldn't quite imagine anybody being that brave, or foolhardy, but who was I to say? Anyway, my mother had stopped, shaking her head as if she did not blame anyone for not believing that, and after a minute she went on, changing the subject.

“A lot of time was spent having babies and looking after them,” I translated. “She gave birth to fourteen, of which two died . . .”

At this point my mother jerked her head toward me, smiling as she spoke. I smiled back. Erika asked, “What's that about?”

I said, “She said that I was one who didn't die.”

“Ask her more about giving birth out there in the tent or igloo or wherever. It must have been pretty, ah . . .” I think she was going to say primitive.

I asked, but knew something about the answer. I'd been at birthings a few times out on the trail, although none were hers. I had been her last child, born when she was forty-five.

“She says she always preferred to give birth alone except for a woman or two who could help,” I began rather pedantically, but while I spoke my mother, not pedantic at all, moved slowly and painfully out of her chair and kneeled on the floor, legs spread wide apart, with her hands braced against her chair, looking at me expectantly.

“She is showing you the most comfortable position for giving birth,” I explained, grinning at Erika's wide-eyed reaction, then hurried to catch up with the flow as my mother kept talking while laboriously getting back into her chair.

“When the baby came out and started crying,” she said and I repeated in English, “then someone in the family, or a friend, would cut and tie off both ends of the umbilical cord. Sometimes cutting the cord would be done with an
ulu
or even a snow knife . . .”

The
ulu
was the sharp crescent-shaped knife blade women used for everything, including scraping hides; the snow knife was much bigger, and used for cutting blocks to build igloos.