Bob and Takako Takano on the Mara-Burnside river system.
Photo courtesy of Hans Gelter.
Liftoff! The winds were strong. Our Twin Otter airplane would travel from Bathurst Inlet on the Arctic coast to Yellowknife on the shores of Great Slave Lake. That’s the length of the barren lands of Canada. We would fly low, affording an easy view of the lower Bathurst Inlet; the Mara, Burnside, and Coppermine rivers; eskers aplenty; barrens to treeline transition; waterways as a corridor for easy travel; and a mass of lakes messing up any notion of water as a useful navigational aid. In the air with this excellent visibility, I was thinking of navigation, not because I would ever walk the long distance across the barrens but because the first Franklin Arctic land expedition did so in 1819–22.[5] Might I see Belanger Rapids and Obstruction Rapids, where river crossings by canoe and hastily made cockleshell canoe respectively exacted so much time and energy from the crew.[6] Might I see some dominant eskers as linear features that might have helped Franklin and company once they headed overland from the Hood River just to my northwest? I was flying over the country these men had walked through 193 years ago. This flight, along with the visceral experience of canoeing and walking in similar terrain, one river to the east of their Coppermine River, not to mention our travels in and viewing of Bathurst Inlet, helped put the first arctic
Flying back to Yellowknife from Bathurst Inlet, imagining Franklin’s men’s march.
land expedition closer to my mind.[7] (Although it was second to Samuel Hearne’s two-year tramp with Chipewyan families thirty-five years earlier.) I know the stories. Specific days had long since been etched in my head. These two weeks on the Mara-Burnside rivers were the closest I’d come to being there, and the low-level flight was a great gift.
Who else was thinking this way as the flights began? I was rendering a human story of the past into a felt experience on the land. I was mulling over our trip with its “harsh” summer conditions compared to Franklin’s men’s truly harsh October conditions, (read: early winter) and our viewing of animals for pleasure rather than on desperate survival-focused hunting excursions.[8]
There are many ways to frame the country, and perhaps the best way is no way at all. That would be to sit back and stare with no references to the terrain; to just be with it. Others might be doing that, although I’m not sure it is possible for most humans. Some certainly are naturalists first. They are looking for animals: the land as a laboratory for genetic diversity, perhaps. The geographer or land scientist watches for glacial features. The theologian might explore the possibility of sacred sites or ponder the land as cathedral. The paddler watches for waterways: the land as gymnasium. Some do all of this to some degree simultaneously. I suppose I do, but the land as a storied place is how I primarily tend to look at it. Did I find it, this way of seeing, or did it find me? In other words, did I first have the theory of place-responsive pedagogy whereby as a place becomes imbued with story it becomes meaningful and then bring it to my practice? Or did I see the land as a storied place and then discover a corresponding theory? I believe the latter is true in my case. It was a matter of imaginative spark. Educators Brian Wattchow and Mike Brown discuss the varied privileged interpretations from which outdoor educators see the land: “… nature as an arena where students experience personal development through challenging activity; or nature as a venue or landscape that can be appreciated and encountered aesthetically and for which we should develop some affinity; or nature as an environment in need of sustainable management practices by humans.”[9] William Godfrey-Smith in the 1970s explored ways of seeing nature: as a gymnasium (for recreation), as a cathedral (for spiritual growth), as a lab (for scientific study), and as a silo (for genetic storing and coding of materials).[10] It appears that from these environmental educators’ perceptions that nature is always a resource. It is always to be used. But as we bring personal meaning and an ever wider understanding to nature — simply put, as we bring nature inside — nature shifts toward being home. It provides study and recreation, yes, but as a home place for dwellers, not a visitor’s space for strangers. I was sure the naturalists, scientists, adventurers, and historians among our group all had some desire to move toward this Arctic place as a core place, rather than as a peripheral space. Indeed, we talked of such themes often.
Finally, and adding further to Godfrey-Smith’s list, Warwick Fox in 1995 wisely suggested that our culture’s nature awareness and perceptions have shifted with time. Culture moves. We are more aware of nature as a life support system (“which holds that a diverse non-human world benefits humans by performing functions necessary for our healthy survival, including the recycling of nutrients, the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide, and so on”); we are also moving toward seeing nature as psychologically necessary. This position acknowledges wild places are
A wilderness expedition conference session while windbound.
a needed refuge from human-designed places. While Godfrey-Smith’s position stresses that we like the non-human, the ecopsychology position suggests that we ought to have diverse non-human places for our mental growth and, indeed, our sanity.[11] These two positions (the life support and the eco-psychological) along with nature as a home place were amplified educational directions for our travels on the Mara-Burnside.Paddler/delegate Pete Higgins asked us to seek a “global intimacy” in our lives by living directly with an understanding of basic ecological principles such as the water cycle and photosynthesis. Deb Schrader and Robbie Nicol helped us explore nature as an ingrained part of our psyche through narrative appreciation and exercises of deeper questioning. Remember that intriguing tension between a river camping trip and an educators’ conference: there were heady times in the bug shelter or under the storm tarps.
For me, the flight back to Yellowknife was among the strongest moments of the trip for feeling the storied place. We had travelled together within a place-responsive pedagogy. Now we were leaving, and the place was coming alive before me with stories. That remained my frame of reference; that nature is a resource I must admit, but not a resource for us to use for our gain only, rather one for us to imaginatively dream into and enlarge our being. The difference in thinking of nature as resource is a matter of relationship and connectivity: nature as subject (home) or object (other). These questions were with me while on the land with our thoughtful group and on our visually stunning low-level return flight to Yellowknife. There was also a more specific set of questions. There was a historical storied way of seeing that was my mandate to share with my colleagues.
But first, a brief introduction is needed for the first Franklin Arctic land expedition.
John Franklin, with his four navy men and fifteen Native interpreters and voyageurs, travelled from York Factor on Hudson Bay to Great Slave Lake (the end of Europeans’ geographical knowledge at the time) in 1819. Franklin was gone from home for forty-two months. From Fort Providence they ascended the Yellowknife River to Winter Lake, where they built Fort Enterprise from which to descend the Coppermine River and travel east on the Arctic coast, surveying it as far as Bathurst Inlet. Then they retreated late in the season, walking without food stores and Native support from the Hood River, crossing the Burnside and Coppermine rivers without proper ferrying to return to Fort Enterprise and fresh supplies. The supplies were not there for the starving men, the strongest of whom had barely had enough strength to make their way to the fort. They pressed on until Yellowknife families were found to come to their aid. Before it was all over, there were murders, cannibalism, attempted mutinies, and epic snowshoe walks of twelve hundred miles to resupply. They were hoping to add significantly to the quest of the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. Suffice it to say, there are many stories embedded in this epic canoe trip turned hiking trip turned starvation march in the central Arctic.
I had wondered before our canoe trip why Franklin had decided to
