By the time I met him in 1958, Simeonie Quppapik was a respected elder. Simeonie, claimed he had been born twice: first when his mother’s midwife brought him into the world, when whalers still visited the area, and second when the Canadian government said he was born, which a bureaucrat determined to have been in 1909, duly written on what looked like an important piece of paper. In either case, Simeonie was adopted as a young child.
I remember clearly one of my visits with Simeonie. I watched him watching something in the distance but, try as I might, I could not detect what he was looking at. Was he dreaming or was there something moving out there? I scanned every inch of the horizon looking for clues that might lead me to the object that had captured his attention. There was nothing floating on the sea. No sign of bad weather approaching. No movement on the land. My curiosity got the better of me. “What are you looking at, Atatasiak [Grandfather]?” I asked.
“I am looking toward the place of my childhood,” he replied in a whisper.
“Where is it, Grandfather?”
Simeonie took a piece of paper and a stub of a pencil, and drew the entire coastline from Kinngait (Cape Dorset) to Qarmaarjuak (Amadjuak) on south Baffin Island, a distance of about 300 kilometres. “There,” he pointed, “that’s where I was born and had my childhood captured, put into a box and attached to a piece of paper forever.”
In 1923, when Simeonie was fourteen, the legendary American filmmaker Robert Flaherty captured his likeness on film. At the time, the Inuit with whom Flaherty lived had given him the name White Swan. One of Simeonie’s relatives, the beautiful Glass Nose, was White Swan’s girlfriend and likely influenced him to photograph members of her family before he headed back south. I’ve often looked at that sweet photograph, then looked at one taken when Simeonie was a strong and handsome hunter. In later years, I would turn and see a small and delicate man who had not wielded a harpoon for some time. But until the end, Simeonie possessed a remarkable memory. He could still sing the songs he had learned many years ago when he lived in skin tents and snow houses while growing up at Qarmaarjuak, the land of the ancient sod houses.
Bright and inquisitive, Simeonie often offered sharp insights into the importance of words. I remember one story about how some qallunaat (white people) came to Sikusiilaq many years ago to make nunannguait, “imitations of the Earth,” or maps. Just off the end of Itiliardjuk is a small island that was the traditional summer camp of the Kinngnarmiut, the people living in the Dorset area. When the qallunaat arrived, their maps made in the South showed that the island had no name, so they asked their guide, “What’s the name of the island?” The guide’s son made a slight misinterpretation by telling his father that the qallunaat wanted to know who was living on the island, to which the guide replied, “Alariaq.” So the place that the locals referred to as Shaqu or Sarku or Saarru (the armpit), named for its pleasant little bay, was inadvertently given the place name Alariaq, the name belonging to one of the most influential angakkuit (shamans) in all of Sikusiilaq.
I had assumed that all the people living in southwest Baffin referred to themselves and were referred to by Inuit living in other distant places as Sikusiilarmiut, meaning the people of Sikusiilaq. Yet when Simeonie referred to himself as once having belonged to the Qarmaaqjummiut, people of the sod houses, and not to the Sikusiilarmiut, I thought it prudent to have a little ethnogeography lesson.
One Sunday in July my interpreter, Jeannie Manning, and I visited Simeonie after church armed with the usual paper, pens, pencils, and his favourite snack, a garlicky sausage I had brought north from my home in Carp, Ontario.
Simeonie began by explaining that the place where you were born and lived most of your life denoted the general name given to all who lived in that place. For example: Pauta was born in Nurrata, and therefore he belonged to the Nurrattamiut. The general area, however, was known as Qaumarvik (the land that is in brightness), which included the ancient camp Nuvujuaq, as well as several small camps whose people were known as Nuvujjuaqmmiut. Therefore, the Nurattamiut and the Nuvujjuaqmmiut would be regarded as the regional group the Qaumainnasuuqmiut, the people from where the land is bright.
Who, then, were the Sikusiilarmiut? I asked Simeonie. He explained that the name of the people from where the land is bright began to change from the Qaumainnasuuqmiut to the Sikusiilarmiut as they vastly expanded their hunting territory due to the introduction of fox trapping by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1913. Just when I was beginning to grasp Simeonie’s teachings, I learned that the Qaumainnasuuqmiut, later regarded by other Baffin Islanders as the Sikusiilarmiut, had yet another name. Their relatives in Nunavik, Arctic Quebec, referred to them as “the people of the other half.“
Simeonie went on to explain the meaning of the name by offering the analogy of a pair of mitts. One mitt represented the people of the Arctic Quebec coast and the other the people of southwest Baffin to whom they were related. Just as I was beginning to understand the lesson, I asked Simeonie to tell me what the Sikusiilarmiut called their relatives in Arctic Quebec. “They called them Akianimiut [those on the other side],” replied Simeonie.
Almost afraid to go any further, I asked him the origin of the Kinngnarmiut, people now living in Cape Dorset. Without any outward sign of impatience, Simeonie explained the following: When people from along the coast became settled in Kinngait, whatever they were called before, changed. They referred to themselves (in the present tense) as Kinngnarmiut. Having noticed me constantly revising my notes, he drew a small diagram revealing the names of the groups who lived throughout the Foxe Peninsula from Nuvujuak to Iqaluit. Later, he would draw an extraordinary map for me, which was exhibited in art galleries in Canada and elsewhere and at UNESCO in Paris.
The kudlik, It gave us light and warmth for over a thousand years.
BY THE LIGHT OF A SEAL OIL LAMP
I shared too brief a time with Kananginak, one of the few people with whom I never had the opportunity to go out on the land. Yet he was a close friend for more than 45 years, a confidant who, without hesitation, shared his thoughts, concerns, and perspectives on life with me. Kananginak represented that generation of Inuit in southwest Baffin who had been born on the land and were exposed briefly to the traditional way of life. Missionaries were still strangers, the angakkuit (shamans) were still to be respected, and outboard motors and snow machines were things of the future. Settlements and nursing stations had yet to be created, and no radio links existed from village to village.
Kananginak was born in a hut lit by a seal oil lamp in a camp reached by dogsled in winter and kayak or canoe in summer. He was born at a time when it was believed that shamans could fly to the moon; later in life, he watched men landing on the moon from the comfort of his home in Cape Dorset, which was heated by oil from Venezuela.
Kananginak’s father, Pootoogook, was the most respected man throughout the Baffin Island region. From the earliest times, qallunaat (white people), including officials travelling along the Sikusiilaq (southwest Baffin) coast, would stay at Pootoogook’s camp. Kananginak once told me, “All qallunaat were big and scary to me.”
I was baptized by a missionary and learned how to smile and be very pleasant to the big men [RCMP] who were sent here to keep us good. They always seemed to know about any wrongdoings, so we smiled a lot. There were some grumpy qallunaat, but they were not scary because their behaviour was predictable. The scary ones were those who showed no expression.
In the early days Inuit working for the
