days of work. When country food was scarce, they had to make two days of food last a week. Once you started working, you could no longer go hunting like in the old days. More and more people became dependent on having flour, lard, sugar, baking soda, tea, and other goods from The Bay [Hudson’s Bay Company]. No work, no food. You couldn’t buy much when you only got 50 cents for a seal skin.
Things were so tough in the early days that some people returning to their camp with goods from The Bay would pass by other camps in the middle of the night so as not to be noticed. Some people came to our camp at Ikirasaq to get food rather than go to The Bay. Country food was much healthier. My older brothers would work at ship time to be able to get the things we could not make, like bullets, needles, and other special things from the South.
I experienced difficulty when it came time to support myself. It was the time when the dogs were being killed. It was the beginning of my adult life and yet I could not raise my own dogs, I could not have a strong dog team. The best dogs were the most aggressive dogs and they were the first to be destroyed. We were told it was because they were a threat to humans. Then the others were destroyed because we were told that they were diseased. The destruction of the “real” dogs was the destruction of a strong breed that helped us to survive for generations. When you think of it, the destruction of the dogs and the replacement of sleds with snowmobiles took away our strength forever. We lost our endurance. I can remember when we walked great distances, when we could lift huge stones or haul sleds loaded with food for days and my brothers and I did such things long ago.
The year before you came to Kinngait [1957], I was living permanently in settlement. I was quickly losing the strength in my body and in my way of thinking. My thoughts were no longer shaped by living on the land but by a ready made lifestyle. Because we began to live like you, we began to behave like you, and in many ways we have become like you. You asked me what would have happened to our lives if the qallunaat had never come north. The answer is simple: We would have continued to live the only life we knew.
The small kudlik that can be carried on long journeys.
When I think about the future I also think about the past. I remember when giving thanks at feasts, we faced each other. Now when we pray, we look at the back of another person’s head. We are losing things along the way. We’re losing traditional knowledge about a world known to our ancestors. We seem to be losing our ability to live in harmony with one another. Perhaps if we’re not careful, we’ll even lose those adopted beliefs that have replaced our traditional ones.
I think that living in the future will be so different from the past that it is beyond our imagination. Perhaps the future is that time when the present, yours and mine, is thought of as just another fairy tale.
Pitaloosie Saila, my “little sister”, a wonderful artist from Kinngait (Cape Dorset).
THE SCENT OF SENSITIVITY
My southern colleagues have marvelled at how fortunate I was to develop a remarkably close and lasting relationship with the Inuit of Sikusiilaq. This relationship took a long time to grow. Three different families often refer to me as “our relative from the South,” which makes me feel at home whenever I return to Cape Dorset. In my experience, lasting relationships include admonishments such as the time when Osuitok Ipeelie impatiently said “It’s time you started to learn to call things by their proper names.” There are other times when one faces occasional disagreement, anger, and in some cases, hostility. In any case, my relationship with the Inuit elders was based on my respect for them rather than any judgment.
It helped also to learn the elements of proper behaviour. I recall with amusement the time Simeonie Quppapik roundly chastised me: “You have been visiting me long enough. Stop knocking on my door when you come! Only qallunaat and police knock on doors. Stop scaring me!”
One of the most important gestures of decent behaviour was to be thoughtful. When a younger person was visiting an elder, bringing food was considerate. I simply left it on the table and learned that no thanks was necessary or expected.
From time to time, I was scolded and brought down a peg or two without rancour. I remember the time I was out on the land with Pitaloosie Saila and her family. Pitaloosie told me to go out and put up the pole that acted a mast for the two-way radio. What seemed like a simple task turned out to be embarrassing. I tried valiantly to put a thin two-metre high pole upright between small round boulders.
“What’s the matter?” Pitaloosie yelled. “You went to university and you can’t even stick a pole up in the air?”
“I forgot how about five thousand years ago,” I lashed out at her.
“Too bad,” she retorted. “Anyway, you qallunaat descended from monkeys, we didn’t. Everyone knows that there were no monkeys in the Arctic.”
I couldn’t stop laughing. The next morning, the pole was standing straight, no doubt put there in a couple of minutes by one of the kids.
Shortly after my first visit to southwest Baffin in 1958, many of the old Inuit who had been born and grown up in hunting camps were reaching the end of their lives. While some of their legends, songs, and stories would live on, the way they thought and felt about things and the way they viewed their world grew dimmer with each elder’s death. Leetia Parr and Pia Pootoogook, along with the sisters Annie, Jeannie, and Nina Manning, helped me gain insight into some of the thoughts and experiences of the old people in Cape Dorset. I could never have gathered some of the stories and many other accounts without their help. It was important for my helper to understand not only what I was trying to learn from the elders, but also why I was interested in such things. The old adage “Ask the right question and you will get the right answer” is not necessarily true. Quite often, the answer is a response to questions in the storyteller’s mind: “What is it that he or she would like to hear?”
I was careful to ensure that whoever accompanied me was socially acceptable to the various people with whom I wanted to speak. Even the best interpreter in the community would be severely handicapped if, for example, the person I was meeting had a history of animosity with a member of the interpreter’s family. I almost blundered into a situation where I was about to have a conversation with an old man who, as a youth, was a camp slave (the polite term is servant) to the father of the interpreter with me at the time.
Knowing or having a feeling about when to back off from a line of inquiry was important. The approach to conversations was critical to what transpired during them. I began by explaining what I was seeking and why I was interested in the subject. At times I said to the person, I have heard such-and-such from so-and-so and would like to know more about the subject, and I asked the person if he could help me. I was often asked, “What will you do with what I tell you?” To this I replied, “I will never repeat the things you want me to keep to myself. The things that can be repeated to others will be written down as I understand them, and that is why I ask you to be patient with me during our conversation.”
I explained to my interpreter and the person with whom we spoke that we would not interrupt each other’s thoughts with translation. I would say whatever I had to say, and the interpreter would then say to me, “That is what I understand you to mean.” Any further articulation was made at that time, before the question or thoughts were transmitted to the elder.
The same held true for the elder speaking to me. Often, we would speak for long periods without breaks
