The North Today

Kathleen Merritt and Nelson Tagoona on the mic in Rankin Inlet (2015)

So what are the most important issues in Arctic Canada today? What would it be like to visit there? (each year, more "southerners" find that out for themselves). What's the future of traditional Inuit culture, language, and economic development?

These are all complex questions, much as they would be anywhere else on earth, but made more so by the unique gifts and difficulties of the Arctic. Goods and services are expensive -- goods have to be flown or shipped up, and getting services provided -- from water delivery to health care -- is also more costly, simply in terms of either A) Training and education so that more Inuit and other residents can do the jobs needed; or B) Flying trained people up there. On my way back from my last summer's voyages, I met a young man who was one of Nunavut's fire inspectors; his job was to inspect all public buildings and accommodations -- schools, health centers, and so forth -- for fire safety. He had to be flown into and out from dozens of small hamlets, accommodated (doubtless at an Inns North, where a room can run $400 a night, and a single sandwich costs $40) and fed throughout the year, just to perform a service that, down south, would require nothing more than a pickup truck, gas, and maybe a night or two at a Motel 6.

And there's much that needs doing. Every social and ecological issue we have down here is present, and often more severe. Secondhand smoke from cigarettes, to take one example, is many times worse in northern houses that are pre-fabricated to be practically airtight. Suicide has touched nearly every family. The general lack of jobs -- unemployment in many communities hovers around 30% or higher -- fuels drug and alcohol abuse among the young. The sheer cost of getting from one place to another makes even a simple family holiday a costly challenge. Within Inuit culture, which emphasises the value of community, these problems resonate in a singular manner -- one way I've put it is simply to say that, among the Inuit, there simply are no bystanders. To be proximate to pain, or loss, is to feel it deeply, fundamentally -- and that pain can drive people to many hard passes. And, if a young Inuk does find his or her way to university or a career, this often comes at the cost of having to live many miles from family and friends.

So how can we learn more -- and possibly do more -- about some of these problems facing the North and its peoples? We can start by reading the Nunatsiaq News, as well as other sources (CBC North, the Alaska Dispatch News, Eye on the Arctic). We can also make virtual visits to many communities, to their schools and health centres, as well as gather information from the Government of Nunavut (GN) in Iqaluit. One of the issues worth special consideration is the impact of the great expansion in Arctic expedition cruises -- there are good articles on the subject here and here and here, and AECO -- the Association of Arctic Cruise Operators -- offers guidelines and information on their site. See also this video produced by VICE news, which features an interview with my friend Ena Maktar of Pond Inlet.

During the 20201 and 2021 seasons, there were no cruise ships due to COVID-19, but in the time since then they've crept back up to their old numbers, with 26 ships doing all or part of the Northwest Passage in 2023; bookings are now at record levels. And, while COVID is no longer a pressing issue, the larger question of the economic and cultural impact of this kind of tourism remains a source of concern, both in the Arctic and in other remote locations.

BONUS: Here's an advance look at the PowerPoint I'll be sharing with you in class tomorrow!

SECOND BONUS: I can't believe I forgot to mention Elisapie in my section about Inuit musicians. In addition to appearing on a brand new stamp from Canada Post, she's recently released an album of rock and pop standards, which she's translated into Inuktitut! Check out the first track, Taimangalimaaq -- I think you'll find it familiar!

Polar Sovereignty

In July of 2007, a Russian crew headed to the bottom of the ocean in a pair of Mir-I submarines, the same kind seen and used in James Cameron's Titanic.  This time, though, the goal was not so much to find something as to leave something -- a little titanium Russian flag -- on the floor of the Arctic Ocean directly atop the North Geographic Pole.  They succeeded in doing so, and the act was hailed in Russia -- while in Canada, where nerves over Arctic sovereignty are thin and often frayed, Foreign Minister Peter MacKay criticized the action as meaningless, declaring that "this isn't the fifteenth century."  Maybe not, and it's not really likely that this flag-planting will have anything beyond a symbolic effect, but all the same it's no less strange an exercise than the Canadian government's touting of the finding of the Franklin-era search ship HMS Investigator, which they decided was important enough to fly the Environment Minister up to the site at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, just to film a few snippets for the news.  Military exercises in support of Canadian sovereignty have become an annual event, now known as Operation NOREX.

There are many ways a claim of sovereignty can be made; prominent among them are discovery (I was here first), cession (you can have it, I don't want it), subjugation (I conquered it by force), and contiguity (it's in the midst of lands I already claim). One might think, given all the flag-plantings, that discovery was the strongest claim, but it practice is can be the weakest; land discovered but not occupied, or without the effective exercise of control, may be deemed "inchoate" -- undeveloped or temporary -- and thus liable to the claims of others who may, in fact, arrive much later.  All these issues, as one may imagine, become trickier in Canada's north, whose vast landmass is larger than India but has a population not much greater than West Warwick RI.

The Russian sub stunt has to do with the sub-category of sovereignty pertaining to coasts.  While the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea defines territorial waters as extending only 12 nautical miles from shore, some countries regard all waters situated above the continental shelf supporting the country's landmass as theirs.  The Russians, of course, take the latter view, and since their shelf extends from the northern coastline to a few miles of the geographic pole, planting a flag on the seabed there is only a modest extension of what they already claim.  A good summary of the issues, and why a recent survey of the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean attracted such attention, is available here.

Russia, already busily selling oil leasing rights along its northern coast, is willing to bet there are more such resources under the polar sea -- and if the icecap were to melt in summer -- something once unthinkable but now only a decade or less away in some projections -- the logistical difficulties of extracting and transporting mineral resources would be greatly reduced.  It's a time of tremendous anxiety -- and, for some, opportunity -- and the only (nearly) sure thing is that native northern peoples are unlikely to get their fair share.

In 2015, Russia submitted a new claim to vast swathes of the Arctic, up to and including the pole itself. See this article in the New York Times, and this in the National Post.  The United States has just recently started reconsidering its Arctic policy to "project" sovereignty in the region, and Canada submitted its own Arctic claim in 2019.

Split Tooth

To introduce Split Tooth, I thought I'd begin by quoting a review that Paddy Eason wrote for my journal The Arctic Book Review:

"It's my impression that many readers of the Arctic Book Review are seeking stirring tales of exploration from long ago. On that basis, this book - which contains enthusiastic teenage solvent abuse, erotic encounters with wild animals and gleeful retribution against human bullies and predators - may not be everyone's cup of tea. For me, though, it's one of the most impressive books I have read in years.

Author Tanya Tagaq’s Wikipedia page describes her as a “Canadian Inuk throat singer from Cambridge Bay (Iqaluktuutiaq), Nunavut, Canada.” Tagaq has released five solo albums of increasing artistic range and ferocity, has collaborated with Bjork and the Kronos Quartet, tours worldwide, is an accomplished painter and an outspoken advocate for indigenous rights and climate activism. It would be no exaggeration to say that she's an Inuit superstar. This is her first book.

Split Tooth is a novel, with frequent nods to memoir, poetry, and traditional tales. At times, to this reader from a temperate clime, the book reads like science fiction or horror: encounters with the Northern Lights, journeys by snowmobile over frozen seas, battles with malignant spirits and musings on quantum physics. But at its icy, fiery heart, this is a book about female puberty.

The unnamed protagonist, when we first meet her, is an eleven-year-old girl living in a small village by Cambridge Bay in the High Arctic. Awkward, smart, and not particularly popular, she spends the long days and long nights in her home town negotiating the universally recognizable childhood assault course of friends, bullies, teachers, neighbors and relatives, while at the same time wishing she had ‘actual breasts’. Alongside this familiar-yet-unfamiliar narrative, there runs a strand of poetry, blocks of text in Inuktitut syllabics, and excellent pop culture illustrations (by Jaime Hernandez.)

Some of the events described or alluded to are shocking. Tagaq certainly pulls no punches. This is not the Arctic wonderland of noble natives that some readers may expect. The first sentence of the book is “Sometimes we would hide in the closet when the drunks came home from the bar.” Alcohol seems mostly for the adults and their tedious rowdy house parties - to be avoided. Our hero and her pals start with cigarette ends and pilfered joints, moving up to butane, rubber cement and gasoline huffed out of snowmobiles. What else is there to do when night and day have no meaning, nothing seems worth learning and the adults are either passed out from booze or away hunting? We learn, as our young hero does, that loud country music blasting from a house is a warning sign - and this is the kind of shorthand at which Tagaq excels, sketching the line from colonial corruption to child abuse.

Predatory adult males are a daily challenge - the teacher who habitually gropes his pupils under their desks, the relatives who sneak into children’s bedrooms at night. One of the first poems in the book is called "Sternum," and begins as a meditation on the human breastbone and ribcage. The last few lines come with the kind of kick that marks her writing throughout  -

The Human Sternum is used for so many things
Clavicles like handlebars
Ribs like stairs
The sternum is the shield
Even when impaired
Even when it smothers a little girl's face
As the bedsprings squeak

However - and I cannot emphasize this enough - Split Tooth is not a grim, dour book. It is a tragedy and a triumph.

The book's second strand, of poems, dreams and folk tales, initially a kind of counterpoint to the coming-of-age dramas of village life, gradually takes over the life of the book. The day-to-day narrative starts to incorporate brushes with malevolent spirits. Wild animals, such as the fox she encounters beneath her parents’ house while hiding from the school bully, walk into her dreams and begin to demand their due or bestow favor. In a key chapter on which the book’s plot turns, she walks out onto the sea ice one night and has an encounter with the Northern Lights that changes her life. What started out as a funny, harrowing tale of village life for an awkward teenager turns into a psychedelic spiritual ordeal ending up with some extraordinary choices for Tagaq’s young hero. I am being circumspect - this book is a page turner, and I’d really hate to spoil it with any further clues. If you choose to read this book, you will be hanging on by your fingertips by the end.

What makes all this work so splendidly, is that Tagaq - and her protagonist - are such perceptive, funny, rational company. The book is sharp and bright as a knife, informed not only by Inuit folktales, but also by 21st century climate politics. Every violent act or thought is balanced with kindness and empathy. The suggestive, elliptical poetry is spiced with a lot of very specific cuss words.

For anyone who has seen Tagaq as a live musical performer, this may come as no surprise. Having read the physical edition of the book, I went in again to listen to the audio book, read by the author with brief throat-singing interludes between chapters. If I had to choose a format to recommend, it would be the audiobook. The hardback is a lovely object (and there is also a vinyl album of the poems), but the five-hour audio book is another level. It is a performance.

The journey from recording studio to written page hides pitfalls that have tripped many an artist. But this book's icy white covers and red-tipped pages contain wonders. Tagaq writes with clarity, rage, humor and authority. In this book she has created what might be a defining artistic statement of the North. It is an Arctic masterpiece."

For those interested in the audiobook version, you can get it here.

You can hear Tanya talk about her book (the link I mentioned in class) here.

Now check out Tanya's music -- and that of other Inuit performers -- here!

Alootook Ipellie

The image at left is a drawing by Inuit artist and writer Alootook Ipellie (1951-2007), and is entitled "Self-Portrait: Inverse Ten Commandments." In the story accompanying the drawing, Ipellie dreams of himself as Satanasee (Inuktitut for Satan), and in his dreams each of his fingers becomes an "inverse commandment," coming to life with a face a a mouth filled with sharp little teeth that tear at his flesh. It's an apt if somewhat grotesque metaphor for the current spiritual condition of people of Ipellie's generation; they must live in two worlds -- the old shamanistic one with its built-in fear and fatalism, or the new Christian one that circumscribes and limits their spiritual development with rules and ideas that are foreign to traditional Inuit culture. Ipellie, who struggled with both the rejection of his work by supposed "connoisseurs" of Inuit art and the modern northern blight of alcoholism, only made it to the age of 56 before he died of a heart attack.

The division of modern Inuit between those who, like Ipellie, can recall the onset of western culture and forced settlements, and the generations after, is further complicated by religious divisions. Inuit filmmaker Zacharaias Kunuk has spoken about the hatred between Protestants and Catholics in Igloolik; one missionary from each faith converted half the town, and Kunuk compared the hostile border through the middle of the settlement to the Green Line in Beruit, which separated Muslims from Christians; he recalled children throwing stones at one another across this sectarian border. Evangelical denominations have had particular growth in the past few decades, and when Inuit politician Tagak Curley adopted the campaign slogan "Jesus is Lord over Nunavut," he counted on evangelicals for their support (he lost, narrowly).

Unfortunately, Ipellie's most brilliant and lasting work, the collection, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, is out of print and getting harder and harder to find. Fortunately, there's an article about him, Kimberly McMahon-Coleman's "Dreaming an Identity Across Two Cultures: The Works of Alootook Ipellie," which discusses his work at length, and includes many of the drawings -- you can read and download it here for free. The story that's based on the drawing above, "Self Portrait: Inverse Ten Commandments" is included in "Alootook Ipellie: Artist Writer Dreamer!" I've also made one additional story, "When God Sings the Blues," available here via the blog. You can also read his stories "A Frobisher Bay Childhood" and "Damn Those Invaders" here.

A Kayak Full of Ghosts

Men whose intestines have been devoured float up to the moon. A fox trades wives with a worm. A man grows sick from eating too many heads. A woman carves a replica of her dead boyfriend out of blubber, and he comes to life. In A Kayak Full of Ghosts, author Lawrence Millman collects a cross-section of the strange world of stories from the peoples of the north, primarily from Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic. We've all read books of folklore and traditional tales before, but I'd hazard a guess that none of them were quite as macabre as this. In an interview with the author a few years ago, I asked him why he thought the Inuit of the north told stories so filled with flesh, with blood, and dismemberment; he replied that "in places where the material culture is very bare, the need to imaginatively transform the world is well nigh overwhelming. Whereas, if you go to someplace verdant, you don't have to perform any transformations, because the wealth is already there. In other words, when you have at your fingertips a voluptuous world, the imagination tends to be more mimetic than it would be when the culture and landscape are austere. Also, the fact that people are often skinning and cutting up animals somehow translates into the rather different types of dismemberment you find described in the stories."

I realize that for some in the class, the content of some of these stories may be very strange, even disturbing. But I would remind everyone that there are quite a few scenes in the Western tradition which are nearly as awful: The evil queen in Snow White is invited to the wedding, but then forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she drops dead; the little girl in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes" is forced to dance day and night until a friendly woodchopper cuts off her legs -- and even then, she is met at the door by her still-dancing limbs. In order to try to fit their feet into the glass slipper, Cinderella's step-sisters cut off parts of their heels. Of course, we don't usually think of the details of the original stories, as we are much more familiar with the Disney versions, which clean up all the blood and whistle a happy tune -- but nevertheless they are there.

None of the stories in Millman's book are ever likely to be made into Disney cartoons -- there would be too much that would have to be (if you'll pardon the pun) cut out. But they have secrets to tell us all the same, secrets about the inner life of a people who managed to extract a living in one of the harshest climates on earth, and who knew all too well that to sustain life, life must be taken.

A wide selection of the stories in this book is available here. Read them, then pick a story from this Kayak -- and describe your reaction to it, recalling that sometimes, that which is disturbing also is that which has the most vital truth to tell.

Minik

The story of Minik Wallace is a stranger and sadder one than that of any other Inuk person brought from his home to the "civilized" world. That he was brought in the name of "science," and repeatedly lied to and deceived by men who claimed its mantle, makes his story all the more horrific. And, unlike London's Egyptian Hall or Barnum's American Musuem, the American Museum of Natural History still stands in New York City, and the bones of some of Minik's people are even today still stored somewhere among its basements and warehouses.

My friend Kenn Harper was the one to uncover Minik's story, and eventually tell it to the world. Kenn was a schoolteacher in the Canadian Arctic, who learned Inuktitut and later married an Inuk woman who was a distant relative of Minik. He heard stories among her relatives in Greenland that got him thinking; they had all heard about Minik, the boy who had been taken south by Peary, come back as a young man, and then left again. What had happened to him? Kenn's researches led him to the American Museum of Natural History, but archivists there said that they were sorry, no records relating to Minik had survived. On the chance that something might be found in the personnel file of William Wallace, Minik's adoptive father, Kenn requested it, and was amazed to find that it was here that the directors and scholars at the museum -- including Maurice Jessup, Franz Boaz, and Theodore Kroeber -- had buried all the documents of Minik's life. These documents enabled Kenn to write the book that became Minik: The New York Eskimo.

They tell a sad tale of scientific exploitation, full of the kinds of trickery and lies we hate to associate with such esteemed anthropologists as Boas (who would later direct the research of Zora Neale Hurston) and Kroeber (who later had his own Minik-like issues with a California Indian named "Ishi," and whose daughter was Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, the distinguished science fiction writer). Yet quite beside the deception, which -- in his stepfather's words -- led Minik to "lose faith in the people he had come among," there is the issue of whether, even in a kinder and gentler world, it is any more fitting for a human being to become a "specimen" than it is to be a circus sideshow. In the end, we're not talking about individual motivation, but the entire scientific worldview of the early 1900's, and its legacies today.

Inuit On Display

The display of humans to other humans has taken many forms over the ages, but surely there have been few as problematic, and often degrading, as the practice of displaying human beings in zoos. The postcard at left is from Carl Hagenbeck's Hamburg "Tierpark" (Animal Park), and shows a group of Labrador Inuit who appeared there in the fall of 1911. The group included Nancy Columbia, whom Arctic historian Kenn Harper has aptly described as the most famous Inuk of her day; she was born in an Eskimo display at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and over the course of her career appeared at well over a dozen world's fairs and expositions from Seattle to St. Louis to Madrid and Paris. She also was featured in a number of early silent films, and wrote he scenario for one of them, "The Way of the Eskimo," which was the first Inuit-written, Inuit-cast film ever made; unfortunately it is not known to survive. In the photo above, taken in connection with their appearance at a "Nordland" festival organized by Zoo proprietor Karl Hagenbeck, Nancy is second from the left, with her trademark Princess-Leia style hairdo; her mother, Esther Eneutseak, is third from the right, with a baby in her arms.

Nancy and her mother were the core of this well-known group of "Eskimos," and while they were the best-known and longest-lived such group, they were far from the only ones. Carl Hagenbeck had displayed several other groups of Inuit at his Zoo, starting with Abraham Ulrikab and his family in 1880. Like many such Inuit, Abraham became ill with a European disease -- smallpox -- and he, his wife, his teenage daughter, nephew, and infant daughter all succumbed with a few weeks of one another. Remarkably, he left a diary, which was recently translated and published. They were not the first, nor would they be the last, to be quite literally displayed to death.

A full listing of Inuit, along with Inupiat, Yupik, Greenland, and Siberian Eskimos who were put on display in Europe and the U.S., would be a long one, and their life stories would fill many books. Unfortunately, little is known about most of them. Nancy Columbia, surely the most famous of them all, retired from shows around 1920, and lived quietly with her mother in Santa Monica, California. She married a motion-picture projectionist, and they had a daughter named Sue who still lives in the area. Nancy Columbia died in 1959, forgotten by the world, but not by those of us who study Arctic history; you can read the essay Kenn Harper and I wrote on her career here. You can also see selected clips of these and other very early Arctic films here.

So what do we make of Nancy's story? We also must consider the far less fortunate fates of other Inuit such as Abraham Ulrikab, "Joe"and "Hannah," "Prince" Pomiuk, and Rosie Midway Spoon -- were displays featuring them intrinsically exploitative, or can we understand them in the context of the times? And how much, really, have those times changed? Your thoughts below.

Searching for Franklin

It might be said of Sir John Franklin, as of the unlucky Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, that "nothing became his life like the leaving of it." Had Franklin succeeded in finding a navigable Northwest Passage, he would have gone down in history merely as a notable navigator; instead, by vanishing, he has ascended to the firmament of Arctic mythology, as much a fixture of that sky as the Aurora Borealis. His death, and the mystery surrounding it, has inspired dozens of poems and novels, attracting writers from Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad and Margaret Atwood; any number of poignant ballads (among them Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage,' which has become almost a second Canadian national anthem), and (to date) four plays, six documentary films, a German opera, and an Australian musical.

The search to rescue, and then to discern the fate of, Sir John Franklin and his men was the very first mass-media disaster. For more than a decade, it dominated the popular press on both sides of the Atlantic; writers such as Dickens, Collins, Swinburne, Thoreau, Eliot, Verne, and Conrad were enthralled by its dark mysteries; clairvoyants from Scotland to India had visions of Franklin's ships, and more than thirty vessels were dispatched, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars in today's money, to seek him out. Stage plays, moving panoramas, and lantern shows depicted the wild loneliness of the "Frozen Zone"; lecturers equipped with maps, charts, and Esquimaux artifacts opined on his likely location, and his wife/widow Lady Jane Franklin became a dominating figure of the day, lauded by The Times of London as "Our English Penelope." Alas, for her, there would be no returning Odysseus! But loss and death draw down to deeper springs of human feeling, perhaps, than happy returns and loving embraces. And when, finally, the specter of the "last dread alternative" -- cannibalism -- was cast over the affair, it drove its tincture of admiration and revulsion deep down into the British psyche.

Even after the recovery of the expedition's final "Victory Point Record" by Francis Leopold McClintock in 1859, there was continued interest in discovering anything further about his final fate. The American eccentric and erstwhile newspaper publisher Charles Francis Hall led two search expeditions in the 1860's; in the 1870's, the U.S. Army dispatched Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka on a new seach for paper records or artifacts that might help clarify the last days of the Franklin exedition. Individual searchers returned to the area periodically from the 1880's through to the 1980's, among them the great explorer Knud Rasmussen, who in the 1902's heard stories of Franklin's ships from the grandsons of the men who had seen them perish, stories almost exactly the same as those collected by Hall more than half a century earlier. Forensic expeditions -- Owen Beattie in the mid-1980's, and Anne Keenleyside in the early 1990's -- collected the bones, and analyzed the bodies, of known Franklin remains, finding evidence of lead poisoning, scurvy, and tuberculosis. Most significantly, historians such as David C. Woodman and Dorothy Harlan Eber have collected and gathered Inuit testimony, comparing numerous accounts with the hope that a common narrative thread could be found. Woodman has traveled to the Arctic numerous times, searching for the ships in the places the Inuit described.

But it wasn't until 2014 when the first of Franklin's ships -- HMS "Erebus" -- was finally found. It was located by Parks Canada's underwater archaeologists only a few kilometers from where Woodman had searched, right where the Inuit had said it would be. Dives on "Erebus" have netted several remarkable objects, including the ship's bell, several china plates, brass buttons, and the hilt of a naval sword. Many of those, such as myself, who had followed the search for years, thought that finding one ship was already beating the odds -- and then, in 2016, the second ship "Terror" was found, again thanks to Inuit accounts (though in this case that of a contemporary witness, Sammy Kogvik). Although suspended during COVID, new dives resumed in the summer of 2022, and many more are to come -- who knows what secrets these wrecks may disclose? Meanwhile, land-based archaeologists have not been idle; earlier this year Doug Stenton announced that he'd been able to use DNA to identify one of the better-known skulls as that of John Gregory, who'd been hired to operate the steam engine installed in Erebus.

Interest in the Franklin story has continued to grow, both thanks to the discovery of the ships and the the 2018 AMC TV series "The Terror," starring Ciarán Hinds as Sir John Franklin, Jared Harris as Francis Crozier, and Tobias Menzies as James Fitzjames. Based on Dan Simmons's horror novel The Terror, it nevertheless stays largely true to the history of the original expedition, and was meticulously researched and shot. To the historical hazards of scurvy, starvation, and cannibalism, the story adds a mythological Inuit beast, the fearsome "Tunbaq" -- if you don't mind the blood and gore, it's a wonderful re-telling of the Franklin story. You can download individual episodes from iTunes, or get the entire series as a DVD.  Michael Palin's new book on HMS Erebus will doubtless spur still more interest, as many who only know him through the Pythons or his BBC travel shows will get his dramatic take on the ship's history, and his account of re-tracing its routes around the world from Tasmania to the Arctic. Part of this involved visiting Franklin sites in the Canadian territory of Nunavut aboard the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, a voyage on which I was lucky enough to accompany him.

It's been more than 170 years since he went missing, and Sir John Franklin remains a source of seemingly endless fascination -- but why? Is it just the mysterious nature of his disappearance? Or does he symbolize something deeper, something we feel we've lost in these modern times?

Exploration and Sacrifice

Skull of a member of Franklin's Arctic Expedition in 1845

The French writer Georges Bataille spent the last years of his life on his great but little-known work The Accursed Share.  In this book, Bataille argued that sacrifice or “expenditure” was the one absolute necessity of all human civilizations.  Whatever energy cannot be used in growth, Bataille argued, “must be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.”  In his view, war, human sacrifice among the Maya, or the Northwest Coast potlatch – were all forms of sacrifice essential to their respective societies. This idea sounds strange to us today, who have come to believe that, whatever its occasional caprices, capitalism – which demands that all profit be plowed back into maintenance and growth – is the best way for a society, and indeed for the world, to thrive.  And yet, for most of our history, even the wealthiest and most successful civilizations have given sacrifice a sacred status.  We still do so today – for war only – but our awareness of this is muddied by our mixed feelings about the terrors of modern warfare, along with the belief, cultivated by some leaders today, that a modern and “professional” army can wage war successfully without undue sacrifice -- but of course, it can't.

Though we mark the soldier's sacrifice twice annually on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, we're unaccustomed to thinking about exploration as a form of sacrifice. And yet, in a profound sense, it is. We're reminded of that sacrifice at times such as the loss of the space shuttles Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003), but even when space exploration is accomplished, as it is more often today, with unmanned missions such as the NASA's JUNO, there is a monetary sacrifice involved -- in JUNO's case, roughly 1.1 billion dollars, not counting the use of existing infrastructure (NASA's command post, various radiotelescopes, and the sixty or so employees involved in the project). If we define sacrifice as 'expenditure without hope of recompense,' then we have to consider NASA's budget (much shrunken over the past decades, but still running $20 billion a year), and indeed the entire US military budget, currently running near $700 billion. It may be a worthy expenditure, of course -- but money that is put into military hardware returns no funds on the investment. As President Eisenhower once put it, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

But are there not some things worth the sacrifice? Certainly there are, and when the direction of that sacrifice is a peaceful one, there's every reason to celebrate it. In our science-fictional universes, such as the Star Trek franchise, we imagine a world in which explorers will "boldly go where no one has gone before" -- but in our present-day world, manned exploration -- whether of outer space, the deep oceans, or the frozen zone -- is often hampered by the unwillingness of governments to take the risk. But this could, and perhaps should, change. After all, it's a tradition that, as President Reagan noted in his Challenger speech, stretches back to the days of explorers in their wooden ships:

On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and an historian later said, "He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it." Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete. The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."

See additional links here.

Into the Wild

It's been a site of pilgrimage over the twenty-four years since Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild first told the story of Chris McCandless, a.k.a. Alexander Supertramp -- the abandoned Fairbanks City bus, #142, in the middle of a in a clearing a couple hundred feet off the legendary Stampede Trail in Alaska, a track first blazed by a miner to his claim back in the 1930s. It even appeared on Google Earth, where it was marked "Stampede Trail Magic Bus," a name which invokes another, more mobile bus, a.k.a. "Furthur," aboard which Ken Kesey, Wavy Gravy, and others of the Merry Pranksters embarked upon trips of another kind in the 1960's.

The Fairbanks bus had been towed (along with another now gone) to the site as temporary shelter for workers years before, and had been fitted with box-spring beds and a stove; when the work was done, the bus was -- like so many things in Alaska -- abandoned. Unfortunately, its popularity was also its downfall; Alaska state troopers in Fairbanks say that more than 75 percent of their yearly rescues have been in its vicinity, and in recent years several people have drowned attempting to cross the Teklanika River, which cuts across the route to the bus, including a woman who had just visited the bus with her newly wed husband. Finally, on June 18th 2020, the bus was airlifted off the the site by an Alaska National Guard helicopter to an undisclosed location. Currently, it's undergoing conservation on the campus of U. Alaska Fairbanks, and will eventually be on display at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks.

When McCandless's body was found there by moose hunters in September of 1992, his family had not known his whereabouts or even heard from him, for more than two years. A young man full of promise, an A-student with a degree from a top college, no student loans, and a $25,000 start up savings from his parents, he seemed like a young man who had it made. And yet, before he departed on his curious quest, he'd given all that money to charity, burned the cash in his wallet and (soon after) abandoned his car. Changing his name to Alexander Supertramp, he traveled by hitch-hiking, crashing on couches, and working -- apparently hard and well -- at a series of farm jobs. He made friends everywhere he went, and yet at the end, he didn't want anyone to go with him. Krakauer, a journalist for Outside Magazine, was hired to do a story, which he did (it appeared in 1993), but he was still unsatisfied. Tracking down more of McCandless's friends -- some of whom contacted him after seeing the article in the magazine, helped fill out the picture, while Alex's few leavings -- postcards to friends, notes scribbled in the margins of books, and such -- offered the bare outlines of a journey.

Into the Wild, the resulting book, was a huge bestseller, and in 2007 was adapted as a film by Sean Penn. And yet, despite the book's immense popularity, readers have remained divided: for some, McCandless is a true hero, a voyager of the spirit whose restless trek symbolizes everything great about the human desire to explore the world -- while for others, including quite a few Alaskans, he's just one of the apparently endless stream of inexperienced, foolish, and just plain stupid people who head out into the wilderness without the knowledge, skills, or materials essential to surviving. The debate is not an entirely new one; as Krakauer observes, a similar argument has long raged over Arctic expeditions such as that of Sir John Franklin, which -- though sanctioned by the British Empire and provided with what was though the best equipment -- canned food, two enormous ships, flour, buscuit, and rum -- proved unable to survive in the harsh Arctic climate, even though, a few miles from the stranded ice-bound vessels, Inuit families were enjoying a rich meal of seal meat and muktuk, and bouncing healthy babies on their knees in their snug igloos.

So, as we begin our journey with Chris/Alex, what do we think? Try not to be polarized by the debate which pits McCandless as hero vs. idiot -- but give a read to this thoughtful essay by my friend, the Alaskan Journalist David James. Would you, if you could have, gone to visit the bus? What was it that drew so many to the place? And what now, that the bus is taken away -- what should be done with it? Don't hesitate to speak your mind -- Chris certainly didn't.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a documentary about Chris that includes interviews with his family members; you can also watch an older documentary from 2007 that retraces Chris's route. If you're interested in the current conservation status of Bus 142, here's the latest update.

Welcome to Arctic Encounters

Welcome to the course blog for our Summer 2024 course, English 261: Arctic Encounters. This  page will serve as the central stepping-off point for our virtual excursions into the Frozen North -- there are links here to all our class readings, viewings, and listenings, along with other academic resources.  But the most important part of this site, though, is the blog itself. For each class, I'll be posting an item about the readings or viewings we'll be considering, and everyone will have an opportunity to respond and post their own views. I encourage an informal style here -- no need to niggle over grammar, spelling, or formalities -- this should be the place for wide-ranging discussions, open exchange of ideas, and questions of all kinds. It's fine to respond to other students' postings as well -- I encourage you to think of these postings as part of an ongoing conversation, rather than isolated islands of thought. Because of the hybrid nature of our course, half of your discussion and participation will take place here, and half in our in-person class meetings on Tuesdays.

There are few places left on earth where simply going there seems extraordinary – but but a trip north of the Arctic Circle still seems to signify the experience of something astonishing. This course takes up the history of human exploration and interaction in the Arctic, from the early days of the nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on contact between European and American explorers and the Eskimo, or Inuit as they are more properly known today. We'll read first-hand accounts and view documentaries that recount these histories, both from the Western and the Inuit side of the story. It's a region of the world that's growing in significance, as global warming heats up more than ice; in recent years, Canada, Russia, and Denmark have all staked out new claims to the frozen zone. The future of climate change, human cultural change, and increasingly scarce natural resources may lie, not in the West or the East -- but in the North.

The High Arctic Exiles

The story of the High Arctic Exiles is one of the most awful and painful tales of the eastern Arctic Inuit, a parable of sorts about how a government used to treating its native inhabitants as mute collateral, and a native population with a culture of deference to abstract and distant authority, can lead to a destructive dislocation for which no apology, and no compensation, can atone.  To be uprooted from a home one's people have hunted and thrived in for ten thousand years, and relocated to a place utterly devoid of game, of life, of anything more than mere dependance, is not something that can be measured in dollars, in words, or in any known currency of the soul. Canada has their anguish on its hands, and it always will.

And yet, like so many other roads to hell -- the forcible taking of Inuit south for TB treatment, or the establishment of permanent settlements and schools for native peoples -- it was richly paved with good intentions.  For the federal government of Canada, there was a great anxiety about the regions north of the Barrow straits -- the Queen Elizabeth Islands, and the northern stretch of Ellesmere Island.  You might be nervous too, if your powerful southern neighbor -- the United States -- had sent explorers into your lands, naming vast tracts after George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.  And for the Inuit, who had shifted with skill from a subsistence hunting model to one which emphasized hunting animals for fur for trade, the prospect of co-operating with the Qalunaat had, at least until then, generally led to what seemed like good results.  After all, as Tiivi says in The Necessities of Life, "what if their stories are true?"

So, as often happened, the RCMP came together with the traders, asking the Inuit of Ungava if they would be willing to re-locate farther north.  It was a land of abundance, they were told, and the move was not permanent -- they could go back in two years if they didn't like their new home -- such were the lies.  Well, why not? thought many -- we will see what this will bring, and if we don't like it, we will go back.  Yet no such possibility was in fact allowed for.

As quoted in a story in the Nunatsiaq News, Markoosie Patsauq vividly remembered the day his ship arrived and his exile began in 1955, when he was only 12 years old: “My impression of Resolute was that we had arrived in a dead land,” he said. “There was no sign of any life, not even the seagull.”  And so it was to be; there was little if any game to hunt, and the Inuit who arrived in Resolute and Grise Fjord found themselves to be abject dependents of the adjacent Canadian bases.  They were forced to rely on the leftovers of the Qalunaat, their garbage really -- proud men who had been used to grappling with the daily challenge of hunting and keeping their families alive were reduced to improvising food and shelter out of packing crates, tinned food, and military surplus.

And, in one of the harshest ironies of history, Josephie Flaherty -- the son of filmmaker Robert and the woman credited on camera as "Nyla, the smiling one" -- along with his wife Rynee and their children, were among the Inuit taken from Ungava to nowhere. Rynee still remembers:

She bundled up a few essential belongings, a canvas tent, pots and pans and some blankets, along with her three kids, Martha, 5, Mary, 3, and Peter, aged 6 months. Her family had to move without sled dogs, crucial to survival in the High Arctic, because theirs died before the voyage began. The government offered no help, not even boxes for their things, she says. During the journey, the ship's doctor diagnosed Rynee's daughter Mary with pulmonary tuberculosis. When they reached Churchill, Maniyoba, on the west coast of Hudson Bay, Mary was one of several children taken away for treatment. There wasn't anyone to translate the nurses' English into Inuktitut, so Rynee couldn't understand what they were doing with her daughter.

"I thought they would bring her back right away," she says. "They didn't tell me anything, except that she was leaving."

More than two years passed before she saw her child again. After six months in a sanitarium, Mary was moved to Montreal to wait for the next voyage of the C.D. Howe, which mistakenly dropped her off at Inukjuak. Even though Mary had a number, and an ID tag around her neck, the system somehow forgot her family had moved to Grise Fiord. After the sanitarium, she ended up in far-flung foster families for a few years. She was finally reunited with her family on one of the first flights to land in Grise Fiord. She had forgotten how to speak Inuktitut. The only words Rynee could understand of her daughter's English were "dirty," when she complained about her new home, and "water," when she was thirsty.

‏"She didn't want to be with us," her mother says, the wound still raw. "She didn't want to get off the plane. She wanted to be with qalunaaqs. She used to cry a lot because we were strangers to her."

‏After losing Mary, then Martha – who was sent to residential schools for several years – as well as his self-respect, all to a treacherous system, Josephie lost his mind. By the early 1970s, he was always pacing and whispering to himself. Going silent, and blank, when his wife tried to help.

‏"He got sick of being poor, struggling," Rynee says.

‏He died in 1984, before he could persuade the RCMP and the government to keep their promise and let him take his family back to Inukjuak, their home.

‏"We were guinea pigs," his widow says. "It didn't matter whether we died or not as long as there were Canadian bodies up there to prove the islands belonged to the Canadian government."

NB: For your convenience here are links to some relevant readings and viewings (also on our sidebar): Excerpt from The Long Exile; the Cryropolitics Blog; the short film Exile; Wikipedia page on the Territorial Evolution of Canada; Community Visit to Grise Fiord); as with the Cryropolitics Blog, feel free to browse as much (or as little) as you like.

p.s. I also finally found a link to the video of Tudjaat, a throat-singing pair of cousins descended from the High Arctic Exiles, singing "Kajusita (When My Ship Comes In)"; the woman in the video is their grandmother, herself one of the Exiles.

Shamanism meets Christianity

For thousands of years, Inuit belief was centered around a shamanistic belief system. When there was trouble, one paid a visit to the local angekoq. He -- or she, there were a great many women shamans -- might ask a few questions; had you and your family broken a taboo? If so, ritual cleansing might be in order. If not, the shaman might speak with others in the band -- had they? All else failing, the angekoq might summon one of her tongait, or spirit helpers. These were often embodied in a small charm worn on the belt, and might be made of an old piece of animal skin or bone. Brought to life, the spirit helper would enable the angekoq to travel wherever he needed -- to the bottom of the sea to visit Sedna, to a neighboring band, or even to the Moon -- as Kenn Harper once pointed out, Neil Armstrong wasn't the first man to set foot there -- Inuit had been visiting for milennia!

When missionaries finally arrived in the more remote areas of the Arctic, the shamanistic system faced a challenge. Shamanism had always had practical as well as spiritual value -- what could Christianity do if the seals didn't come to their breathing holes? -- but at the same time shamanism worked mainly by fear, and brought with it "numerous and irksome" taboos, as recounted in the introduction to our book. Perhaps understandably, while attending church and even becoming catechists and preachers, Inuit quietly kept shamanism alive, like a fire extinguisher in a closet, in case of necessity.

Isuma productions has dramatized the onset of Christianity, showing both its attractions and its coercive elements, in an episode of its Nunavut series, Avaja. In it, the priest offers his Inuit neighbors gifts of tobacco, attaching the promise that when they hear the bell, they must come to the church. He preaches a sermon about "Mosesesee" and the Burning Bush (a tough sell for people who have never seen a bush), and they seem to comply with his wishes, singing along loudly with every hymn. Nevertheless, it's clear that one reason they chose to attend was the anxiety of not being impolite, and (perhaps) the fear of offending the new God and his ministers. For Inuit who were there to witness this development, there has always been a sense of doubleness, of living between and yet within two worlds.

The spread of this new faith was uneven at first, and often the text of the Bible or other religious texts arrived well before any context with which to understand them. Perhaps the worst case of this was the Belcher Islands incident of 1941, in which a hunter named Peter Sala -- the only man on the islands who could read syllabics -- decided that he was God and his son was Jesus. Those who would not follow his orders were killed. His sister even claimed to have a vision of the second coming, and declared that Jesus was going to float down in his kayak from the sky -- and Inuit needed to be naked in order to receive his blessings. Perhaps needless to say, many of those who listened to her froze to death.

This and many other stories are told here, by Kenn Harper, based on installments of his long-running column, Taissumani ("in those days") in the Nunatsiaq News. Read them -- many are strange indeed -- and unlike the tales in Kayak Full of Ghosts, most of them are true stories. In your comments, choose one of them, and describe your reaction to it.

Nanook of the North

Nanook of the North has been hailed as the first and greatest documentary film, and although I would not necessarily agree with either claim (it's certainly not the first, in any case). But yes, Nanook rewrote the book for documentary film, and it did so by taking a number of pages out of the history of dramatic film.

Robert Flaherty had actually compiled two different sets of footage in the Arctic in the years before Nanook, and had at first intended to use this material to make his film. And yet, although this material clearly showed the "actual" Arctic, it did so piecemeal, and without any strong central narrative. When the working print caught fire and was destroyed (early nitrite film stock was highly flammable), Flaherty decided on a whole new plan. Instead of simply pointing his camera at things that were actually happening, he decided to "cast" specific Inuit as members of an imaginary family, and then deliberately create a narrative which not only included the "incidents" he'd earlier filmed, but extended the story through a complete dramatic arc, much as would a feature film. The idea was revolutionary, but still he needed backers to provide the resources.

He found a willing sponsor in Revillon Frères, a fur concern which operated a series of trading posts; the "friendly trader" in the early scenes is from one of these. The company simply asked that they be portrayed in a positive light, a seemingly small request, but one which nevertheless does affect the film's objectivity. Flaherty also wished to depict Inuit life from the era before the adoption of modern weapons such as rifles; thus, although one of the main reasons the Inuit traded with the white man was to obtain guns and ammunition, this was not shown, and "Nanook" hunts only with a spear. He

even persuaded them to conduct a walrus hunt with traditional weapons, something the local Inuit had not done for more than a generation, and which they were reluctant at first to re-enact. As Inuit writer Alootook Ipellie pointed out, it would be as though someone came to modern Toronto to ask the locals to show how everyone lived in the 1800's!

And of course Nanook himself, his wife Nyla "the smiling one," and the rest of the family depicted by Flaherty were in fact actors, Inuit playing an Inuit family. Nanook was portrayed by Allakariallak, whom Flaherty chose for his patience and rugged appearance; Nyla was played by a young Inuk woman, Maggie Nujarlutuk, who was, actually Flaherty's common-law wife at the time the film was made, and one of the babies shown may have been their child, Joseph (or Josephie; the Inuit added an -ie or -ee to many western names). Like many other explorers and travelers before him, including Peary and Henson, Flaherty left his child behind when he headed back south to take up a career as a filmmaker. Josephie Flaherty was, as fate would have it, one of the Ungava Inuit who was to be forcibly relocated to Resolute and Grise Fiord in the 1950's in a misguided attempt to strengthen Canadian sovereignty in the North. This group, known as the "High Arctic Exiles," finally received a financial settlement offer from the federal Canadian government a few years ago, but no apology was made then, or has been made since.

And to be fair, Flaherty could not necessarily have anticipated the worldwide response to his film. Although Revillon Frères thought of it more or less as a promotional venture and did not even expect to recover their costs, Nanook was picked up for distribution by Pathé, given a New York premiere and went on to be one of the most successful films of 1922. Flaherty was given a contract by Paramount, and headed off for Samoa to make a film about the native people there; this second film took three years to make, and was not as successful as Nanook, although it was in reference to this film that the word "documentary" was coined (such films had previously been known as "actualities"). Flaherty was next paired with W.S. Van Dyke to make another south seas film, but they had a falling out (Van Dyke was later to make 1933's "Eskimo," the first big-budget, big-screen northern epic of the sound era). After parting ways with Van Dyke, Flaherty was sent to work with German visionary F.W. Murnau to work on a film called "Tabu," but they too soon had a falling out. Flaherty next moved to Britain, and worked on some shorter films as well as "Man of Aran," which was set in the remote Aran islands. He then went to work for producer Alexander Korda on a film set in India, to be titled "Elephant Boy," and yet again was fired from the project. Back in the U.S., he worked on several more documentaries, but problems with financing and distribution meant that few of them were ever seen in his lifetime.

One of the stories that Flaherty liked to tell was how Allakariallak, less than two years after Nanook was filmed, had starved to death in the frozen wilderness that was his home. The press loved this story, and it's still frequently repeated today. But it's not true; according to testimony from his son and other family members, Allakariallak died from "white man's disease" -- probably tuberculosis -- at home with his family. He may well have been exposed to it during the time he worked with Flaherty on Nanook.

NB: To watch Nanook online, the best link is this one. You may also be interested to see "Flaherty and Film," an old television broadcast which features a fascinating interview with Flaherty's widow.