Among the Inuit

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The twin-engine Otter soars over the mountains and fjords of northern Baffin Island, near Bylot Island. The pilot flies low along a rugged coastline that rises steeply to the tundra plateau. Nunavut covers 770,000 square miles, one-fifth of all Canadian land, encompassing some 29,000 inhabitants (a population density of one person per 26 square miles). Eighty-five percent of the inhabitants are Inuit; more than half are under 25 years of age. North Baffin Island, 1999

Hiking alone along the high ridges, lured to the next bay around the next fjord, I often walked all night in the sunshine, swallowed up in the magnificence and isolation of the High Arctic. Milne Inlet, Eclipse Sound, North Baffin Island, 1998

A rock, deposited here by glaciers, is now a thin ecological niche providing a home to lichen. Owls also perch, hunt and eat here. From decay comes a delicate ring of moss campion that grows on the perimeter of this little fertile oasis of Arctic habitation. Cape Crauford, Lancaster Sound, North Baffin Island, 1999

A “matchbox” house in Igloolik — small with thin walls, little insulation and big stoves. Matchboxes are what passed for housing in the 1950s. They were steamily overheated in the winter, when outside it was cold and bone-dry. At the time when everyone lived in these government-built houses, tuberculosis raged through Canadian Inuit settlements. Igloolik, 1977

Woman in the old sewing centre softens skin by chewing it. Igloolik, 1978

Inside an old stone Catholic Church, Igloolik, 1976

A caribou skin dries on a clothesline. Turton Bay Beach, Igloolik, 1976

We were 30 miles from the nearest point of land, in the northern reaches of Foxe Basin. There were nine of us: 45-year-old Paulosie; his wife Iga; their children Andy, Auksou, Jeanne, Johnny, Maliki and two-year-old Leita; and me.

We travelled for five or six days. It was difficult to keep track. We ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired. We slowly made our way through often-treacherous drifting pan ice towards Paulosies family summer camping place on North Baffin Island.

Deporah Qaunaq, Andy’s aunt, fillets and prepares big red slabs of Arctic char, fresh from the nets in front of the camp. Often indistinguishable from the fish, her hands move like a sculptor’s with speed, precision, and dedication. Her husband Simeonie, a full-time hunter, defied the law and killed a bowhead whale so that his elderly father-in-law, Noah Piugattuk, could taste it once again before passing away. Oopingiviajuk, August, 1997.

I lived with Paulousie and his family in this tent during the spring, summer and fall of 1976. I learned far more about myself than I did about my Inuit family. The only privacy I had was when my eyes were closed. Kangilujak, Steensby Inlet, North Baffin Island, 1976.

Caribou meat is strewn over rocks to dry outside the tents. In camp we all help ourselves to the meat whenever we want, and we sleep whenever we want. Here I lose all sense of time. Oopingiviajuk, North Baffin Island, 1998.

One Sunday morning both Papa (centre left) and Deporah (right) illustrate to young people in the camp how to cut a caribou skin to make a parka. "The neck is the strongest part," Deporah says. Oopingiviajuk, North Baffin Island, 1998

Boiling caribou meat and roasting marshmallows. Collecting enough small green sparse willow and bits of moss to make a fire, and keeping it going, are always challenging. Oopingiviajuk, North Baffin Island, August 1997

Isaac and Rebecca Irngaut make bannock with flour and seal fat. Paulosie Attagutalukutuk’s oldest brother, Isaac, committed suicide by slitting his own throat. Rebecca Awa remembers him as a “very thoughtful man who cleared snow from the church and elderly people’s steps all winter long.” Kangilujak, Steensby Inlet, North Baffin Island, 1978

Martha Angugattiaq Ungaalaaq was Rebecca Awa’s grandmother and the daughter of Wilfred Corone, who went with Joseph Bernier and the Hudson’s Bay Company to trade for furs in Igloolik. Rebecca tells me that Martha was “adopted by a childless couple and was a strong woman who never complained about her once broken and chronically painful back.” Kangilujak, Steensby Inlet, North Baffin Island, 1976

Jenny Irngaut peers out of the tent at her family’s summer camping place. The family leaves Igloolik by boat every year to hunt caribou and to fish for Arctic char. She is now Jenny Awa. Kangilujak, Steensby Inlet, North Baffin Island, 1976

Andy Attagutalukutuk picks marrow out of a bone, one of his favourite things to eat. He uses his knife, but sometimes he carves a little bone tool that slides into the leg bone so he can more easily scoop out the rich oily marrow. "I come here to eat," Andy says. Oopingiviajuk, North Baffin Island, August 1997

Esa Kripanik rests with fresh caribou meat that he is carrying back to camp. He and his wife, Teporah Qaunaq, who is Paulosie's niece, walked about five kilometers from camp to shoot this caribou. Oopingiviajuk, North Baffin Island, 1997

Paulosie carries a caribou skin and meat back to the boat near Kangilujak. When he was young, living meant hunting; blood meant life; and living the questions was more important than seeking the answers. He left the Arctic only once, in August 1997, when diagnosed with liver cancer. He died two months later. He was one of the last full-time Inuit hunters. Kangilujak, Steensby Inlet, North Baffin Island, August 1976

Seal hunter Augustin Taqqaugaq and his son Lukie motor through the shifting autumn ice floes of Foxe Basin. They harpoon a seal after it has been shot and before it can sink. How quickly a seal sinks depends on the season; how fat the animal is; and the currents, temperature and salinity of the water. Foxe Basin, 1976.

We stop on pan ice to eat seal meat and collect fresh water for tea. The first time I ate raw seal liver I was very pleasantly surprised that it tasted so sweet and mild. It seems like the perfect food to eat out here. Foxe Basin, Igloolik, 1976

Paulosie hunting seals with his sons Andy and Molokai. This was mostly a matter of waiting quietly for long periods until a seal would stick its head out of the water or until people got tired of waiting, which was hardly ever. Paulosie had enduring patience. Time didn’t have much meaning for him. He just did what had to be done, no matter how long it took. We once spent a week camped on the beach of a small unnamed island fixing and replacing with walrus skin the rubber bushings around the propeller shaft of his old boat. Steensby Inlet, North Baffin Island, 1977

Rebecca Paapaaq Malliki, “Papa,” stands motionless over a seal’s breathing hole. She carries a small baby on her back, inside her parka or amunti. When you’re hunting seals on the rough sea ice, the first challenge is to recognize and locate all the breathing holes within an area, and then to disturb most of them so that the seals are discouraged from using them. The seals will be forced to use the undisturbed holes. Here, one must stand very still, with a harpoon or gun, hoping that a seal comes up for air. Foxe Basin, Igloolik, April 1976

Semi Malliki hunting seals at the floe edge. The son of Noah and Elizabeth Piugattuk, he has moved to Repulse Bay. When I showed this photograph to an old Inuk friend, she told me in her shy, non-judgmental way: "Don't print this because his parka would be considered very ordinary, because it looks like whoever made it ran out of white fur to put around the arms." Floe Edge, Fury and Hecla Straighs, Igloolik Foxe Basin

Looking for seals by dog sled. Cape Crauford, Lancaster Sound, North Baffin Island, August 2000

Eco-tourists at Cape Crauford, Lancaster Sound, North Baffin Island, August 2000

A hunter wearing waterproof sealskin kamaks drives his dog team, pulling a small plywood boat he uses to retrieve seals after shooting them. Floe edge, Igloolik, 1978

Two Igloolik hunters have tea and wait by their qamuti (a traditional sled) for seals. Floe Edge, Igloolik, 1977

This man shot a seal from the ice edge and is retrieving it using a very small homemade plywood boat. At this polynya — an area of sea that remains free of ice — the currents of the Fury and Hecla Strait create a mix of high nutrient levels that make the floe edge an excellent habitat for seals, walruses and whales. The supply of food in the year-round open water is the reason that people have been inhabiting Igloolik Island for over 5,000 years. Floe edge, Foxe Basin, Igloolik, April 1975

Stopping for tea, Alain shields his camp stove from the wind in order to light it. A good way to start a cold primus stove is to pinch a little caribou fur from your parka and lay it around the element. The fur ignites well. Harsh Arctic realities are at no time more manifest than in winter, on either land or sea ice. The distinction between “land life” and “settlement life” becomes obvious when you return to Igloolik after sleeping in igloos or hunting cabins, with only a qulliq for light and warmth. Approached from a distance, Igloolik appears like a flickering jewel on the horizon, a grand spectacle - an intensely inviting womb of warm light that I am desperate to reach. North Baffin Island, Igloolik, April 1976

Caribou hunters having tea on the ice. North Baffin Island, Igloolik, 1976

Building an igloo. “The snow is very poor here, too soft on top and too hard at the bottom … but it is the best we have found,” Andy Attagutalukutuk says. We have to cut blocks “on the horizontal, flat side up,” out of the middle of this snow patch. He spirals the blocks around himself like a snail building its own shell, which rises higher and higher. It’s like winding a little womb in the wilderness. As he adds blocks, they shield him more and more from the wind, which is now very strong and so paralyzingly cold that even short exposures are lethal to living tissue. “Left-handed people build igloos in a clockwise direction, and right-handed people go counterclockwise, but there are not many people who build them properly any more,” he says. North Baffin Island

Andy Awa was always happy to go caribou hunting, and he was a real joker. Andy’s late grandfather Awa was a great shaman, and Andy's widow Rebecca remembers him telling her that he had to be treated like his grandfather. “He was very spoiled when he was a child,” she tells me, “like Sheba our daughter is by my father. She is named after my grandfather, who disappeared while he was hunting. When my father was young, he used to watch the hunters coming back to camp, hoping his own father would be among them. He treated my daughter Sheba just like she’s his father who has returned. He sometimes called her ‘father,’ and he really spoiled her”. Foxe Basin, Igloolik, 1976

After a long night of fixing, re-fixing, and fixing again a breakdown on Andy Attagutalukutuk’s snowmobile, we arrived at this tiny hunting cabin, all snowed in. “We will sleep here tonight,” Andy says, as if there were any doubt. All this time I had assumed we would eventually build an igloo to sleep in, as we did 20 years ago when I travelled with Inuit hunters like Andy’s father Paulosie. I am cold, tired, and delighted to accept the end of intrigue for now. And when I look at our little cozy cabin here in this black, cold wind, it becomes staggeringly obvious why building an igloo makes no sense. Harry is here too, busy unpacking his qamuti. “I stayed here last winter. That window was broken by a polar bear,” Andy says, referring to a damaged and repaired window frame. What a remarkable place this is. Twenty years ago, there were no cabins like this. Around 9 p.m. we hear snowmobiles outside. The door soon swings open, cold rushes in, and out of the cloud come two fur-clad Inuit hunters. This time it is two brothers, whose father owns the taxi business in Igloolik. I watch them pull off their fur parkas, seal-skin pants, and layers of clothes: caribou socks, then wool duffle socks, then plastic bags inside those, and then a seal-skin boot inside the plastic. Andy and I make room for them on the sleeping platform. I introduce myself, but there is no response. “They are quite deaf,” Andy explains. “If you find an old man who isn’t deaf [from gunfire and snowmobile noise], it means he hasn’t been hunting much.” Andy himself is very deaf. North Baffin Island, Igloolik, 1999

I spent many hours riding qamuti (sleds). Hanging on and contending with the biting wind chill are relentlessly challenging. With every turn, I adjust my caribou parka hood, and with it the wind’s angle of attack against my face. When I feel solid spots — frozen flesh — I hold my mitts against my cheeks, but then there is a gap between my mitts and parka, where searing wind bites a thin frozen ring around my wrist. The qamuti creaks, rumbles and whispers differently with each moment of terrain. The two heavy timber runners and 12 wooden crosspieces are all lashed together on the qamuti with the skin of bearded seal, so the sled remains flexible and pliant in all directions. It changes shape and adjusts to every bump and contour. Over ice, it resonates like a hollow drum. Passing over deep snow drifts, the qamuti whispers softly. Gravel produces a horrible rumble. When we go over pressure ridges, especially when bigger pieces of ice hit the runners, it becomes critical to keep both legs away from the edge. At times it is like riding a bucking bull on a fast-moving conveyor belt. Floe edge, Fury and Hecla Strait, Foxe Basin, 1976