Canadians (47 page)

The territory was booming, with diamond mines opening up, plans being laid for a gas and oil pipeline down the fragile Mackenzie River Valley, talk everywhere of new roads, bridges, and jobs, jobs, jobs. It seemed as though, nearly a half century on, John Diefenbaker's great “Northern Vision” was coming true, at least in the Northwest Territories.

“Sir John A. Macdonald opened the West,” Dief told a Winnipeg crowd in February of 1958. “He saw Canada from east to west. I see a new Canada—a Canada of the North!” His government would build new roads into the North to reach the rich resources. It would create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Canadians. It was, he promised his cheering supporters, “A new vision! A new hope! A new
soul
for Canada!”

The Globe and Mail,
in a Valentine's editorial that followed the speech, said the new prime minister had “struck a note which has not been heard since the completion of the transcontinental railways.” It gave him his majority government. But a few years later this great Northern Vision amounted to a partially paved road that headed north out of Yellowknife toward the Barrens, soon petered out into gravel … and then vanished altogether into the tundra.

Diefenbaker never won another election, and the “Northern Vision” faded for more than a generation—suddenly to rise again in 2006. There was new vision, all right, and new hope. But there was also great concern for the old soul of Canada.

In Dettah, another Dogrib community, this one within sight of Yellowknife, I met with ninety-three-year-old Michel Paper, who could talk about the first time he ever saw a white man, and how they were so terrified of each other that they ran in opposite directions. He'd never seen a shovel before either, and the day he was shown his first one he began twenty-six years of working with it at the nearby Giant gold mine.

“A shovel,” he laughed. “I didn't know what it was used for. I could hunt. I could snowshoe. I could run a dog team. I could fish. I could trap. But I didn't even know how to hold a shovel.”

He used that shovel to help poison his own land, the mines and their tailings leading to arsenic in Great Slave Lake. “We lived so good before the white man came,” he told me. “Nobody ever got sick. We got our food from the land. We got our fish from the lake. We drank water from the lake. Then after 1934 people got sick. There's no animals here any more. Big animals are all gone. I don't know where they've gone. We're scared to eat the fish now because we're told they're all poisoned. We're told not to drink the water.”

Michel, who grew up in a world where he could chop a hole in the ice or lie down on the warm rocks and drink the ice-cold waters of Great Slave Lake, now lives in a world where water comes in large jars accompanied by an $80-a-month bill.

Today, North of Summer is under siege from sources other than gold mining. The greatest concern comes from beyond, in the form of gases that bring temperature changes that threaten to change the entire world— but nowhere so dramatically as in the North.

There are magpies now in Yellowknife, something never before seen. But then, too, there are grizzlies that arrived from the opposite direction, also never before seen. Territories premier Joe Handley says he's looked out his office window and seen coyotes running across the ice of Frame Lake. Coyotes have never been known to be so far north. Same with white-tailed deer, now often sighted. Polar bears are in danger of having no ice on which to hunt. In some places caribou populations have dwindled to the point where hunting has been suspended. Wood bison are getting closer and closer to Yellowknife. There are new plants showing up.
The winter temperature in wide parts of the Far North has been eight degrees above average. Robins have been sighted in Iqaluit.

In May of 2006 an American big-game hunter shot and killed an animal they're calling a “grizlar”—half grizzly, half polar bear—on Banks Island in the Arctic Ocean. The hunter and his guide had presumed it was a polar bear, having white fur, but the head and the eyes and the neck and even the claws looked wrong. Somehow the two breeds, from decidedly different habitats, had come together to produce the first hybrid ever recorded in the wild.

There are many serious issues in the magnificent north of this country. There is poverty. Assaults and sexual abuse are far above the Canadian mean. Infant mortality rates are triple the national rate. There is widespread alcoholism and easy access to drugs. Gasoline sniffing is an epidemic among the young in some communities. Suicide rates soar far beyond the averages found in the rest of the country. The education system sorely needs repair. There are few jobs in Nunavut and, so far, limited prospects for the resource projects that are flooding into the Northwest Territories and Yukon.

But nothing compares to the threat coming from environmental change—change that could mean the end of certain northern species and that threatens the very way of life for the Inuit and Inuvialuit and First Nations and Métis.

There are still deniers out there, but their numbers are declining faster than the polar bear population—and faster still, had any of them travelled with us to Tanquary Fiord on the far northern edges of Ellesmere Island. There, hiking in the northernmost wilderness reserve in the world, Canada's Quttinirpaaq National Park, we stared in awe at “The Hand of God”—a massive glacier shaped, eerily, like a long forearm reaching down into the fiord, thumb and four fingers tightened as if it were a giant hand seeking purchase on earth. The rangers have photographs taken over the years that show the arm shrinking, the fingers appearing to tighten … the grip slipping.

“The world can tell us everything we want to know,” Quitsak Tarkiasuk of James Bay told a workshop organized by the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee in the late 1990s. “The only problem for the world
is that it doesn't have a voice. But the world's indicators are there. They're always talking to us.”

The world might find it easier to talk than the people themselves do. The Inuit have no word for such things as the robins and barred owls and even hornets they've been seeing in recent months. During the winter of 2004–05 officials in Nunavut brought together twenty Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun interpreters and elders to see if they could find ways to talk about all the baffling changes that have come their way in the last few years.

They came up with 131 new words, many of them variations on
hila,
a simple word for that most complex of northern realities, weather.

For “climate change,” they now say
hilaupaalannguqtirninga
.

For “global warming,” they will say
hilaupuunnakpallianinga
.

And
nunguttut
—a word they hope is never used—will stand for “extinction.”

In the words of Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference from 2002 to 2006, “If you can protect the Arctic, you save the planet.”

“Everything is here, you know,” Michel Paper said that day I visited him at his home in little Dettah. “A lot of gold. A lot of diamonds. A lot of oil and gas. The Creator did so many things for us. He put fish in the water and we took the fish out and He never asked us for anything. The white man asks for everything. I sometimes think the white man has more power than the Creator.”

The old man shrugged. He began absent-mindedly shuffling the cards that sat on top of a well-worn cribbage board. “He's not going to go away, you know.”

Who?

“The white man. He's not going to go away. All my life I helped whites. Whites need to help me now. You're not going to go away—so we should work together.”

ON THE LONG TRIP through Nunavut we spent time in Iqaluit, Pangnirtung, Pond Inlet, Resolute Bay, Grise Fiord, Eureka, and Alert. Seven small specks on a huge map.

But that, perhaps, may be what makes this country different from any other. You might
see
England, and you might
tour
Europe—but it is impossible in Canada. It is a country you can only taste. And for a good many of us, all that does is increase the appetite for more.

My experiences in the Far North were all new. I put a borrowed snow machine through the ice in Resolute—
Sorry about that!
—and met a man in Iqaluit, Adamee Itorcheak, who was determined to bring wireless internet to every single community.

At the impossibly spectacular community of Pangnirtung I found the Pang Golf and Country Club, open twenty-four hours a day and with no twilight fee—there being no twilight during the Nunavut golf season. There's just the one hole, but if it were part of the PGA Tour it would make the seventeenth of Sawgrass or the eighteenth at Pebble Beach look like so many straightway, no-frill mini-putt holes.

Late one “night” I watched while children as young as seven and those in their twenties lined up to take their turn on the most challenging hole in all of golf. They teed off on the only flat surface of rock along the shore. Arctic Ocean and ice floes were out of bounds to the left, steep hill and more rock formed hazards to the right. And if you teed off straight down the middle it could be even worse—solid rock to bounce the shots off into nowhere, puddles and bog to suck the ball down into a trap that would terrify Tiger Woods.

A makeshift flag marks the hole that has been dug out of the dirt, and beyond that sits the Pangnirtung Visitors Centre, a small display case just behind the main window holding a number of artifacts from early exploration days. One treasure, found in an old Scottish whaling camp, is an ancient golf club, a rusty niblick.

The white man, as Michel Paper said, obviously did not go away.

At Grise Fiord—site of the world's greatest white-knuckle landing strip—I spent a day with Larry Audlaluk. While he skinned a ring seal down by the water I knelt and watched and listened to his remarkable story: a people torn from their roots and forced to move thousands of kilometres north to make do in a land whose animals they didn't recognize and hadn't a clue how to hunt; a people so miserable that some, like
Larry's own father, died from heartbreak that first cruel winter; a place so dark and desolate that the people themselves decided to move across the bay to catch just a little more sunlight each day when there was sun; a place where, the day Larry came back from this bay carrying an Arctic char, his mother broke down and wept at the memory of how food she once knew tasted.

More than fifty years had passed since Larry Audlaluk came here as a very young boy. He talked about the hardships and the unfairness and how, over time, the horrible dark and cold place where his people had been sent by the government became something quite unexpected. “People have to move on,” he said. “The young have grown up here. This is their home.

“It's my home now … I love it here.”

LARRY AUDLALUK'S HOME in Grise Fiord, Nunavut; Betty Fitzgerald's in Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland; Clarence Brazier's in Sprucedale, Ontario; Gerald Merkel's in Raymore, Saskatchewan; Elizabeth Chocolate's in Behchoko, Northwest Territories; Connie Smith's in Fort McMurray, Alberta; Marie-Eve Lainesse's in Verchères, Quebec; Shirley Chan's in Vancouver, British Columbia; and some 32,146,547—and counting—other Canadians' homes in St. John's, Halifax, Charlottetown, Fredericton, Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Sault St. Marie, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Prince George, Vancouver, Victoria, and in thousands of towns and villages and crossroads across five and a half time zones and stretching from the boardwalk at Point Pelee to the runway at Alert.

And such a home, too. A home so many say they love, as Larry Audlaluk does, but a home, too, that seems forever in danger of some imminent collapse over some threat or other, whether real or perceived.

Some prefer to stick to the doom and gloom, the true northerner's sure bet. I prefer to think Peter C. Newman got it right in his memoirs,
Here Be Dragons,
when he neared the end, sighed deeply, and wrote that after half a century of recording all the mistakes and twists and crises of the country, he could conclude only that “Canada takes a lot of killing.”

But the Bumblebee Nation, somehow, remains afloat, its flight plan determined by whatever wind happens to be blowing, by pure whim, by good luck, by some unknowable genetic command to keep going, no matter what.

Perhaps this country's true genius does lie in that line down the middle of the road that a highways worker stumbled on back in 1930. It certainly isn't perfect—accidents will happen—but by and large it works well enough to keep things moving in all directions.

What we cannot know—what we really don't even want to know—is which direction that line is headed.

And what, pray, lies around the next corner.

And the next …

TOWARD THE END of that long trip into the Far North we reached Canadian Forces Base Alert on the most northern tip of Canada's most northern point of land, Ellesmere Island. Beyond this shore there is only frozen ocean between Canada and the northernmost tips of Norway, Russia, and Alaska.

It is so far north that if you hold up a compass it will point to the north magnetic pole—to the west and
south
of where you're standing in this land of endless contradiction.

Here, on a bright early June day in 2005, with a sharp wind gusting in off the ice, Governor General Adrienne Clarkson and her husband, author John Ralston Saul, set out to build a stone cairn. They chose a point at the very end of the long Alert runway, right where the loose stone and gravel drops down fast toward the jumbled ice of the frozen Arctic Ocean.

Right where Canada ends. Or where Canada begins, depending on which direction you might be travelling.

Clarkson herself chose this spot so that it might stand as a statement of proprietorship at a point where, on a clear day, you can spin in your tracks on the loose gravel and make out the United States Mountain Range to your lower left, the British Empire range to the lower right, and the high cliffs of Greenland to the far right and know that, straight
ahead across the choppy ice, Russia sits somewhere beyond the slow pale curve of the horizon.