Authors: Wade Davis
Theo and John grew up together, and their lives
in many ways encapsulate the story of the Inuit in the twentieth century.
Igloolik, today the cultural heart of Nunavut, historically had remarkably
little contact with the outside world. William Parry, with two ships of the
British Navy, wintered in the ice off shore in 1821–22. In 1867 and again in
1868 the American explorer Charles Francis Hall passed through as he
searched for survivors of the Franklin Expedition. A French-Canadian
prospector, Alfred Tremblay, visited briefly in 1913, as did Peter Freuchen
in 1921 as part of Knud Rasmussen’s Fifth Thule Expedition. But that was the
limit of the European encounter.
The Arctic formally passed from British to
Canadian rule in 1880, but the first sustained contact at Igloolik did not
occur until the arrival of Catholic missionaries in the 1930s. Their
immediate goal was the destruction of the power and authority of the shaman,
the cultural pivot, the heart of the Inuit relationship to the universe. To
facilitate assimilation, they discouraged the use of traditional names,
songs, and the language itself. As always, trading goods proved seductive,
drawing the people toward the mission and away from the land, a process
encouraged by government authorities whose presence was well established by
the 1950s. A distemper epidemic allowed the authorities to rationalize the
wholesale slaughter of Inuit dogs. The introduction of the snowmobile in the
early 1960s increased dependence on the cash economy. Family allowance
payments were made contingent on the children’s attending school, creating
another incentive to settle. The government conducted a census and because
Inuktitut names were so difficult to transcribe, they identified each Inuk
by a number, issuing identification tags, and eventually conducting
Operation Surname, a bizarre effort to assign last names to individuals who
never had them. More than a few Inuit dogs were recorded as Canadian
citizens. A final blow came in the 1950s when the government, battling a
tuberculosis outbreak, forcibly evacuated every Inuk to a hospital ship to
be screened. Those who tested positive, roughly one in five, immediately
were shipped south for treatment, many never to return. The psychological
impacts on both those evacuated and those left behind were profound, and not
dissimilar to what families endured when their children were forcibly
removed from the home to be educated. At the ages of six and eight Theo and
John were sent south 800 kilometres to a residential school at Chesterfield
Inlet where, forbidden to speak their own language, and in the case of Theo
violated by a priest, they remained for seven years.
When finally they were allowed to return home,
their families took them immediately onto the land in what Theo today
describes as a rescue mission. Over a series of years, he recalls, “They
turned us back into Inuit men.”
The culmination of his rebirth was an epic
journey by dogsled, 1,800 kilometres from Igloolik across Baffin Island,
north along the shore of Ellesmere Island and across Smith Sound to
Greenland. Theo thought he might have relatives living in the small Inuit
community of Qaanaaq, the most northern settlement in the world. As it
turned out he did, all descendants of legendary shaman Qitdlarssuaq and a
small band of six families who had migrated north in the 1850s, taking two
full years to reach Greenland. Theo had done the journey in two months. Andy
and I invited him to return with us, on a charter flight of a mere six
hours. Almost immediately the plane crossed over the Baffin Island we could
see from the expression on Theo’s face that something was wrong. It was
April and our flight path was taking us 12 degrees south of the North Pole.
The sea ice was not there. Smith Sound, which Theo had crossed with his sled
dogs, was open water. He stared out the plane window in disbelief. A tear
grew in his eye as he said to no one in particular, “The ice should be
frozen by October. This year it didn’t come in until February. There were
robins in Igloolik. We don’t even have a word for them birds.”
The Inuit are a people of the ice. As hunters
they depend on it for their survival even as it inspires the very essence of
their character and culture. Gretel Ehrlich, who lived eight years among the
Polar Eskimo in Greenland, suggests that it is the nature of ice, the way it
moves, recedes, dissolves, and reforms with the seasons, that gives such
flexibility to the Inuit heart and spirit. “They have no illusions of
permanence,” she explains. “There is no time for regret. Despair is a sin
against the imagination. Their grocery store is out there on the land and
this creates an emotional life that’s so much bigger than that of those who
live in cities. They deal with death every day. To live they must kill the
things they most love. Blood on ice is not a sign of death but an
affirmation of life. Eating meat becomes a sacramental experience.”
Gretel was waiting for us in Qaanaaq when we
landed. With her was Jens Danielsen, her mentor in the north, a great bear
of a man with an enormous heart and immense skills as a hunter. Like Theo,
Jens had made an epic journey with dogs, in his case retracing the route of
Rasmussen’s Fifth Thule Expedition all the way from Greenland across the top
of Canada to distant Alaska. In the company of these two remarkable
individuals, Jens and Theo, our plan was to spend a fortnight on the ice,
establishing a hunting camp beyond the western shore of Qeqertarsuaq Island,
roughly two days from Qaanaaq. To get there we would travel by dogsleds.
Qaanaaq alone among all Inuit communities in the Arctic had long ago banned
the use of snowmobiles. In their wisdom the people had recognized that
keeping sled dogs was the fulcrum of their culture. Dogs loosened the
shackles binding the families to the cash economy. They made limitless the
length of any journey. They honed the skills of the hunter, who had to
provide a constant supply of meat. They brought security to the night. If
you were a master of dogs, you were, as Jens said, a master of your life.
After pounding at high speed over hundreds of
kilometres in
kamatiks
, with the constant high-pitched whine of
engines, it was pure joy to head out over spring ice at the slow but steady
pace of a dog team. It was movement as dream, the poetry of silence as steel
runners ran over soft snow. The land seemed to rise out of the horizon, and
oddly enough I was reminded of the
Hokule’a
and the wayfinders and how Nainoa always
described the canoe as the sacred centre that itself never moves, as the
vessel waits for the islands to come out of the sea. Theo and Jens were
themselves navigators, not only of the geography of their lands but of their
own cultural survival and that of their people. It was impossible to get
lost in the Arctic, Theo had told me a week earlier, during a fierce
blizzard that obliterated the sky and that forced eight of us to huddle for
three days in a plywood shelter of less than 3 square metres. As Theo cooked
Arctic char, Jens recalled each of the twenty-one polar bears he had killed,
as well as a dozen others that had nearly killed him. All you had to do was
read the snow. The prevailing winds caused all the drifts, large and small,
to point to the northwest. In the dark, even running at high speed, Theo
simply dragged a foot on the ground to know where he was going.
As it turned out the dogs were of limited value
once we reached the island of Qeqertarsuaq. There were great open leads in
the ice, and we were obliged to hunt by boat. Jens was stunned. He had never
seen open water in April. In his language the word
sila
means both weather and consciousness. Weather
brings animals or leads them away, allowing people to survive or causing
them to die. The ice, Jens explained, used to form in September and remain
solid until July. Now it comes in November and is gone by March. The hunting
season has been cut in half in a single generation. Gretel told me of a trip
she and Jens had made the previous summer. They were hunting narwhal and it
rained every day. They had stood one afternoon alone on a headland, looking
out to sea. “This is not our weather,” Jens had said. “Where does it come
from? I don’t understand.”
This then is the tragedy and perhaps the
inspiration of the Arctic. A people that have endured so much — epidemic
disease, the humiliation and violence of the residential schools, the
culture of poverty inherent in the welfare system, drug and alcohol exposure
leading to suicide rates six times that of southern Canada — now on the very
eve of their emergence as a culture reborn politically, socially, and
psychologically — find themselves confronted by a force beyond their
capacity to resist. The ice is melting, and with it quite possibly a way of
life.
THE HOPE LIES IN THE
severity of the crisis. This past year for the
first time in human history we became a predominantly urban species. In the
year 1820 only London had a population of more than a million. Today there
are 414 cities of such size or larger, and within 35 years demographers
predict there will be more than 1,000, many following the pattern of places
like Lagos, capital of Nigeria, which in 1955 had a population of 470,000
and by 2015 is projected to be home to over 16 million. Cloistered and
insulated within urban space, in many cases living already in toxic
conditions, city dwellers will not be the first to notice the consequences
of global climate change. Nearly fifteen years ago I sat on the shore of
Baffin Island with an Inuk elder, Ipeelie Koonoo, and watched as he
carefully cleaned the carburetor of his Ski-doo engine with the feather of
an ivory gull. He spoke no English, and I did not know Inuktitut. But with
Olayuk translating, Ipeelie told me then that the weather throughout the
Arctic had become wilder, the sun hotter each year, and that for the first
time Inuit were suffering from skin ailments, as he put it, caused by the
sky.
The impacts of climate change are only beginning
to be felt. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are at their highest in
650,000 years. Oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic, and the
population of zooplankton, the basis of the marine food chain, has dropped
73 percent since 1960. Natural habitats everywhere are under threat, the
cloud forests of the Andes, the grasslands of the Asian steppe, the lowland
rainforests of the Amazon, and the entire arid belt of the sub-Sahara from
the Horn of Africa to the Atlantic shores of Mauritania. Half the coral
reefs of the world either have died or are on the edge of collapse. The
largest known insect infestation in the history of North America has
destroyed millions of hectares of forest in the western United States, more
than 130,000 square kilometres of lodgepole pine in British Columbia alone,
and has now spread to Alberta to threaten the boreal forests of the
Subarctic. In the Pacific and Indian oceans, island nations such as the
Maldives, faced with the possibility of dramatic increases in sea level,
have made contingency plans for the evacuation of their entire populations.
But arguably the greatest immediate threat is to
be found in the mountain icefields that are the birthplaces of all the
world’s great rivers. On the Tibetan plateau, source of the Yellow River,
the Mekong and Yangtze, the Brahmaputra, Salween, Sutlej, Indus, and Ganges,
there has been no net accumulation of snow since at least 1950. These
glaciers are not just retreating at the margins, they are melting from the
surface down. Conservative estimates predict that 60 percent of China’s
glaciers will be gone by the end of this century. Half of humanity depends
on these rivers. Five hundred million people in the Indian subcontinent
alone turn to the Ganges for water; for 800 million Hindus it is the sacred
Ganga Ma, holiest of rivers. During the dry season, fully 70 percent of the
river’s flow originates in the Gangotri glacier, which is receding at a rate
of nearly 40 metres a year. If, as currently anticipated, the glacier
completely disappears, the Ganges will become a seasonal river within our
lifetimes. One shudders to anticipate the economic, political, and
psychological consequences for India. In 2007 riots occurred when a few
hundred pilgrims to the Amarnath Cave in Kashmir, located at 3,800 metres
and one of the holiest of Hindu shrines, found that the phallus-shaped
stalagmite of ice, for generations considered the sacred image of Lord
Shiva, had melted.
Throughout the world mountain people who played
no role in the creation of this crisis not only are seeing the impact of
climate change on their lives, they are taking personal responsibility for
the problem, often with a seriousness of intent that puts many of us to
shame. Eighty percent of the fresh water that feeds the western coast of
South America is derived from Andean glaciers. These are receding at such an
obvious rate that the pilgrims to the Qoyllur Rit’i, believing the mountain
gods to be angry, are no longer carrying ice from the Sinakara back to their
communities, forgoing the very gesture of reciprocity that completes the
sacred circle of the pilgrimage and allows for everyone to benefit from the
grace of the divine. In the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, the
mamos observe each season the recession of the snow and icefields that for
them are the literal heart of the world. They notice as well the
disappearance of birds, amphibians, and butterflies, and the changing
ecological character of the páramos, which are drying out. They have
increased both their ritual and political activities, and have formally
called on the Younger Brother to stop destroying the world. In Tanzania, the
Chagga look up to a mountain that has lost more than 80 percent of its
snowcap in a generation and ask what will happen to their fields and the
very idea of Africa when Kilimanjaro no longer shines over the ancient
continent.