The air raid siren just sounded, 10 PM.  I learned this week that besides being set up for a missile defense warning system, it denotes the vestigial curfew time and internationally accepted noon lunch time.  I like both as daily benchmarks or a synaesthetic occupant of one’s time… marking activities and weather from day to day, with sound.  It has the added emotional heft of the real air raid alarm, that Wurlitzer mechanical fan winding up to pump air through a whistle sound that makes you want to run for cover.  So it’s my second to last one here.  Tonight it happened during my walk to the heritage center; I bought a fairly tough steak and couldn’t bring myself to eat it, so I prepared it for the two neighbor dogs, Missy and Dora.

We spent an 80 hour week getting every last little part of the qalgiq put together.  I finished all final framing and wiring, put in three tortuous nights with arctic mortar and limestone shale.  The elders, Mary, Annie and Mabel sewed the rest of the seal skin for the outside of the tupik.  Only Mary speaks English to real effect… I think at this point the others are curious about it… but they have already succeeded in getting where they are, and can’t worry about really taking up anything like English.  My favorite comment from Annie this week: we were kind of frantically getting things together and trying to explain dimensions to them for the tupik frame (it turns out they’re better marking all dimensions with a little pen mark on string–which is actually the most accurate) and I came into their sewing room and Annie looked at me and took a sip of coffee and said, “Lot’s a time.”  I laughed at myself for a long time.  I’m not sure if she finally meant that there is lots of time, that we have lots of time, or that the project would still take lots of time, which it did, relatively.  We ended up pulling it together.  There are 43 seal skins in the structure and upholstery of the interior, all hunted locally, fully consumed, tanned and cured.  I don’t know anyone else with a theater quite like this:

All the skins are oriented with the head of the seal up.  Many of the skins within the theater have the whole head intact with the beady eye holes and whiskers intact.  All the flipper holes are very sensitively patched with a like seal fur from another skin.  There are special stitches for the different parts of the seal, all sewn with floss.

We ended up being unable to put in the earthen floor… which was probably a stroke of luck because it would have made the finish only more harrowing… I would be working right now if we were doing that part of the project.  The carpet job in this heritage center is actually quite nice and we set up the exterior wall in part of the four color design and it leads a person into the large doorway of the theater which works nicely: a couple of shots from the outside:

The name for this building is qagiq, pronounced something like “qual-ghik.”  It is a kind of community gathering place.  Some think it would have been mostly for men, to share about experiences in the field, hunting, to share with more youthful ones about successful means and methods of building hunting implements, to journey in the mind in spirit, and to relax and share.  I have come to a few realizations about this building, about the people, about the outstanding meeting of two incredibly different worlds that are just now meeting one another.

I am trying to get my head around what’s going on here, in Cambridge Bay and in the Arctic North, in terms of the light speed changes that are happening here.  It is not easy.  The activity of making this ancient style of structure with Brendan and thinking about the way things were up here–and then watching people react to what we’re doing in their land, in their heritage center–is sort of surreal.

To put that expression into context: 65 years ago my grandfather was finishing up with WWII, the United States had just defeated Hitler, the world had refined a seemingly bullet proof method of industrial fabrication and international trade.  The natives of all the participant nations were distant dreams (except the code talkers come to mind).  Up here, the United States government was beginning to put in heavy duty radar stations and gear up to seriously watch the former U.S.S.R. for any possible nuclear missile launches.  They built the Loran tower, the first major piece of communications infrastructure in Iqualuqtuqtiaq (Cambridge Bay, place of many fish).  The first transition architecture was built from the crates that the Loran tower was delivered in.  Along with it came cheap energy, packaged food, and alcohol.  The Western Industrial Canon was inserted into the Inuit vein.  Every year more materials for building and more food that could sit on a shelf showed up, and every year people moved ‘off the land.’  At that point they were capable of enjoying both things: they knew imminently well how to spear a seal, how to trap a fox… and what kind of crazy amazing thing was hot tea, canned oranges, and alcohol!  (On one of the days we were on the land a few weeks ago, I was complaining about the clouds of mosquitos, exclaiming about the idiocy of them not reacting to my organic mosquito repellent, Brendan explained that these–huge–mosquitos have not tasted blood for 10 or 20 generations.  They don’t give a shit about the balm you rubbed on your skin.)  Think about the effect of alcohol on a people who have not had anything like this in their blood since they parted ways with Genghis Kahn.  A people who drum with a shaman to listen to the spirit of a caribou tell them where to go.  Alcohol has the false mask of taking you right to the front door.  The appearance of the West in the North probably represents the most shocking cultural and social transition possible; more than the threat of Communism on Democracy, or Tyranny on Communism, or Feudalism on Villagers, or whatever: this transition was removing you from the land… not commercially traded and recorded land, the land.

In one generation, it is over.  Every last native person comes to water.  Every last Inuit is in a heated container of some sort (fascinating leaps in architecture), the able bodied are put to work building the radioactive DEW line, and the kids are shipped to residential school, beaten if they speak Inuinaqtun.  In one generation our culture was able to effectively shake the language and way of life out of an entire people, as old as time.  Now, my parents’ generation (up here) are the fruit of residential school, and their children do not understand their grandparents… and the grandparents don’t completely understand the grand children.  An ATV is pretty cool to anyone; that’s perhaps the difference between the “West” and crack cocaine.  Moving along the tundra on a badass ATV or Skidoo is really effective, that’s why it’s so acceptable.  But the language is disappearing and the hunting technology is extinct.  What’s impressive to me is that these women who are working with us to sew this seal skin tent (an archaeological fact) knew this way of life.  It’s not just a story.

So when we asked the elders about what it would have looked like, or how the skins would have been oriented, they kind of scratched their heads.  One said, “Well, it wouldn’t have been inside.”  Like, it just doesn’t compute that this thing would be placed indoors.  So I ask myself, who is this for?  This community is 95% native; this Heritage Center is for the community.  Why are we building a replica of the old way that no one under the age of 65 understands… and those older are just baffled anyway?

I am in awe of how these people thought.  Brendan was explaining to me a couple of the hunting mechanisms the other night.  They pretty much ate anything that moved.  There was hunting trick called something like a ‘gull bomb.’  They would take a piece of baleen, bend it in half and freeze it in a piece of meat… then throw the meat in the air for a gull to catch; as the meat thawed in the stomach of the gull, the baleen unfolds and pierces the stomach of the gull and it falls.  There are similar tricks with foxes and wolves.  In the winter, a seal hunter keeps a deep sea ice hole open and lures a seal with a piece of fish, harpoons the seal with a toggled harpoon (hanmiat, made of caribou bone often), the seal takes off and a tendon line is attached to the hanmiat, the hunter lets it out and then lets down an inflated balloon to slow the seal down.  The seal will drag this balloon underwater and exhaust itself and die.  The balloon is made of the stomach of a seal, sewn with a waterproof stitch.  The seal dies with a piece of caribou wood in its lung, dragging an inflated stomach exactly similar to its own.  The inflated seal stomach is called avotaq.  The old circle of technology is extremely closed.  A caribou is killed with an arrow fashioned from caribou bone, and whilst you make it, you wear it.

Now the technology of this place is schizophrenic.  People are curious about the old ways.  The kids are in some way proud of the old ways.  They are also enamoured of the West.  A Skidoo that goes 70 miles an hour on the sea is pretty cool.  The construction of the qalgiq has brought me to realize… I have not participated in making a qalgiq, but have further enunciated the bifurcation of these two worlds.  We have made a replica.  Of course it is positive to aid the imagination and to bring youth into the presence of history.  But what is it for?  I am finally intent upon understanding how we can look back, get curious about those who went before us, come to an understanding, and then make a decision to actually enhance our own lives.  I am guessing that there is no better feeling than spearing a seal, using extreme acumen to bring home one of these magnificent animals in -60 degrees Farenheit, knowing your family will feast, the lamp will stay lit, a little suit will be made for your daughter, and your heart will beat, lungs expand, eyes blink, and it will happen again tomorrow.  That feeling is good.  Where is it now?

That’s Mary Avolak.  I think she’s about 70… she doesn’t quite know: she says she “doesn’t count time the way you do.”  Her husband worked on the DEW line many years ago.  He long passed away, she thinks from cancer he acquired doing his job.  Last night we hiked about five miles out of town to have supper and tea with her. She has a “cabin” out of town along the sea where people fish and party and rip around on their ATVs.  It’s possible to stand in the cabin only if you’re situated in the center of the building, otherwise it’s a sitting room (standing for Mary), fully equipped with beautiful old cooking utensils, tin cups and bowls, enameled pots, a pot bellied stove, plywood walls, and a cozy bed in the back. She fixed caribou porridge.  It was the most real wild life affirming thing I have tasted in a long time.  When you look at her you are looking at the face of someone stranded in tradition, left behind in an old way, where a whole family lived in a small room, and hunting, sewing, loving and laughing were the only form of wealth.

There is a serene dusky evanescent pink glow in the sky right now, quarter to one oclock AM.  After 15 straight days of work, I am starting to hit a stride… now knowing that there will be no break until it’s all done and we’re getting on the plane.  No sleep till Brooklyn as Michael Diamond says.  It feels a little like that now.  We installed the play house last weekend and it enjoyed immediate use.  There are now kids daily in there, lounging on the caribou seat, pulling on traditional amautiit… and they figured out my secret door, which was meant to be an adult connaisance only, for storage.  So I had to fix that.  Here’s a few shots of the kids’ cabin:

Since installing that last weekend we have entered the final design and construction of the qalgiq full force.  We finalized ideas for lighting, text panel (descriptions of the installation) configuration, decided to proceed with an earthen floor based on the counsel of my friend Sukitia (who does this work in Portland: www.fromthesehands.com), and to install a full masonry wall around the outside and along the bench feet on the interior of the tupik (traditional summer tent).  This sort of qalgiq would have definitely been a summer time tent.  The winter equivalent, i.e. a house for hunting tool maintenance and ritual, would have been an ice house.  This tupik, however, would have been used starting early in the spring when there is still serious ice loading on buildings and quite low temperatures… in April it will still be about 10 degrees below zero here, Farenheit.  Built out of wood from below the tree line (600 miles south), traded for furs and copper tools, the tupik is still a very robust structure withstanding serious weather considerations.  I have tried to bring as many of those considerations to bear here in our installations, while at the same time making it a part of a museum, a fully operational movie theater, and a community and elders’ gathering place.  Traditionally, the structure would have been clad with partially scraped seal skins or caribou skins.  (Seal would last the best.)  Because a partially scraped skin will smell awful in a heated place, we have had to go with fully tanned hides.  There have been some problems with the caribou skin shedding in the climatized space, so we decided to sheet the outside of the building with seal skins.  I sort of can’t believe it, but the outside tent skin will be 16 seal skins… sewed by the elders, Mary Avalak, Mabel Etegek, and Annie Itigihioyak,

.

These women are incredible.  I am sure I have never met such durable, happy, inviolate people in my life.  Look at how they are sitting.  Their joints and flexibility are incredible.  One will reach for a needle or something on the floor and bend way past her ankles and grab an object at full body distance.  All the seal skins are sewn with floss.  Like floss for your teeth.  I guess it’s the strongest most durable way to get the seals together.  I know that you may grimace a little thinking about all the seals we’re going to use (we’re also making all the benches on the tupik’s interior out of seal skin: 24 more seals)… but they are all hunted locally and I’m sure every bit of material on the animal was well used.  According to Brendan, a seal is a very savory thing for a family and lasts, surprisingly, only a few days… for a family of 6 or 7… and, of course, only the Inuit are allowed to hunt them and prosper from their flesh and sale of their fur.  I will detail more of the seals as we get it all sewn together.  The ladies are coming first thing in the morning to begin the benches.

The rest of the tent walls on the interior are going to be canvas, painted to look like seal skins.  We have cut out about 65 seal shapes from canvas, made seams in them, sewed them together and put a base coat of flesh like paint on them.  Here’s Brendan overseeing:

As far as the rest of the structure goes… it has been quite a challenge to do anything that resembles normal construction up here.  When I called around before leaving–and talking to people who were working up here earlier in the summer–I was assured that the “hardware” store here has pretty much everything we would need as far as “normal” construction stuff goes.  So I was surprised upon arrival, when I went to the hardware store… to find basically nothing.  No concrete, mortar, plywood, drywall, any real fasteners like screws and lag bolts (or any bolts), no saw blades, extension cords, drill bits, anything.  I brought a select few special tools and have otherwise Macgyvered everything from tools onsite, etc.  For example, we were able to find one bag of Portland cement, from a local builder who we will have to trade for a very expensive bottle of Scotch… and I had to mix mortar from sand that we dug up on the land.  (We drove way out past the clear water river two days ago and collected sand, that had to be dug from near the river.)  We also collected all the stone from the land.  So today I struggled to get the proportions for mortar correct–or as correct as possible given this ONE bag of precious baked lime.  Here are some images of the qalgiq as of tonight:

As you might be able to see, there is not one bit of plywood in any of this work.  Looking around, I found a whole unit of 1X6 Canadian pine in the loft of the woodshop.  We are basically commandeering this material because these projects would be impossible otherwise, without taking apart the house we’re staying in.  We’ve received a basically good signal that it’s ok we’re using the wood.  (Based on the conditions I found the shop in, this is about the best application for this material… so far.)  The Heritage Center is also attached to the school and provides a great service to the community, so everyone seems pretty satisfied with our cowboy tactics.

The next few days will be exciting because we will start to apply the surfaces to the structure, the seal skin, the canvas and then begin adding the beautiful round lumber that came up from Yellowknife.  I cut into some of it today and was amazed to find old growth rings in these small spidery 3″ diameter logs.  It shows you how slow a tree grows in the sub-arctic.

This evening the vice principal was next door conducting phone interviews for new teachers this coming fall and she has adopted two sibling children, Evik and Emauri.  They are extremely precious little people and accompanied me through my somewhat hellish experiment making mortar with arctic sand and fairly stale Portland cement.  They ask all the time, “pack me.”  This means they want to be carried on your back.  The first time they asked I packed both of them, Emauri holding onto Evik, because she’s smaller.  Anne, the vice principal, said, “now you’ve done it.”  So I have to do this every time they see me, which is good exercise when you’re also carrying two fifty pound buckets of arctic mortar.

Until soon, over and out from the ceiling of the world, Cambridge Bay.

I have spent several long days in the shop getting things ready for construction of the qalgiq, and finishing up the kids’ dress up house… adding the finishing touches today of two little clothes hangers fashioned out of caribou antlers.  (Had caribou chili last night… and felt a sense of gratitude today for the animal as the smell of the animal’s headress filled the shop.)

A wicked storm has pulled through here this evening; gale force winds whipping right down over the north pole.  sideways rain and snow.

I have been everyday visiting a very new puppy that lives right by our house; I think her name is Missy.  According to several others, she is the replacement dog to several that were skinned and eaten last winter… but who sat out in front of the house frozen for several months, skinned, before their keepers decided to use them.  So I have an insight into Missy’s life that she perhaps does not have access to.  Here she is, this evening:

It’s hard to tell from the photo what a dismal evening it is… here is another from just beyond Missy’s house:

The change in weather here is striking.  Last night I went out on a nice walk with Brendan, about 11:30… and forgot for a moment how amazing it is that the light was striking us from straight across the horizon… and stayed there for an hour and a half, before beginning to rise again.

All the houses are built up about 24″ off the ground, and I noticed the light falling under the houses, shining all the way under each one we passed.

As I’m growing delirious again from lack of sleep, I will share a couple other messages from last night and leave a longer post for early in the week:

A caribou hide, draped like a towel outside over someone’s railing:

The way everyone gets packages:

I have paid particular attention to dogs here…having a special fondness for them, their need for affection, all of them tied by chains outside houses, sometimes far away from a house, often with no shelter, no water, nothing more than a leathery piece of meat, bone or grissle.  I am reminded of the Jelalaldin Rumi poem about dogs:

There are love dogs

No one knows the name of:

Give your life to be one.

My work routine has me rising at 4-5 AM to stretch and have tea and get started by 5:30.  Somehow, it is the least distracted time to work, those early hours, here brightly lit.  My projects so far have been the assembly of two medium sized display cases whose parts I had shipped up here… as well as the construction of a kids’ playhouse for trying on Inuit clothing.  There is a serious tradition of sewing here: there remain elders who sew all of the Inuit clothing: wolverine gloves, mittens of caribou, wolf, musk ox, seal, etc., boots, double layered clothing for deep winter.  There are several of these beautiful parkas here on display, called amauti: the big parka with the large hood, into which a child can fit if necessary.  The design of this technology is the most streamlined function oriented design I have ever witnessed.  The large iconic Esquimaux and Inuit hoods normally have two layers of fur, the first to insulate the skin of the face, the second to create a wind foil at the same time as an antenna for ice: when wind hits the outer layer, the fur fibers leaning forward create a slight air vacuum around the face which eliminates the wind in the center of the hood: a foil.  Your breath then remains in the small vacuum and becomes warmer and heats your face.  This is extremely important in minus 100 degrees fahrenheit.  Brendan told me a story two days ago of having to run outside to check something on the heating oil line coming into the house, in December last year; his errand outside lasted about 45 seconds and when he returned inside his hands were completely numb and several fingers frostburned.  Painful warming up.

The connection to the land here is immediate, palpable.  I cannot surmise another people so intimately connected to the land through such harsh beauty and brutality.  “Nuna” is the word for land, “vut” is ‘our.’  Nunavut is ‘our land.’  This land is lifeline and arbiter of life.  (It’s ten PM now: and the big air raid sirens just sounded.)  The only sense of wealth among this people is survival.  The very condition of beating hearts, pressurized lungs, a meal, the laughter of a child, a skin over your head… is as rich as you can be.  There is ZERO distinction here between the station of one person and another.  They look at me and simply infer that I am from ‘far away.’  I don’t detect any sense of longing or curiosity about leaving.  This is igaluktuktiaq, place of many fish: and it is good.  (I will do another article on the technology and the tools…)  Today, I am most struck with the sense of ‘the land,’ the land making the person… rather than what we’re used to: making something of the land.  I’ll get there slowly.

This far north workshop is bizarre because in its inception it was set up to be an incredible workshop:

… this photo was taken after I spent most of an evening thoroughly cleaning it.  About half of the machines are broken or only in partial working order; there was a sense of complete abandonment in this shop: like it was designed to be something good and then in reality had no real liklihood as tool for instruction.  The thing I see over and over in the shop, and everywhere else, is a shape like this:

…it’s a fishing spear; you simply strike down through the water, hit an Arctic char, the outside two members (here made of caribou antlers) separate (with flex) and the center spike impales the fish; if it wriggles, in only worsens for the fish up above.  This is called a kokiwog.  It seems students took apart machines, re-purposed various kinds of hardware, and in general wrought havoc on this shop in order to make this shape.  I would say rightly so.  In their genetic inheritance lies this shape, and many other ingenious designs… not chairs and tables.  So I have partially re-built the table saw, the oscillating drum sander, the air compressor and organized much of what seemed in disarray.  I should say that it probably only seems to me (and perhaps other southwestern craftsmen) in ‘disarray.’  I’m sure the Inuit brought a kind of sublime order to the space.  That’s because there is one thing in their soul: the land.  Nuna.  The land is life; and they want life, not chairs.

I have spent three days so far building this little play house that is going to tuck under the steel staircase in the museum.  I’m probably making it a little nicer than it needs to be… but I believe there will be time to make a really good kids’ dress up house, and get the qalgiq done, if I spend my 12 working hours per day preciously.  I spent a few hours in the library part of the museum making measurements for this playhouse and made some friends who were pretty excited about helping me measure and extremely curious about this ‘house’ tucking under the staircase.  I had met this one boy earlier, Nicholas; he had poked his head into the open shop door and asked, “what you doing?”  I said I was working.  He said, “you got moneeeey?”  I actually did not and I replied no.  He said, “I help?”  He then came in and spent about two hours with me, sweeping, helping hold boards, standing behind me while I operated the table saw.  He came back today and helped more.

I have spent about five or six hours now with Nicholas and I can vouch for him.  Today Brendan came into the shop and was looking at the little bench in the corner of the playhouse and thought it would be a good idea to upholster it with caribou.  I really liked that idea too, so we did it with a gorgeous piece of caribou:

Nicholas and his friend Thomas came into the shop to help.

It’s hard to see the caribou there (I’ll take better pictures installed) but that’s not really the point.  These kids want to share time and space.  I haven’t experienced children this open before.  In a way they are already fully formed.  There is just the land here.  On the land there is trouble, and I’m sure to some extent their parents monitor how they roam around, but from the looks of it, kids have a free run of this place.  They are up at four in the morning, playing on their bikes in the icy morning sun.  They are out right now, striking hockey pucks against this building I’m sitting in, laughing riotously and fiercely competing for hardest slap shot against the building.  (These shots leave big dents in the building.)  They are the property of the land, of this village.  They will often go home and be with another family.  Today I was having tea with a woman, Monique, who leads one of the traditional sewing classes and her little girl April came and went several times.  I asked about her, and Monique told me that April mostly lives with her parents.  There was an expression there whose depths I did not plumb.  I didn’t know why she divulged that information, perhaps it was economic, perhaps she didn’t like this particular child all the way?  Later I talked to Brendan about the kids and he said that about 40% of the children are living elsewhere than with their genetic parents.  It is called ingutak, the act of raising someone else’s kid.  There are some dark stories there.  There are a couple of brothers that have been at the Heritage Center every day this week (I’m told they basically live here), they are several years apart, one is Anthony, the other Ashley.  They are both strangely blind, like their eyes are seared shut.  They have magnificent expressions.  They navigate around town, through the dusty windy roads with ATVs roaring by and trucks spewing up gravel (I can’t imagine the process in the winter!) without any problem.  The younger brother Ashley has a pattern of clapping his hands together very lightly and looking up, skywards with a blissful expression.  I asked Brendan about it and he told me that both brothers can echo-locate.  They are known for this.  They clap their hands lightly, anywhere in town, and they know exactly where they are.  They both likewise have a kind of touched sense: like anywhere else they would be ‘placed’ somewhere.  Here, despite whatever dark history lies there, they are a loved part of the public commons.  The people who work at the Heritage Center, and many others in town, have adopted Anthony and Ashley in ingutak.  This seems to me like a way the land is working on the people, almost a direct translation of its effect on people.  Brutal and real and beautiful.

In other places, it often seems hard to read people, to read one’s feelings about a place, about others’ feelings… about you, about the place.  Here, there is no question.  No hesitation.  It’s just open.  In a place that is so harsh, that delivers a kind of weather that, for long periods of time, carries a death-within-seconds seriousness… a weather that penetrates the ground and the sky… there is a heart torn wide open.  Though there are deep troubles, there is an open willing heart.

Yesterday after work, we went out to fish for char and ended up getting a ride on the road out there; this is the light at about 10 pm last night:

We fished an area right on the clear water river.  There was a problem with Brendan’s fishing pole, however.  Every time we cast, the last loop went flying off with the sinker.  Brendan went over and chatted with two women who seemed to be having good luck catching char.  (This char is incredible.  It is served everywhere, raw, on the skin; it melts in your mouth and feels like the cleanest firmest most amazing fish on the planet.  It travels from the arctic rivers just a little ways out into the sea up here and then back; it does not encounter the bigger poisons of the sea… like the water, you can put it straight into your body without preparation.)  She just gave Brendan a fish!  She told us to tell people we caught it.  Since we would have no (other) luck fishing, we walked back towards town.  This is the scene, just a few hundred meters behind Cambridge Bay, just beyond the burning debris:

Because the ground is in permafrost the graves are basically gravel added over the surface.  There are some unfortunate stories in this graveyard and it is being added to as we speak.  But it is also just part of the rugged honesty of this land.  Nunavut.

The starkness of the land here, looking out over it, traveling it, contemplating for how long it extends, and how many other robust creatures are out there, bears, wolverines, walrus, beluga, must rat, and ox, makes me realize how close death is.  It is right here.  It is very nearby and it takes these people a kind of wild chaotic activity to resist those forces; and they have developed a way to do so with a special elegance.  Walking a line, drawing life out of every moment, in a way that seems to require little effort, with a strong constitution for the reality of dying.  Many other things die for these ones to live.  The land has brought that shape of the kokiwog into their minds and now it is everywhere, and the shapes that don’t serve this kind of life (like chairs) are useless.

The flight from Calgary to Yellowknife was striking: at dusk we took off over Calgary, about 9:00 P.M.  As we flew North the dusk became subtly brighter; after nearly three hours flying straight North, we landed in a bright dusk evening about quarter to midnight:

I went out to a little hole in the wall pub across the street from my hotel called Le Frolics.  There was a band playing some incredibly bad good cover music.  Their hearts were so invested in the music that it was an excellent welcome to the intense attitude of these Northern places.  A very small dram of Macallan single malt scotch cost $19!  The following morning I arrived–still without my big bag–at the Yellowknife airport, connecting to Cambridge Bay.  Now the faces in the airport were primarily Inuit; I was looking at this amazing map installation on the floor of a crossroads corridor in the airport which shows the whole Arctic portion of the world.  An Inuit guy with a Skidoo shirt came up to me smiling and asked, “Do you like my map?” He was from Kigluktuk, which is about a hundred miles or so West and a bit East.  I asked him if Kigluktuk was nice; he said, “Oh, it’s beauuuutiful.”  He told me he’d grown up there and lived there his whole life.  I told him I was coming up to Cambridge Bay and asked him what it is like.  He said, “It’s beauuuuutiful.  It’s not like Kigluktuk though: Kigluktuk has mountains and large rivers; Cambridge Bay is mostly flat.”  Three hours later I was flying into Cambridge Bay: iqualuk tuk tiaq.  iqualuk is fish, tuk is lots, and tiaq as a suffix is the essence, or place… of lots of fish…

The airline that flies up here is called First Air.  The round trip ticket from Yellowknife to Cambridge Bay, which is a two hour flight, is $2,400.  The plane lands on a gravel runway (I spose most of the year it is on snow-ice).  Each flight is half passengers (or less) and cargo.  A huge forklift is immediately unloading cargo upon arrival.  The sky feels big.  The air feels thin.  The water is right there–the bay–it is as clear as anything; you can see right through it.  The first impressive landmark is a series of spherical dome buildings that look like observatories.  They are part of a U.S. government program started in the early fifties called DEWS: Distant Early Warning System.  They are set up every 200 miles across the Arctic in order to surveil the former U.S.S.R. for any potential incoming nuclear missiles.  According to Brendan (whom I am working with here), if they were to intercept a missile, it would blow up and land in Saskatchewan.  We have such delightful strategies.

Driving into the town I am immediately seized by the impressive difference of this place.  It is still sinking in.  Natives are flying around on ATVs, all the houses are built up off the ground–which is in permafrost–on various kinds of jacks.  Huskies are tied by chains between houses and gnaw on a piece of musk ox leg, a very light fine dust blows through the air, through the dirt and gravel streets and immediately dries your skin.  Trucks and vans trundle by on an errand to the hardware store.  I sense an immediate kinship to Burning Man, not because people are flying by on art cars, drinking and cruising, but because you can sense that every last thing you see was imported from very very far away.  Most of the houses are sided with T1-11, that classical shed product, you see Ford trucks and vans everywhere, covered snowmobiles, ATVs, everything brought by cargo freighter or a Hercules jumbo jet.  Things are expensive here.  A tub of Bryers ice cream (how fit for the North pole) is $20.  A large size cooler is $200.  A normal filled medical prescription is $2000.  A small aluminum boat for fishing is $20,000.  All the electricity is made by huge diesel generators down by the bay.  All the water for houses is delivered by trucks and pumped to an overhead valve running into the house.  Huge oil drums stand outside every house for heating oil.  In the winter, if the heater fails, the pipes will burst within about three hours.  (Brendan’s professor in archaeology told me this evening that he was here once in December and in a walk of about 300 yards he got minor frostbite on his nose: it turned white.)  Women walk around with this pillowy hood feature in their garments that holds a baby.  Many many buildings are dented all around the perimeter from kids rough housing; concrete bollards are broken, windows, rocks thrown on roofs, shoes thrown over wires, debris all over the place.  There is no real dump or recycling facility–way too expensive–everything is taken by tractor about 400 yards behind town and burnt: everything.  And the common wind direction is northeasterly, from right off the pole, and it blows the black smoke right though town, which I am told smells really bad.

We spent about 45 minutes checking things out upon arrival and then Max (archaeology professor) and Brendan and two students invited me up on this drive to Mt. Pelly, North of town about 45 minutes.  We drove over this river called Clear Water River (for a very good reason) several times.  The water is so clean you can drink it basically anywhere (above the sewer drop point, close to town).  We stopped and looked at one of the main sites these guys have worked on, called The Pembroke Site… these sites would have been occupied by some very robust Inuiit up until about 800 years ago:

It consists of fiver summer tent rings, five winter tent rings and a qalgiq (the thing I am here to build).  The summer residences are up higher on the hill, less excavated.  They would have been built out of wood and a skin membrane, rather than snow.  The ones lower down were more excavated into the hill side, had more intensive masonry measures, and would have had thicker frames, with skin membranes and then covered in sod and then snow and ice.  On the top of the hill is the qalgiq, the largest structure by far (shown second), probably only used in the spring and summer, and probably taken down in the winter as it wouldn’t necessarily have withstood the huge wind loads (increased by ice) of the season.  This building was used as a meeting house, for going through and maintaining, repairing, building and discussing hunting and hunting equipment.

(Today it began to dawn on me, after having already seen hundreds of artifacts about killing animals, spears for lancing fish, harpoons, knives, incredibly designed arrow heads for shooting caribou, amazing long multi-pronged devices for harpooning a seal… that in the qalgiq, a huge amount of magic happened: it is where you built the things that kept you alive, that tested your ideas about hunting, and that brought you prosperity: a dad might look at a son, building a copper harpoon, and caution about the design, or offer advice, or scold; another man might have an innovative idea, carve a new shape in a soapstone spear and find later that it works well, or doesn’t.  They would have built traps for Arctic foxes, and squirrels.  This gathering house is where they would vet the ideas of others, commune with their only craft, and meet the spirit of the animal they sought through shaman guided vision quests for the next place to slaughter caribou, doing so from within a structure sheathed with the very flesh of that animal.)

We continued on to the butte called Mt. Pelly which really is a gorgeous buttress of shale covered with lichen and amazing little ground covers that have the strangest fruit I have ever seen, like little date seeds with brown bellies, hanging over the main leafy part of the mosses, and things like thyme.  The wind is blowing incredibly… but when it stops, there is an immediate and abundant swarm of mosquitos, almost unbearable.  Mt. Pelly is also know as Uvayok, thought of as the fist death.  He was a giant traveling with baby Pelly, and lady Pelly.  They lay down in this area and died.  You can see the beach striations on the side of the buttress are the ribs of Uvayok.  From the top of this buttress, the rest of the land rolls out flatly.  You can very clearly discern the curvature of the earth, from about 400 feet above sea level.

The dirt street where Brendan lives is called tuktu, or caribou.  We were talking last night and he explained that in his house here (which is very clean and nice… two bedrooms, a good mud room/meat storage, and a nice living room), for others in the community would probably house two families, and maybe a cousin, or two sets of partners, about ten kids, and a cousin.  They still live and hold the things of their past life.  In an old caribou skin or snow house there might have been a family of a man, two wives, and six kids in a 10′ diameter room, which could only sustain one maybe two persons standing up completely, in the middle.  In the winter, it would have been lit with a very soft dim light of seal oil.  And that would have been the only light you see for 9 weeks… the whole time living on stored seal meat, caribou, frozen Arctic char, and a fox or two.  Now a days, in a spacious luxuriously heated building like this, they have real estate to move freely.  And every few days a couple of men will drag a few dead seals in, throw them on a piece of cardboard in the pergo floor and butcher them, saving most every part of the animal and having an immediate seal sushi snack.

Today was a meeting of elders, for Max and Brendan to present their recent findings on what’s called a caribou drive, that they mapped out in a place called Igloluk, about 50 kilometers Northwest of here.  These people hold a huge energy.  They were the only and last people to live “on the land.”  (The ‘land’ is referred to often here, i.e., ‘when you go out on the land.’)  They speak primarily Inuinaktun, and cannot completely understand their children, because their kids were taken from them at young ages by the government and sent to ‘residential schools.’  These schools would have been far away and they were forced to speak only English and sometimes beaten if they spoke Inuktitut or Inuinaktun.  The elders now would have been born on the land, but moved off it pretty early and given government tags, housing, etc.  The oldest one in our meeting today may have been on the land for as many as 15 years.  Their bodies are strange, beautiful and clean.  Their faces and hands much more weathered and tan than the rest of them.

I have been engaged to travel up to the Canadian Arctic to work in an Inuit Heritage Museum.  I will be building a traditional style, communal building called a “qalgiq,” pronounced QUAL GHEK.  I have been studying the Inuit vernacular architecture and reading about the uses, means and methods of these fascinating buildings.  They were traditionally used for hunting ceremonies, preparation for hunting, and shaman guided voyages.  The qalgiq would have been the largest building in the networks of other dwellings, and for a long period of time were predominantly used only by men.   A couple ethnographic photos:

photo: from Birket-Smith, fig. 117

I cannot stop admiring what a stalwart people… that would build like this and prosper in one of the most inhospitable climates on earth.  Many Inuit tribes were whaling and often these qalgiit would have been built of whale bones… the jaw bones.  Here’s a computer rendering of what this may have felt like:

photo: R. Levy/P. Dawson

The perimeters of the buildings would have been stone, and the membranes often caribou.  The caribou hide would protect nicely against weather and tuck under the stones at the perimeter.  It would then have been covered with sod and then ice, for insulation.  The stone would act as good thermal mass if there were a heat source present within the building.  This photo from 1896 shows the awesome blending of the architecture with the environment:

photo: Birket-Smith, fig. 118

Where I am traveling, in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, the natives would not have built with whale bone because they were not hunting whale in that area.  We will be using a system of lodge poles.  The Thule (Cambridge Bay, Pembroke natives) here would have traded fur and meat for this wood, brought up from below the tree line.  We will match to some degree the ridge pole shown in the photo above.

This installation will have a theater system, showing some old footage of Inuit ways of life, a life scene of a man and his son sharpening knives, some text displays, and an earthen floor.

This is the first article of several on my experience traveling to the ceiling of the world to help these amazing people build a qalgiq.  Unlike these robust people, I will be getting there by plane: arriving Sunday.

Just made this with my friend Ben Pederson in his shop.  It is solid oregon black walnut, book matched and engineered with a drawer in the skirt and easily packs flat.  One meter by two meters; made for two German engineers.

i check from time to time the “creative” jobs page on craigslist and recently found this interesting posting:

“I am looking for an artist that will help my company create our logo.  We are a small business services company looking to build our brand.  Only serious people relpy [sic] please.  I do some money but was hoping for more barter or exchange or better yet help you build your brand as a graphic designer.”

Seems like a pretty bulletproof plan to me.

is this:

in a way, this is amazing architecture too, committed to the earth’s surface for pennies compared to, say, a cathedral.  1/5 of the world’s population lives like this.  THIS is eco friendly.  forget about low VOC paints and cork floors.  these have dirt floors.  and i bet the people in here are just about as happy as the people in Sausalito.

I had another, stronger encounter with paradox recently, watching this TED lecture by magician/conjurer, James Randi.  Let this small article serve as an exploration of this physiological paradox… as well as a challenge to James Randi himself and his foundation.

Having been in the profession of “magic” for a long time–he’s also known as “The Amazing Randi”–he turned his attention to debunking other so called magicians, psychics, and professors of the supernatural, and often works with Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine.  The fact that Randi made his fortune as a magician and now debunks others who make money off the willingness of human beings to believe, is pretty interesting… but is not the paradox I became aware of in watching this lecture.  In general, I believe him when he says he’s debunking psychics because they end up causing more pain than they purport to relieve, i.e. he has a sense of the good and is trying to carry it out.  In this talk he debunks several sectors of alternative belief: homeopathy, psychics communing with the dead, and people claiming psychokinesis, such as a water dowser.  On stage he swallows a whole bottle full of a homeopathic sleeping agent and then reads a label saying to call a poison hotline if overdose occurs, or something like that.  He explains the philosophy of homeopathy which is that by distillation of some herb, or dilution, it becomes vibrationally more potent… but you’re watching him talk for a while and he doesn’t appear to get sleepy, as one would expect if you’ve swallowed a whole container of sleeping pills.  So he debunks homeopathy that easily.  (By examining his body on stage in this talk, I get the sense that he’s a guy that takes a lot of naps though; I think those pills are having some cumulative effect on him.)  He describes exposing a faith healer, Peter Popoff, many years ago, who claimed to be healing his congregation through the holy spirit and by divine connection knew a lot a priori about the people who would come to his televised megaplex for healing, when in reality he had a small radio in his ear and his wife was giving him information about the attendees.  Shortly after the exposure, Peter Popoff claimed bankruptcy.  I watched some of the footage he gives of Peter Popoff here and was a little nervous about his conclusions.  Here’s why: I am as big a fan of any of the dissolution of basically anyone who heals people through Christ on TV… but watching the people get healed in Popoff’s congregation, I suddenly could see that they truly believe in what they are experiencing.  Randi opens that youtube interview with this statement: “I want to be sure–if I can–of the real world around me, the world as it really is, as is possible.”  I couldn’t get that statement to dovetail with these people getting faith healed and then expressing actual relief from arthritis, or rheumatism, or a bad hip or whatever.  I mean, even though this guy is a fake, aren’t these poor people actually getting help?  If they are, there’s a paradox there.  A really big one.  We will explore it in a few sentences.  The first thing I would ask Randi is this: OK, you’re exposing a fraud… but this fraud is providing televised entertainment, as well as actual–albeit temporary–relief from real pain that Western medicine probably doesn’t have a cure for.  So I ask, how much is attendance to one of these congregations?  $30, $50?  How much was a ticket to one of your magic shows back in the day?  Are the two really so different?

Then comes the harder question.  If people get bona fide relief from something fake, is the treatment actually fake?  It turns out that the very institution that James Randi would rely upon for his reality, i.e. Western Medical Practice, actually has a whole doctrine for this gray edge of its science: it’s called the placebo effect.  The definition of the placebo is a sham or fake procedure that produces a real effect.  The phenomenon is so strong that Western science often has to conduct a double blind placebo in clinical trials in order to insure that the results of a REAL procedure aren’t placebo induced, meaning basically that the patient isn’t just healing himself because he’s being treated by REAL doctors in a real office, etc., meaning that both the doctor and the patient do not know if what is being administered as treatment is real or false.  If nothing happens, it’s false.  If, however, a patient is suffering from something which either can’t be treated with normal drugs, because of the condition itself–as in the case with some severe respiratory diseases–or because the condition is simply undefinable, a placebo is often very practical and effective.  For example, with a case of severe pneumonia where a patient needs to reduce pain and slow the heart rate–but where the use of opiates or morphine derivatives would compromise the condition even further–a physician will inject saline solution into a patient hypodermically and tell the patient that he is getting a dose of the strongest pain killer there is.  Often, that alone will create tremendous relaxation in the patient and achieve the results the doctor is seeking.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo)  There are vociferous debates all over Western medical practice about the morality of placebo induced results because it is a practice based on deception.  But often, because placebo procedures widely reap good results, doctors say that they should be employed because anything to aid in the healing process could be interpreted as part of the hippocratic oath, and in the aforementioned article, based on scientifically conducted polls, medical journals report that 60% of physicians around the world utilize the placebo effect.

That there is stated scientific doctrine for the placebo effect, including a placebo effect for homeopathic treatment, is grounds to form a conclusion about the actual and documented power of human belief.  It is at this point that I cannot see the entire logic of James Randi’s crusade to dispel the efforts of alternative medical and otherwise practitioners, when those individuals are not competing with or excluding the care of rigorously tested treatments (of the West) that could heal the same ailments.  In other words, if Science itself grants power–and a relatively large domain of power at that–to the placebo effect, wouldn’t it in fact be more of a detriment to individuals receiving this treatment to debunk and demystify the practice?!

The paradox for Randi is that perhaps in thinking he is doing good, he is in fact, not.  Perhaps just as he allowed his audience to believe that he was actually bending a spoon, so should he allow a psychic let his patients believe they are receiving real treatment.  Because the power of belief is REAL and documented under scientific conditions.

Not too long ago I read a volume about hypnotism, and pretty shortly after starting the book, was able to hypnotize myself.  The author, Raphael H. Rhodes, in Hypnosis: Theory, Practice, and Application, says this:

This phenomenon [hypnotism] first attracted my attention several decades ago when, as an impressionable adolescent, I witnessed an operation in a dental surgeon’s office.  The dentist was cutting deeply into the patient’s gum.  The patient sat back, composed and comfortable, though no drug had been administered.  She had merely been hypnotized.  The hypnotist had told her to relax.  He had said that she would feel no pain.

At the conclusion of the operation, which lasted about half an hour, the dentist laid his instruments aside, and nodded to the hypnotist.  The latter then addressed the patient: “When I wake you, there will be no pain, no headache, no after-effects.  You’ll feel well and happy.  Now when I count to ten, you’ll wake up.”

Upon the final count she opened her eyes and smiled.  “When does he begin?” she asked.

(From the Introduction)

When you consider this: that surgery, or something which would be considered quite painful, is possible without anesthetic, it becomes evident that within our own physiological/psychological construction, there are internally higher tools to aid in healing.  The body knows that pain is a map towards wellness; it also knows how to turn the pain off in order to surpass the negative effects of the pain itself, to achieve the wellness it seeks.  Read this for another example of surgery under hypnosis.

I would argue that a hypnotist, who in 30-60 seconds is, able to subdue a patient properly for a 90 minute typical Western surgery is equally as “magical”–if not more–as someone who could bend a spoon or speak to the dead.  I haven’t witnessed any of these things, but knowing that the former is entirely possible and has been documented by science, I would like to submit to James Randi that a broad stroke effort to debunk the world of alternative healing is short sighted.  The path to hell is paved with good intentions, etc.

James Randi has a one million dollar challenge available to anyone who professes a paranormal, supernatural, or psychic ability.  I would like to recommend that the $1,000,000 challenge offered by James Randi’s foundation, to find someone with supernatural, paranormal, or psychic powers come to rest with this article, and be submitted to ME for use in a positive way, in the formation of a new foundation which works on the fostering of hope as opposed to the erosion of it.  For if a hypnotist can make you think you’re a cat, so that you’re saying, “I’m a cat, I’m a cat!” or can put you to sleep while you undergo open heart surgery, then you’ve got a psychic power there, insofar as that person has used his mind to manipulate another body into undergoing a totally unexpected event, and that’s more psychic than turning the page of a dictionary with your mind or bending a spoon.  I personally would love to take responsibility for the $1,000,000 and do some work in Haiti, rebuilding, and putting the money to good use…