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<\/p>\nThe flight from Calgary to Yellowknife was striking: at dusk we took off over Calgary, about 9:00 P.M.\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n
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I went out to a little hole in the wall pub across the street from my hotel called Le Frolics.\u00a0 There was a band playing some incredibly bad good cover music.\u00a0 Their hearts were so invested in the music that it was an excellent welcome to the intense attitude of these Northern places.\u00a0 A very small dram of Macallan single malt scotch cost $19!\u00a0 The following morning I arrived–still without my big bag–at the Yellowknife airport, connecting to Cambridge Bay.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I asked him if Kigluktuk was nice; he said, “Oh, it’s beauuuutiful.”\u00a0 He told me he’d grown up there and lived there his whole life.\u00a0 I told him I was coming up to Cambridge Bay and asked him what it is like.\u00a0 He said, “It’s beauuuuutiful.\u00a0 It’s not like Kigluktuk though: Kigluktuk has mountains and large rivers; Cambridge Bay is mostly flat.”\u00a0 Three hours later I was flying into Cambridge Bay: iqualuk tuk tiaq.\u00a0 iqualuk is fish, tuk is lots, and tiaq as a suffix is the essence, or place… of lots of fish…<\/p>\n
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The airline that flies up here is called First Air.\u00a0 The round trip ticket from Yellowknife to Cambridge Bay, which is a two hour flight, is $2,400.\u00a0 The plane lands on a gravel runway (I spose most of the year it is on snow-ice).\u00a0 Each flight is half passengers (or less) and cargo.\u00a0 A huge forklift is immediately unloading cargo upon arrival.\u00a0 The sky feels big.\u00a0 The air feels thin.\u00a0 The water is right there–the bay–it is as clear as anything; you can see right through it.\u00a0 The first impressive landmark is a series of spherical dome buildings that look like observatories.\u00a0 They are part of a U.S. government program started in the early fifties called DEWS: Distant Early Warning System.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 According to Brendan (whom I am working with here), if they were to intercept a missile, it would blow up and land in Saskatchewan.\u00a0 We have such delightful strategies.<\/p>\n
Driving into the town I am immediately seized by the impressive difference of this place.\u00a0 It is still sinking in.\u00a0 Natives are flying around on ATVs, all the houses are built up off the ground–which is in permafrost–on various kinds of jacks.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Trucks and vans trundle by on an errand to the hardware store.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Things are expensive here.\u00a0 A tub of Bryers ice cream (how fit for the North pole) is $20.\u00a0 A large size cooler is $200.\u00a0 A normal filled medical prescription is $2000.\u00a0 A small aluminum boat for fishing is $20,000.\u00a0 All the electricity is made by huge diesel generators down by the bay.\u00a0 All the water for houses is delivered by trucks and pumped to an overhead valve running into the house.\u00a0 Huge oil drums stand outside every house for heating oil.\u00a0 In the winter, if the heater fails, the pipes will burst within about three hours.\u00a0 (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.)\u00a0 Women walk around with this pillowy hood feature in their garments that holds a baby.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There is no real dump or recycling facility–way too expensive–everything is taken by tractor about 400 yards behind town and burnt: everything.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 We drove over this river called Clear Water River (for a very good reason) several times.\u00a0 The water is so clean you can drink it basically anywhere (above the sewer drop point, close to town).\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n
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It consists of fiver summer tent rings, five winter tent rings and a qalgiq (the thing I am here to build).\u00a0 The summer residences are up higher on the hill, less excavated.\u00a0 They would have been built out of wood and a skin membrane, rather than snow.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This building was used as a meeting house, for going through and maintaining, repairing, building and discussing hunting and hunting equipment.<\/p>\n
(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.\u00a0 They would have built traps for Arctic foxes, and squirrels.\u00a0 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.)<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 The wind is blowing incredibly… but when it stops, there is an immediate and abundant swarm of mosquitos, almost unbearable.\u00a0 Mt. Pelly is also know as Uvayok, thought of as the fist death.\u00a0 He was a giant traveling with baby Pelly, and lady Pelly.\u00a0 They lay down in this area and died.\u00a0 You can see the beach striations on the side of the buttress are the ribs of Uvayok.\u00a0 From the top of this buttress, the rest of the land rolls out flatly.\u00a0 You can very clearly discern the curvature of the earth, from about 400 feet above sea level.<\/p>\n
The dirt street where Brendan lives is called tuktu, or caribou.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They still live and hold the things of their past life.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the winter, it would have been lit with a very soft dim light of seal oil.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Now a days, in a spacious luxuriously heated building like this, they have real estate to move freely.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 These people hold a huge energy.\u00a0 They were the only and last people to live “on the land.”\u00a0 (The ‘land’ is referred to often here, i.e., ‘when you go out on the land.’)\u00a0 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.’\u00a0 These schools would have been far away and they were forced to speak only English and sometimes beaten if they spoke Inuktitut or Inuinaktun.\u00a0 The elders now would have been born on the land, but moved off it pretty early and given government tags, housing, etc.\u00a0 The oldest one in our meeting today may have been on the land for as many as 15 years.\u00a0 Their bodies are strange, beautiful and clean.\u00a0 Their faces and hands much more weathered and tan than the rest of them.<\/p>\n
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The flight from Calgary to Yellowknife was striking: at dusk we took off over Calgary, about 9:00 P.M.\u00a0 As we flew North the dusk became subtly brighter; after nearly three hours flying straight North, we landed in a bright dusk … Continue reading