I was four years old, then, so I apologize for my dim memory, as well as the fact that I didn’t quite understand all that was happening. It seems to me that viewing such memories, in my mind’s eye, is much like staring down a very narrow tunnel, wherein images milky and unclear are sharply contrasted by those which are disturbingly vivid. Sometimes, the sequence of events—I’m sure—is utterly mixed up. I am not even certain of which colours and shapes are those held in actual memory, or substituted by imagination. Yet I know, or rather I feel, one great truth: those images in my mind are somehow important. They are of a time and of events that may seem unthinkable today. Yet some part of my brain nags me into believing that they nevertheless should not be forgotten. For now, it will suffice to be a decent witness. In fact, a decent witness is all that I can be, since the best witness could be nothing less than the shadow of Death itself. For it is this that I see in front of me, when I think back, and even though I am only four at that time, I can sense its grip upon those around me, and sense the despair and pain that they endure.

It is the time before the great and well-known tragedy of the Arctic Exiles. Richard Harrington is documenting, with his now famous photographic collection, the starvation of whole camps of Peoples of Ennadai Lakes. Unbeknownst to some then and many today, a lesser known famine is at once occurring to the north, in the Garry Lakes Region. The same caribou that have failed to migrate across the barrens that year have deprived large and small groups alike of the meat necessary to their survival. The Garry Lakes People are one such group. They have always been an oddity in that they are both an inland and coastal People. That horrible year, as they customarily travelled south to hunt their fall caribou, they were unaware that they would not return. That winter.

Elders recall the terrible caribou famine of half a century ago. This photo of an unidentified Padleimiut man with a carcass was taken in 1949.
Photo by Richard Harrington, courtesy of Public Archives Canada

It is in that same winter that my father answers his call to serve as a missionary among the Netsilik peoples. We pack up everything we own, and leave our Baffin culture to trek for thousands of miles over treacherous terrain—a period of three months by dog team. I am little, and thus am carried, and full of glee at the chance to travel extensively—a craving typical of Inuit. I accumulate the vivid and mostly beautiful memories of places we cross, of people we meet.

Yet it is the horror that confronts us upon reaching our final destination that clings most tenaciously to the edges and corners of my mind. My own guess is that it impacted upon my psyche with especial force simply for the reason that I was still, at that age, learning how to think, how to make sense of events in the world around me. I am struck, I remember, with that kind of forceful blow that only dreadful reality can deal, the sort of effect that causes a child to freeze upon realizing a horrible and previously unimaginable truth about the world.

I am greeted by the very raw essence of life and death, and my days as a baby wither behind me.

I see a man on a sled, attempting to rise amid caribou-skin blankets. He has just been rescued. He feebly gestures his thanks to all, or perhaps only to the powers that be, and sinks back in exhaustion. His face is hollow and skeletal, his clothes ragged, partly eroded (later, I find out that many have eaten their own clothes). I can only keep thinking that a small breeze might have bowled him over. As he slips down, he resembles a desiccated corpse lain to rest. Even his moan—betraying the fact that he still lives—is weak and sad, as if the effort of uttering it were too much for him. He is literally a man recovered from the brink of death.

Later, I will know this man as the grandfather of one of my best friends, a brilliant boy nicknamed Pepper: he is the old man with the wooden leg and crutches, who eats with a meat grinder, as he doesn’t have any teeth.

Pepper’s grandfather wasn’t the only survivor of the horrible famine that overtook the Garry Lakes region. In some ways, looking back, as difficult an ordeal as it was for the grandfather and his family, the sight of his condition was only a mere glimpse of the true horror that they had endured. Other families in that region have their own stories to tell. To this day, I believe people must live with the scars of those times. Given their strength of spirit, those survivors were the best sorts of people to form the basis of a later community. There are no better foundations than the twin virtues of courage and perseverance.

It was long after Pepper’s grandfather returned from the hospital, with a new wooden leg from the depredations of the famine, that I really came to know his family. My father became a hunting partner and mentor to Pepper’s father. Pepper’s father—I suppose—felt obligated to support my father in his missionary work, volunteering to assist him in working with the Netsilik peoples. In a way, we were quickly accepted on a “grass roots” level, and we children were provided with an irreplaceable experience. We were able to witness and participate in a way of life that no longer exists.

The films and ethnographies that I’ve viewed and read don’t even come close to painting a true picture of the wonderful diversity of Inuit culture in that area, including the lesser known Eastern Arctic Peoples: the Kingarmiut (Cape Dorset), Uqqurmiut, and others. Living in that time and place was like growing within a melting pot of fantastic cultures, with all the lore that they had to speak of.

How can one be impressed by the later works of social scientists, when your own father has fond memories of working with the great explorers? Of remembering Knud Rasmussen as “Kunuuti”? Of knowing that your friend’s father had travelled with Henry Larson on the St. Roch, on its maiden voyage through the Northwest Passage? When your own grandfather is the son of Captain Joseph Bernier, your great grandmother his housekeeper and chef; when you have seen the so-called trailblazers of today—who now have libraries and missionary programs named after them—taking their fledgling steps. When you’ve baby-sat their children, helped set up their tents, and showed them how to put sealskin boots on properly. It does colour one's view of history.

I feel the same whenever I read about discoveries of woolly mammoths found intact and preserved. I know from scientific evidence that the creatures are tens of thousands of years old. Then I remember that all across the circumpolar north there is a remembered word for such a beast, preserved in oral tradition and figures in string games. It sends a shiver down my spine.

Sometimes, I now mine my own culture for nuggets of such knowledge, as though the lore I once took for granted has become trapped in fossil amber. Some of the knowledge comes from folklore: old monsters, great upheavals, strange animals, little people, giants, visiting star peoples and men in bizarre ships, trips to the moon and ocean bottom, great oceanic voyages and treks over ice and snow, and always the cast of heroes, villains, antiheroes, and tricksters.

Yet much of that treasure derives from the living people, those whose lives were—and often still are—breathing archives, offering glimpses into a past that no ethnography could ever know.

In the same way that the Arctic was long thought to be empty and desolate, only recently catching notice for its unplumbed riches, so must dissolve the idea that older generations represent simple and uncomplicated folk. Just think of what those ancient hearts and minds have held; the eyes that have beheld lost worlds. And to think that so much—a universe in each person—might be stolen from us by something as blunt as an often-forgotten famine, so long ago. Always, the thought makes me feel as though I have come under a shadow, almost invisible, yet subtly colder than its surroundings.

Few of us give thought to our ancestors; often, because we are busy living in the now. But perhaps it is also that we do not wish to dwell upon the eldritch, and sometimes chilling, nature of their stories. To think of those past minds, of what they represent, is staggering. Like a fly in amber, they are at once fossil and immediacy; shadowed until under scrutiny, whereupon details jump sharply into relief.

We and our ancestors share one ocean of time, yet we will always remain separate isles within it; and I am in awe of them.

Pijariiqpunga.

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