Edmonton LitFest Moves to the Hot North

Edited by Gordon Morash

Introduction

In October 2006, Edmonton became the first city in Canada to host a literary festival completely devoted to the genre of creative nonfiction. Edmonton LitFest – the shorthand title for the Edmonton International Literary Festival – remains one of the few festivals in the world to address the themes, content, and issues inherent in the amorphous writing style that has embraced such names as Gonzo journalism, participatory journalism, memoir, life writing and literary journalism.

The 2007 edition of Edmonton LitFest, taking the theme of Hot North!, was expanded to four days, Oct. 11-14, 2008, with a focus on adventure, aboriginal peoples, resources and exploration, exile and lost souls, and climate change and environment. The authors on the international guest list included Edith Iglauer, Rudy Wiebe, Barbara Kingscote, Susan Aglukark, George Monbiot, Andrew Nikiforuk, Elizabeth Kolbert, Nancy Wachowich, Rhoda Katsak, Tom Radford, Janice Williamson, Joyce Dene, Debbie Marshall, Ken McGoogan, David Solway, Anthony Dalton, and Melanie McGrath.

White Man’s Calamity was the first of two sessions held in Zeidler Hall at the Citadel Theatre on Oct. 14. Québécois poet David Solway and nonfiction writers Anthony Dalton from British Columbia and former Albertan Ken McGoogan presented variations on the theme of the Northwest Passage … and the failure of white explorers and adventurers to adapt to the North.

The second session, Call of the North, focused on UK author Melanie McGrath’s book, The Long Exile, the story of the Canadian government’s forced resettlement in 1953 of Inuit to an uninhabited area of the Arctic. In this session, she was interviewed by Toronto writer Marian Botsford Fraser.

Since 2006, Athabasca University’s Master of Arts – Integrated Studies has offered a creative nonfiction course (MAIS 617), as well as the opportunity for students to complete their final projects in the genre (MAIS 701).

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White Man’s Calamity

Anthony Dalton

Ellen Bielawski: Anthony Dalton is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of Canada, an author, freelance photographer and public speaker. As I understand it, this morning he’s going to be talking about that all-too-frequent experience in the Arctic, near-death. He’s been published around the world in magazines and newspapers. British born, now Canadian, he has travelled not only in the Arctic but in the Australian outback, the Falkland Islands, Namibia, Vanuatu, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia. His most recent books are the one he was just signing, Alone Against the Arctic; Baychimo: Arctic Ghost Ship; and Wayward Sailor: In Search of the Real Tristan Jones.

Anthony Dalton: Good morning. The Arctic is a passion of mine, as it is for David and Ken. As with so many people in the past, so many explorers in the past, the Arctic is unforgiving. It doesn’t deal with intruders lightly, as I discovered almost to my cost 23 years ago. I was attempting to travel the Northwest Passage in a very small boat, 13 feet, 7 inches long. It was bright yellow in colour. It was built for me by the Metzeler Corporation in Germany, especially strengthened for the Arctic, although it was an inflatable vessel powered by an outboard motor. I left for Nome, because the Canadian pilot guide for arctic regions states that the Northwest Passage is that body of water that travels between the Bering Strait and Baffin Bay. If I was going to attempt the Northwest Passage, I had to do it right from the start. So I started south of the Bering Strait in the old gold mining town of Nome. Going through the Bering Strait was probably one of the greatest thrills of my life. There I was, where Captain Cook had gone, where so many other explorers had gone. I expected the Bering Strait to give me a really hard time, but I went through it on a day that was extremely placid. My reaction was, “Huh, this Arctic is not as tough as I’ve heard.” At that point I was a bit south of the Arctic Circle.

A few weeks later, I reached a little village called Kivalina. Kivalina is an old whaling town of about 140 residents. There were only about 50 in the village when I was there in August. The weather pinned me down for a week, because the waves out on the sea were ranging seven metres high, and nobody but an idiot would go out under those conditions. I had been up to Point Hope, which was the next settlement on my itinerary, a few days before, and found that the fuel there had been contaminated with salt water. So I had to backtrack to Kivalina to fill up my tanks.

Waiting in Kivalina was a very frustrating experience. All I could think of was, “I’ve got to get moving very soon. The ice is going to close in and I need to get up through the ice before that happens.” I wanted to get around Point Barrow to Hershel Island at least. My Inuit friends said, “Be patient Tony, be patient, do not go out on the sea. We would not go out in this weather.” When the weather finally subsided, the waves were running about two metres. Sylvester said to me, “We wouldn’t go out in that.” I said, “But I have a need to get moving, to reach the ice before it, too, ground into the coast.”

From Alone Against the Arctic:
“The wind and driving rain reduced visibility. It looked as if the sea off the point was flowing south, driven by a strong wind from the polar icecap. But that couldn’t be, unless the wind was blowing in more than one direction at the same time. From where I sat, low down in Audacity, my boat, it seemed the wind was blowing from the southwest towards the northeast (which is what I really wanted, although 15 or 20 knots less would have been preferable).

Remembering the extended sandbar from my previous visit, I slowed the motor until it was just ticking over. Easing out into the sea a ways, I assessed my chances. They were slim, I accepted, but with Audacity under me and experience behind, we should be able to make it. With the utmost concentration, keeping my eyes on the surf breaking on the bar, I steered due west, aiming initially for Siberia.

The sea was really confused, swirling in all directions at once, white with its own spray. I added more power. The wind appeared to be blowing in circles like a miniature tropical storm, an embryonic Arctic hurricane. I didn’t like the look of it at all. I began to feel trapped. Indecisive. Scared. 

 ‘Let’s go back,’ I told myself, turning Audacity’s wheel as I made the decision. Somewhere, I hoped, there was a place to land, a place I had missed. I followed the shore past the supply barge. Its tug was steady at sea, rising and falling with the incoming swells. I thought about tying up to the barge, but a close look revealed there was nothing to tie it to. My loud shouts bounced off the thick steel hull. There was no one onboard. I thought about pulling alongside the tug and asking for help. I did neither. The combination of wind and sea and ship would only damage Audacity, perhaps irrevocably.

 ‘This is my problem,’ I reminded myself. ‘Let’s see it through the way it started, the way it was planned.’

I was well aware that with this expedition I had probably bitten off more than I could chew. Having done so, I had no choice but to swallow and go on. While Audacity rolled with the unstoppable motion, I tied the tarpaulin tightly over the space between the back of my seat and the motor. A check on my lifeline showed it was attached but in good condition. The cord for the kill switch stretched from my ankle to the ignition. My personal gear was stowed mostly under the foredeck. One kit bag was tied to the seat beside me. Underneath, wrapped securely in plastic, my camera equipment and film were out of harm’s way. My two wooden paddles were stationed to left and right. Each tucked down beside the seat against the two main pontoons. Easily accessible if needed, they were well out of the way when not in use.

In the doubtful shelter of the barge’s port side, I switched fuel tanks. There was no sign of any improvement in the weather. With no guarantee that the river I had to aim for and the lagoon it served would be accessible, I needed the biggest tank with the most fuel in case I had to fight my way further north. Ready for the worst the sea could throw at me, I restarted the motor.  

For a few seconds, Audacity wallowed in the swells beside the barge, waiting for her reluctant captain to commit himself to serious action. My raw nerves began to complain loudly again. To drown the internal screaming, my hand opened the throttle and Audacity responded immediately, infinitely more willing than I.

We turned again, back to the point in the open sea. The tug and barge fell rapidly away behind. The land flattened, and the sea took advantage, bombarding it furiously. Knowing my choices were limited, I went hard for the point.

West of the elongated sandbar, the sea settled to great brown and gray combers, and they were definitely running south. The wind, which had been blowing on shore south of Point Hope, still circled. Once well clear of the maelstrom on the sandbar, I turned north and steered into the approaching waves. Howling abusive at me, the wind blew straight in my face, out of the north again.

There’s nothing to slow or stop the wind or its companion waves north of Point Hope. Stuck out there nearly 165° west of Greenwich, a straight line leads north to just one place: the spot on Earth where everything else is south – the North Pole. In between, there’s only the Arctic Ocean, for which the Chukchi Sea is but a part. That August day, while the increasingly malevolent north wind blew the sea before it, the polar ice sat against the coast two days’ run ahead. Already the pack was thickening, advancing south, following the storms, eager to join the fray. The sea, which never gets warm in those high latitudes, was cooling to the point where it would soon become slush, the natural forerunner of solid ice.

Crossing the southbound swells and turning into the wind was a bit like riding a roller coaster at speed. It was at once nerve-wracking and supremely exhilarating. Unlike a roller coaster, however, it was a ride I couldn’t get off, and one that would not stop.

The troughs behind the giant waves were long, almost gentle, at first. Once I was safely over the first summit, I settled into a rhythm. Coast down the back of one. Cruise sedately north for a few minutes, begin the rise – feeling the power as the wave lifted me on high – race to the next peak before the wave broke and start all over again.

In the simplest terms, a wave at sea is a natural path in the wind-controlled behaviour flowing across water. It is not a high point of water travelling across the sea until it breaks on a shore. The water we see foaming, rolling, plunging onto a beach does not arrive with a wave. All that excited water is already there, stationed at the shore since the last tide. The breaking waves simply advertise and arrive independently.

I watched each successive wave approach me, unable to define much difference – if any – between them. They all spelled danger. Each one reared up in front of Audacity, picked us up, held us in its embrace for as long as it needed, let us slide down its back. Intimidating though they were, as long as they behaved in a uniform manner with no surprises, I knew I could stay afloat.

To starboard, the land was visible, falling off, receding behind the rain. We were beyond the point and I began my turn. The only way to safety was diagonally across the incoming seas. My course, would inevitably, take me further and further from shore until I was in line with the river mouth. From that position, I would have to surf all the way in on the back of a wave. Slowly we made our way along the north shore behind Point Hope. The seas marched south, huge and threatening under a sombre sky.

The waves as always were breaking closer in. They were more concave, more menacing. I kept angling away, keeping clear of the worst of the turbulence, rising and falling with the never-ending motion. On top of each wave, I was exposed to the full force of the wind and the rain. The light, which had been feeble for a couple of hours, began to fail as the afternoon prepared to change into sober evening garb. The clouds darkened, thickened. Occasionally I stood up to get my bearings, searching for any sign of the river mouth that leads to Marryat Lagoon. At such times, I had to hold the steering wheel with one hand and brace the other on the dashboard for stability.

Although I couldn’t see the lagoon entrance, I estimated I was approximately due north of it and about one nautical mile or nearly two kilometres from shore. To the east, a span of high granite cliffs, topped by barren rounded hills, ranged north to Cape Dyer and Cape Lisburne.

Coming off the top of one large roller, half drowned in the agitated foam of the crest, I saw the monster. For a second I couldn’t believe my eyes, I couldn’t believe my ears. Like an express locomotive at full speed, the rogue wave roared towards me. My horizons filled with water. The wave dominated my sight. The noise jamming my ears, threatening to split my skull. In a welter of freezing foam, with absolute terror not a second away, we powered through the tumult towards the summit. Gleaming like polished steel, the wave threw its redoubtable bulk at us.

This giant attacked. Picking us up, it shook Audacity violently. Buffeted by wind and breaking crests, I gave her full throttle and streaked diagonally skywards. This time we acquitted ourselves well. Audacity broke through the snowy white disturbance and screamed into the temporary haven of the following trough. Foiled by the unexpected bravado of an insignificant man in a miniature boat, the disgruntled wave raced south to vent its fury on the Alaskan shore.

The storm’s intensity shook me to my core. Waves fought waves. The sea fought the wind. The wind retaliated. I was caught in the middle, and everything attacked me. Knowing the storm was wild enough to easily wreck small ships, I was terrified. The physical strain of keeping Audacity going was taking its toll. My strength was deteriorating by the minute. The mental effort needed to overcome each obstacle sapped my rapidly decreasing morale. Constantly thrown from side to side, I was battered and bruised from contact with the dashboard and the wheel. My hands and arms threatened to seize up, as overworked muscles voted to go on strike. Survival was the only thing on my mind. That and the need to control the fear building inside me. Mastering my fear was the first step in the process of staying alive.

The outboard motor’s brittle voice was all but lost in the shrieking wind. I cut back on the power as we surfed back down the wave’s back. The trough gave me a few seconds to catch my breath. Another monster approached as if it had all the time in the world. My hand pushed the throttle all the way forward, and Audacity kicked in without hesitation. Again we attacked. Swallowing hard, with lips pressed tightly together, knuckles white under my gauntlets, I raced to meet the latest adversary.

At first we did well. Audacity took the initiative at the perfect angle. The wave was gigantic and moving at high speed. It carried us along, a speck of flotsam to be played with. My motor spun the propeller at full speed. Triple blades dug into the water as I held the throttle open. We almost made it to the top. When within reach of the sky, we got hit hard.

When thousands of tonnes of fast-moving water hit more heavy, fast-moving water, the force of the impact is cataclysmic. With a clap like thunder, the breaker slammed into a wave rebounding off the invisible cliffs, creating a diabolical confusion of breaking waves and spindrift.

Swamped by seas and cross-seas attacking from all angles, blasted by yet another giant wave, Audacity began to slew sideways, to slide, to roll. With the steering wheel and throttle, I fought to correct the disastrous motion. It was impossible. The elements had taken complete charge. Audacity was out of control.

The virulent wave which itself had only minutes left to live before demolishing its bulk on Alaskan soil, flexed its enormous wind-honed muscles. Heaving, rolling, blustering, it curled over us, sucking us up into its creamy peak, hissing venomously and roaring with arrogance, it spat us out.

Before I could take any form of evasive action, Audacity capsized.

The already deafening noise increased as we tumbled with the breaking wave. Audacity and I were separated except for a short umbilical cord, as the wave hurled me into the deathly cold waters of the Arctic Ocean. The kill-switch worked perfectly. As Audacity turned over and I was cast out, the line tightened, broke the connection. The engine stopped.

I hit the water hard from a great height, going deep, head first. Audacity hit a fraction of a second later.

My lifeline held this time. It kept me tethered to the boat and prevented my being swept away. I pulled myself up its length to surface inside Audacity’s hull. Anticipating air – because there’s usually air trapped in pockets in an upturned boat – I literally kissed the floorboards. No air. Not a breath. There was just icy salt water below a tight umbrella of yellow. I was trapped underneath, and I knew that this time I would drown in the Arctic.

This, then, was the harsh result of my passion.”

Dalton, Anthony. Alone Against the Arctic. Surrey, B.C.: Heritage House, 2007.

Dalton, Anthony. Baychimo: Arctic Ghost Ship. Surrey, B.C.: Heritage Books, 2006.

Dalton, Anthony. Wayward Sailor: In Search of the Real Tristan Jones. Camden, ME: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 2003.

 

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Ken McGoogan

Ellen Bielawski: I think anyone would have a bit of trouble following the opening act there. If anyone can do it, it’s Ken McGoogan. We’re lucky to have him with us this morning. I think he’s done more in recent history to bring the North alive to people who have not travelled there, than anyone. If you did not see his review in the Globe and Mail yesterday of James Raffin’s new book on Sir George Simpson, the mastermind of the Hudson’s Bay Company, it’s a most recent piece. About a week ago, the Globe and Mail piece ran on his most recent travel in the Arctic. I’m going to turn it over to Ken.

Ken McGoogan:  Thanks very much, Ellen. I think, Anthony, that was cruel and unusual punishment to leave us there under the boat. Some guys will do anything to sell a book, right? Thank God I’m not like that!

I was just up in the Northwest Passage in slightly different circumstances than Anthony, happily for me. I was on a cruise ship, as Ellen mentioned, one of the resource people. It was really quite a wonderful experience, particularly because I spent the past decade or so immersed in northern exploration history. So when we went south down Peel Sound, I knew Franklin had gone south down Peel Sound and got trapped in the ice further down. When we turned east through Bellot Strait, I knew that in 1851 Joseph René Bellot and William Kennedy had come through here by sledge, and they were the first ones to make that. Then we turned north again up Prince Regent Sound, we passed Fury Beach, the cliffs. I looked over there and I knew the ice had driven Edward Parry up onto the beach there in 1824. What began to come home, in my mind I had all this ice, and here we were sailing through the Northwest Passage, there was no ice. Of course, we did eventually go places where we were able to come up against glaciers and massive icebergs. It was absolutely fascinating.

As a result of that, it came home vividly to me that global warming is very much a reality. To me it’s very connected to what I’d been doing, because the contrast was there. Global warming is obviously happening everywhere, and most vividly at both poles. But what distinguishes the Arctic from the Antarctic is the presence of the Inuit people. Down in the Antarctic there are no people. Up in the North, the Inuit people have been there and their presence colours the whole history of the Northwest Passage. I don’t think that their contribution to European exploration has ever been properly recognized. What’s interesting is that those explorers who respected the native peoples, who learned from them and created alliances with them – and I’m thinking of John Rae, Elisha Kent Kane, Charles Hall, and back before that, Samuel Hearn – they flourished in the North. Whereas those who distained to “go native” or were unable to find Inuit allies, usually ended badly.

What I’m going to talk about here today, I’m just going to give you illustrations of that. I’m going to contrast two pairs of people. The first two I’ll touch on briefly, John Franklin and John Rae. I feel convinced that everyone in this room already knows who John Franklin is. Rudy Wiebe wrote that wonderful book, A Discovery of Strangers. Franklin’s first overland expedition, he went down the Coppermine River and headed east. Obviously, neither the admiralty nor Franklin had any real conception of the challenges involved, and that expedition ended in disaster. Franklin ignored the warnings of the native peoples who were with him, who knew better. He insisted they had to keep on going. As a direct result of that, their return trek became a desperate race for survival. Nine men died of starvation, exhaustion or exposure; two were shot to death. A party of Yellowknife Indians managed to save the rest. Ironically, back in England, the sensationalism of this debacle made Franklin a hero, the “man who ate his shoes.”

Flash-forward a bit to 1845, two decades later. I put this in a different context in my book Lady Franklin’s Revenge, where we see there that Franklin was a well-meaning individual. He was trying to redeem himself for a bit of a debacle that had happened down in Van Diemen’s Land, and always trying to prove himself to his wife Jane, who was really the power in that family. Anyway, she gets Franklin a job to lead this expedition. They’ve come in from the East, the Atlantic, and they’ve come in from the West, the Pacific through the Bering Strait, where Anthony was. All they needed to do was to connect this northern channel with the southern channel along the coast. What could be difficult about that? Of course, Franklin sails in 1845 and he disappears. Later he gets stuck in the ice, forced to abandon ship, 105 men at that point. But what’s interesting and significant is that in two decades they haven’t really figured it out yet, that they had 105 men come out, those two ships, that land mass. The lesson of the Inuit, who’d been there about 4,500 years, they’re living for the most part in small groups, semi-nomadic, able to travel to follow the animals. Once that number of men are forced onto the ice, it’s virtually impossible for that many men to survive there, no matter how much help they get.

So conceptually, if those ships got trapped, they were in very deep trouble indeed. This, to me, is also interesting. Sometimes, you hear about the white men, the explorers. But all the explorers are not the same. John Rae would be the antithesis of Franklin. In 1854, Rae was working for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He did solve the two great mysteries of 19th -century arctic exploration. He discovered the fate of the Franklin expedition and the final line in the Northwest Passage, the only one that was then navigable, down around King William Island. He did find a way down to link these two passages, and that was vindicated later when the first one who managed to actually do it, Roald Amundsen, sailed through Rae Strait.

Rae came from Orkney in the northern reaches of Scotland. When he arrived here in North America, he was already an expert hunter. If you happen to be in Orkney, you go to Stromness, you can still see the land where Rae roamed with his musket on his shoulder. He was a hunter, he was a sailor. You can’t live on an island without being a sailor. He was a superb hunter, superb sailor, before he arrived. But John Rae didn’t come in and say, “Okay, I’m an expert and here’s how we’re going to do it.” No, Rae arrives; he goes to the Cree and says, “I’ve never hunted these large animals. How do you cache meat to protect it from the wolves? I’ve never done that, show me.” His best friend is a Swampy Cree named George Rivers, and they’re out hunting all the time. He learned everything he could. He became the first explorer to winter above the Arctic Circle without a ship, lived off the land. He learned from the Inuit how to ice sled runners, why you wear snow goggles, how to build igloos to travel. He travelled the way the Inuit travelled. He didn’t go out and say, “Here’s how it’s going to be.” He learned from them. From the 1840s on, another thing that distinguishes him, he took all this learning and he was the main hunter of every expedition that he ever led. That distinguishes him from virtually every other northern traveller. Rae led the expedition in every way.

From the Inuit, he learned the fate of Franklin, that the final survivors had resorted to cannibalism, and he brought that news back to England. Of course, this outraged Lady Franklin, who enlisted Charles Dickens to discredit Rae. Dickens articulated the prevailing sentiment towards the Inuit, describing them as savages and virtually accusing them of murder. John Rae did what he could. Very difficult to defend yourself against someone who’s probably the most articulate writer of the age. A big fan of Dickens, but obviously he had feet of clay in certain areas. In the end, forensic evidence has vindicated both the Inuit and John Rae, although even now, you’ll find people who argue otherwise. The point I want to make is that Rae became the most successful explorer of the era because he was avid to learn from the native peoples, be they Cree, Ojibwa or Inuit. He learned from them, and could listen. A different approach from John Franklin, who could not listen, could not learn.

I’ll give you a second contrasting pair of opposites. Farther east on the Arctic map, between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, that’s where you’ve got Smith’s Sound. That did become known as the American direction to the North Pole, and Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, they both went up in there. That’s how most people tried. I’ll talk about two contrasting Americans, Elisha Kent Kane and Adolphus Greely. In 1853, Franklin is still missing. Elisha Kent Kane, he was on Beechey Island, he was from Philadelphia. He was another doctor, interestingly. He’s standing on Beechey Island talking with three or four other people, including Captain William Penny and a couple of other people. A sailor comes over the rise hollering, “Graves, graves, we’ve found graves!” They had found the graves on Beechey Island of three sailors that Franklin had left before he sailed south. Those are the three graves that were opened up, as the story is told in the book Frozen in Time. I was there just a month ago, looking at those graves.

Kane at that time, you’re right near Wellington Channel, which leads north. Most people at that time, virtually all the arctic experts, were convinced that Franklin had sailed north. Kane was highly literate, easily the best writer of any of the explorers of the 19th century. He wrote a two-volume masterpiece called Arctic Explorations. I’m working on a book on Kane right now. So Kane was convinced, through his extensive reading, that there was an open polar sea – this was a prevailing theory – an open polar sea at the top of the world, and there was a barrier of ice around it. He believed Franklin had gone up Wellington Channel and got trapped behind that barrier. So the whole challenge was to get up and make your way through that barrier of ice. He thought some survivors might still be up there.

So in 1853, he sails up in a quest to rescue Franklin survivors and attain this open polar sea, as he thought it was. The Russians – well, Ferdinand von Wrangel, who had led a great sledge trip in the 1820s – they’d argued that the best way to achieve the Pole was to do it the Inuit way with dogs and sledges, and put depots of provisions along the route, and then make the dash. Kane decided to do precisely that, so in 1853 he sails north through Smith Sound. He gets trapped in the pack ice up there. He survives two horrific winters, the usual scurvy, amputations, and deaths from overexposure. Unlike many other explorers, however, Kane was willing to learn. First, he had an Enoch hunter with him, a young guy at that time, Hans Hendrick, who subsequently went with other explorers and became one of the foremost Inuit of the century travellers. With Hendrick, Kane forged an alliance with the local Inuit. He helped them, they helped him.

So here was this aristocratic, very well-educated Philadelphian, who was actually able to make the transition. He was actually at times out hunting with the Inuit and living in the igloo with a multitude of people around him. He was able to do that, to become truly allied with the local Inuit off the coast of Greenland, combining the Inuit savvy and the Western technology. Half his men defected. They figured, “Okay, we’re going to be able to make it ourselves.” Kane said, “What about all these sick men who can’t leave and make that run for it? No, we’re going to make a run for it and we’ll send someone back.” So they go off. They get about 300 miles down the coast and they realize it’s not that easy, and they eventually come skulking back. Meanwhile, Kane has turned the ship into an igloo and eventually, with the help of the Inuit who are there transporting supplies and men, he manages a fantastic escape using sledges and small boats. He’s really the Shackleton of the North. He finds that American route to the Pole. He arrives home to learn that the fate of Franklin has been discovered by John Rae. But the point here is that Kane survived because of his alliance with the Inuit that he was able to forge.

Take that example and compare it with the Cape Sabine disaster, about a quarter of a century after Kane, of Adolphus Greely. By now, the explorers have pushed up quite a bit farther north, past Kane Basin, between Ellesmere and Greenland. Greely sails up there and he’s supposed to establish a chain of weather stations and try for the Pole. Initially, all is well. He and his men are left there at a place called Fort Conger. One of them tries for the Pole, a guy named James Lockwood, and he sets a new record for farthest north. But relief ships failed to arrive, heavy ice. Here we have the characteristic failure to respect the changeability of the arctic weather. Through two winters they survive up there, but then a second relief ship fails to arrive, and it’s time that they have to start moving down. The question that arises: Do we go south down the coast of Ellesmere Island where there should be a cache of supplies left by our fellow Americans, or do we head down the coast of Greenland, where there should be a cache as well, and over there the Inuit people? There are some of the Inuit people, the descendants, sons and daughters of those that Elisha Kent Kane befriended, the Etah Eskimos. They talked this over, and what do they do? They go down Ellesmere, where there’s nobody. Well, the relief ships failed to arrive and there’s no fall-back position. By the time they think, “Well, maybe we should’ve gone over there to hang out with the Inuit people,” they encounter open water and they can’t get there. It’s that classic mistake – the failure to respect the Inuit people and their significance and importance up there.

That winter, under the stress of starvation, the expedition falls apart. The two Inuit hunters that they have, one dies from overexertion, the other in a drowning accident. By June, all the officers except Greely are dead. Seven men are left; one private has to be shot. By 1884, when the relief ship does arrive, Greely has lost 21 of his 27 men – one to execution, the others to starvation, drowning, and hypothermia. Then the survivors are haunted by charges of cannibalism again, which undoubtedly did take place. So here’s the startling revelation: If you enter an extreme environment with the attitude that you’re ready to learn from those who’ve lived there for 5,000 years, you stand a fighting chance. But if you arrive taking the view that you have nothing to learn from them, then calamity lies directly ahead.

I come to the announced theme, the white man’s calamity. I think these two contrasting pairs show that the white man’s calamity is his arrogance. It’s a form of hubris, more specifically, the overbearing pride that goeth before a fall. It’s terrific to think that since then, happily, we’ve learned the lesson that hubris is our weakness, it leads to calamity, but we’ve overcome it. But I think that’s a subject for another panel. 

McGoogan, Ken. Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the   Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin. Toronto: Harper Flamingo Canada, 2001.

McGoogan, Ken. Lady Franklin’s Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2005.

McGoogan, Ken. Race to the Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane. Toronto: Harper Collins Canada, 2008.

 

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David Solway

Ellen Bielawski: Well, it does get better, doesn’t it? Our third speaker this morning is David Solway, the award-winning author of so many books that I don’t dare go near him, I’m so in awe. I won’t read you all the titles. He’s currently an associate editor with Books in Canada, and working on his fourth book in education and culture, entitled Reading, Riting and Rythmitic, and a collection of political essays, Living in the Valley of Shmoon. If you were here Friday night, you heard his wonderful poetic evocation of the end of the Franklin expedition. With that, I’ll turn it over to David.

David Solway:  Thanks, Ellen. I should start by saying that in some way I differ from my good predecessors. They are experts in the region; they’ve both been to the High Arctic. Anthony was saying at the beginning that we all have a passion for the Arctic. But I don’t have a passion for the Arctic. That makes me wonder what I’m doing here. Then I understood it was because I wrote a book of poetry called Franklin’s Passage, which required that I do some research. All of the research that I did was confined to books by various authors that we see at this table and many others as well. The furthest north I’ve ever been is Edmonton, three times. The last time I was here, three years ago, I arrived in a 40-below cold snap, so I really did feel North. Before that the furthest north I’d been was Mont Laurier, Quebec because, like Ken, I grew up in Quebec. Ken grew up in St. Eustache, I grew up in Ste. Agathe des Monts. That’s one of the advantages I have over Ken, because Ste. Agathe des Monts is about 40 miles north of St. Eustache. I have a bit of a problem, which I haven’t quite resolved yet. It takes me back a couple of years when I was a guest at the University of Regina. I was asked to give a lecture at the department of education, so I wrote up the lecture. As I was doing so, mainly on the plane on the way there, I realized that I had also touched upon another subject that had interested me, so I wrote up a second lecture. When I appeared before an audience like this in a room very similar to this one, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. So I put it to a vote. I said, “I have two lectures – the first one is called this and the second one is called that. Which one do you want to hear?” There was a majority who preferred one of the two, and that was the one that I did. When I knew I had to come down here and do something, I thought, “I can’t work the way I usually do as a poet, that is, I can’t just wing it. I’ve been doing that for years, this is my métier, you know. Here I have to be serious, I have to try and be authentic or authoritative. So I can only speak of what I know, and I can’t take too many chances.” So I did write up a kind of lecture, a talk, which I have in front of me. LitFest artistic director Miki Andrejevic said the other night, “I’d like to hear you read some poetry and talk about it.” I said, “Well, I’ve got something prepared.” He said, “Why don’t you do something else?” So I thought about that, and I read a few poems a few nights ago. Then afterwards I took an adversarial stance. Afterwards Miki said, “Why don’t you do your lecture?” So, I’ll start with what I’ve written up. It’s simply called Some Notes on North.

I wanted to start out with a poem by Richard Outram. Richard Outram was a Canadian poet, one of the best poets we’ve had in this country. In fact, he was poet laureate or poet-in-residence for the City of Toronto some years ago. I don’t think he ever acquired the acclaim that really was his due. He died about a year-and-a-half ago. It’s a very painful story. He was very lovingly and happily married to Barbara Howard, who is an engraver. They ran a press together, and so on. It was a 35-year marriage, and one that was founded apparently in absolute devotion to one another. She died. Shortly afterwards, Richard went outside, laid down in the snow, and he died. I want to start with a poem of Richard’s called “Expedition.”

       It seems the fabled Northwest Passage and
       the fabled Northeast Passage meet;

       at the Arctic centre of starved men’s minds
       under a white stunned sun circling the white,

       boundless, featureless, white-wired-horizon:
       in the absolute cold of a man’s absolute death.

That idea of the Northwest Passage as metaphoric correlative of our experience is what really was the principle upon which I based the book of poetry, Franklin’s Passage, the idea of absolute cold, absolute death, and absolute separation between the individual and the individual’s goals. But of course it’s a polyvalent metaphor, and I was thinking of the blocked Northwest Passage between a man and a woman. I am not as devoted a husband as Richard was, and that sometimes leads to problems. I thought of the blocked Northwest Passage between an individual and an understanding of his or her life. I thought of the blocked Northwest Passage between French and English in Quebec, two communities separated, two solitudes, as Hugh McLennan called it. We haven’t quite met yet, we haven’t bridged that passage. The irony is that Franklin’s Passage, the book, won the Grand Prix de Livres du Montreal. I was the first anglophone poet in the 40-year history of the prize to win that award. I gave my speech in French and quoted Québécois poets. I thought suddenly there’s a kind of melting taking place, the fact that I should win that prize in Quebec, which excludes most anglophone writers. I should win the Prix David, because it’s my name, but that will never happen. But this was a start. I thought, “Well, maybe now the passage here between the two communities will begin to melt, northeast and northwest and now it will meet.” Well, we’ll see. The piece itself, I’m just calling it “Some Notes on North” – I don’t have a title for it.

Having grown up in the small Laurentian town of Ste. Agathe des Monts, I know all about snow, and about climate change as well. When I was a teenager completing high school, the more advanced spirits were beginning to talk about global cooling, which eventually became one of the ecological Leitmotifs of the 1970s. You must recall all that palaver about the new encroaching Ice Age, and how the entire northern hemisphere would gradually turn into an arctic wasteland. Well, climate changes, and so do our obsessions about climate change and its causes. I remember walking down Principal Street around 11 o’clock one night, munching an Oh Henry! chocolate bar that resembled a dark, sweet icicle, mottled in my father’s fur coat against a 30-below onslaught of seeming unparalleled vindictiveness. I wondered what I was doing here. The stellar flag above me inspired no sense of patriotism whatsoever.

Later on, I could only groan inwardly whenever I heard Gilles Vignault chanting, “L’Hiver, c’est mon pays” – a sentiment clearly not shared by the sun-seeking hordes of Québécois pouring into Florida for the winter. Myself, I sympathized with Leonard Cohen’s resonant complaint, “Winter is all wrong for me.”  Instead of renting a psychological igloo on King William Island in the Arctic, Cohen bought a physical house on the island of Hydra in the Aegean. When his former partner, Marianne, offered me her own house on the island if I consented to tutor her son, I jumped at the chance. From that point on, whenever I could, it was baklavas and 90-plus temperatures rather than balaclavas and sub-freezing darkness. In a sense, you might say, I was in prestigious company. After all, Glenn Gould “pulled up his parka” and went North only once, and Stephen Leacock, who wrote prolifically about the North, admitted that he’d never gone there and never would. Richard Outram’s last book, from which I quoted, published posthumously – and is accompanied by the drawings, by the way, of Thoreau MacDonald, the son of the Group of Seven member, J.E.H. MacDonald – is significantly entitled South of North.

Nevertheless, what I feel then, opting for the midday rather than the midnight sun, I was betraying my patrimony, denying my identity, churlishly seeking the easy way out. These critics would no doubt endorse Rudy Wiebe’s dictum in Playing Dead: “Until we grasp imaginatively and realize imaginatively in words, song, image and consciousness, that North is both the true nature of our world and also our graspable destiny, we will always go whoring after the mocking palm trees and beaches of the Caribbean and Florida and Hawaii, we will always be wishing ourselves something we aren’t, always staring south.” As he might have added, lolling on the honeyed littoral of the Aegean, where so many Canadian poets have roistered, declaimed, imbibed, wedged, and occasionally indited a line or two. The point is, character, destiny and identity cannot be legislated or exhorted into being. I wrote in an essay entitled “The Flight from Canada,” which appeared in my litcrit book, Director’s Cut: “It is precisely the comfortless absence of a secure identity, the rootlessness, the sense of radical alienation, which is our greatest gift and blessing, routes – spelled r-o-u-t-e-s, not roots – confer authority upon us.” I should also confess that I certainly do not find my identity in nordicity, in the so-called “northern imaginary,” or in the enunciative field of boring discourse, to cite one expert’s thinking. What “north of 60” really means for me is the shuddering recollection of my last birthday.

Nevertheless, I did grow up and spend most of my life in what I like to call the North, even if it was sub-tundra and sub-taiga. I can understand the attraction of winter, of sharp, clear cold and dancing under the aurora borealis, which I’ve done by the way, ungainly in my mukluks. Of the hiss of skis on packed snow or the sweep of a skate’s heel smooth on bow-bend – that’s a quote from Gerard Manley Hopkins. According to the Sony BMG bio of Glenn Gould, “He was uncomfortable with the Mediterranean temperament that manifests itself in bright colours, personal displays of passion and personal identity.” I can understand that, too, having suffered from the excesses of the Mediterranean Weltanschaunung far too often. Still, as I attend this symposium, I can’t help feeling like a Russian sub, an alien intruder in someone else’s territory, sneaking along the bottom of collective awareness and domestic expectation.

Blair Bruce has an extraordinary painting executed in 1888 originally entitled The Phantom Hunter, now called The Phantom of the Snow, which hangs in the Hamilton Art Gallery and with which maybe some of you are familiar. I have it here. It depicts a hunter or trapper dressed in brown – the only strong colour on the canvas – who has collapsed in the snow looking as if he’s about to give up the ghost. He’s gesturing towards a pallid, greyish-white phantom figure that’s moving eerily away from him. Just a week ago, I was in Hamilton to give a poetry reading. I took some time out in the afternoon to visit the Hamilton Art Gallery where the painting hangs, only to find that, like the phantom figure in the painting, the painting itself had moved away from me. It was on tour, ironically in Quebec. But it wasn’t a total loss because I emerged with this postcard print of it that you may want to look at later. In a sense, it serendipitously encapsulates my relation to the North, a shrunken copy of the original for which I paid next to nothing and can scan without effort or discomfort.

Be that as it may, it’s a great painting; I’ve seen various prints but never seen the painting itself. I’ll have to go back to Hamilton one day. I was inspired by a poem called “The Walker of the Snow,” by the Irish poet, Charles Dawson Shanly. He spent 15 years in Canada in the office of public works. The poem was written in 1867. It appeared in various magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, and finally settled in Clarence Stedman’s famous 1895 Victorian Anthology. It’s about a hunter who suddenly finds himself walking beside this phantom figure, and it has a very eerie effect on him, sort of like a snark turning into a boojum, if you remember the Lewis Carroll poem. I don’t have the time to read the whole poem, but I’m going to read two stanzas, which are significant for my purposes.

       Then the fear chill gathered o’er me,
       Like a shroud around me cast,
       And I sank upon the snow-drift
       When the shadow hunter passed.

      And the otter-hunters found me,
      Before the break of day,
      With my dark hair blanched and whitened
      As the snow in which I lay.

It’s kind of sentimental and the pleonasm, of course, is “blanched and white,” same thing. But the effect is a significant one; it’s a calamitous effect, as you pick up in Bruce’s painting, as well. Still, as I was thinking about the title of today’s talk, which came very clear to me and aptly circled back towards the white man’s clarity, I tried to figure out what to do with that. I was thinking of this poem and being blanched and whitened as a white man’s calamity. I was thinking of why I wrote this book, and I began thinking of the metaphor, once again of the Northwest Passage and our calamitous existence on this earth. I thought, “Well, for those who go up north, yes, there is such a thing as a white man’s calamity.” White men who explore the North, they get themselves into serious trouble from which they have to be rescued by the indigenous population. But for me, not being an Arctic explorer, the real calamity is that all men turn white in the North, in the sense that we are all white men and women once we have entered what's called the circumpolar semiotic in the Arctic. This is the metaphor I’m talking about. It exemplifies our condition as fragmentary and perishable creatures, the majority of which we do everything to suppress, obviously, and yet which we will understand is the duality there. We turn white with fear, we turn white with age, we turn white as the innumerable pages of the books that we read about the North. We are all blanched and whitened, we are all whited out by the great eraser, time. As we seek this metaphorical Northwest Passage of insight or resolution, much of it of course will escape us, which is the subject of my book. Like the proverbial moth to the fire, the human spirit is drawn to a sheet of ice, which functions as a kind of mirror that reflects back to us the wan phantasms that we finally are. When I tried to capture this recognition, one poem from Franklin’s Passage, adumbrates the pivotal scene of the book. It’s about mirrors.

      They come in all forms
      and from different orders of magnitude:
      pocket-sized, framed in cherrywood,
      giving back the common lineament;
      the tropic device of thickened panes
      painted with sooty translucence
      and the frost of approximate discernment;
      sheets of ice rising sheer and stark
      to startle with a long-forgotten shape
      in the sunlit, unaccustomed light
      of alien latitudes;
      even the sky with its polished tain of cloud
      assembles a ghostly embodiment
      and lamps the visceral pitch of design.
      But the voyage itself is the truest glass.
      Scoured of flaws, smoke and biases,
      it peels back the skin of the customary
      to reflect an interior figure
      vaguely intuited and routinely misconceived,
      like a ship’s completed manifest
      accounting for the arc of discovery and loss
      and bearing us back, astonished, to ourselves.

So North is for me, not a place, shifting or indefinable as it may be. It’s a metaphorical correlative of East, West and South, of all the other directions. It’s both a literary and an existential trope. It’s a metaphysical compass in which every point is marked “N,” one that summarizes our condition as frail, beleaguered, transient creatures struggling against the harsh environment not only of our physical presence but our conscious presence. The mystery of our being here reminds us not only of a cold habitat but of a cold, implacable epistemology. This is ultimately why I prefer the vibrant phantasmagoria of the Mediterranean archipelago, where the spirit is drenched in the illusion of plenitude and opulence, the sea undulating with fish and mermaids, the storied past present at every turn. The great poets from Homer and Aeschylus to Seferis and Elitus ventiloquil on the wind. You won’t get much of this north of 60. At the same time, paradox, as usual, ruffles our convictions. It must be admitted that the actual North may also have a rich and friendly side, as Vilhjalmur Stefansson insisted in The Friendly Arctic, while the Aegean Islands all shale and granite and long deforested, dry as Ezekiel’s bones under the pitiless summer sun, may also initiate us into the frozen barrens of existence. So maybe it all comes down to a personal decision between two different ways of confronting truth – fire or ice. You might remember Robert Frost’s famous poem. He is at the beginning of that poem, belying his very name, Frost.

         From what I've tasted of desire
         I hold with those who favour fire

But of course, Frost is also aware at the end of the poem

        … that for destruction ice
        Is also great
       And would suffice.

 
Solway, David. Franklin’s Passage. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.

 

 

 

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Call of the North

Welcome to the final session of LitFest ’07. It’s been fantastic, and I think I say that quite objectively, even though I am chairman of the board. My name is Curtis Gillespie. Welcome to our final event. I’ll talk about the event as a whole at the end of today’s session, but for now we’ll move to our final session. I want to introduce our two esteemed panelists here today, Marian Botsford Fraser to my extreme left, and I don’t mean that politically, but maybe I do, I don’t know.

Melanie McGrath

To my immediate left, the centrist, Melanie McGrath. Melanie is an award-winning journalist. Her book, Motel Nirvana, won the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Award for best British and Commonwealth writer under the age of 35. Her books include Silver Town and her latest book, which we’ll talk about today. The Long Exile took her to the High Arctic to live among the Inuit. It is also currently being made into a feature documentary by Zacharias Kunuk, director of the Camera D’Or winner, Atanarjuat, whose latest movie was The Journals of Knut Rasmussen. She continues to write for, among others, The Guardian, The Observer, The London Evening Standard, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, and The Times. Melanie has lived in Las Vegas, Nicaragua, and now lives in a very interesting old house in London. The Times once listed her as one of the 10 most interesting people to know in the capital, and I’m curious to know how they arrived at that conclusion.

Just one last little word before I turn it over to Marian, who will explain more about the structure of this afternoon’s event. I want to say that it’s been really nice, being involved in the organization of this event, to see Marian and Melanie at so many of the events. You don’t always see that kind of support when you go to conferences and literary events, from people who are participants. So I want to thank you both for being such excellent participants in every sense of the word. Thank you.

Marian Botsford Fraser:  Thank you, Curtis. We’re going to do this a little bit differently than other sessions, just because, to be completely practical about it, Melanie has this wonderful new book about the Arctic. My book is about being a Northerner and the connection that I feel as a person from Northern Ontario with the Arctic, and how my feelings about landscape certainly extend through my experience of growing up in the North to the Arctic, and is probably why I was drawn to go there numerous times. But the reality is that Melanie has this wonderful book about a really important story in the Arctic. We’re going to have a conversation about her book.

I was introduced to this subject in 1991 when I was working for the Arctic Council in Ottawa. This was a coalition of NGOs who were trying to get a non-governmental and governmental organization going of Northerners and Southerners, aboriginal people and governments right across the Arctic. It involved people from all the other Arctic nations, as well as Canada. I went to a meeting in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which was still Leningrad at that point. One of the people who was on that trip was John Amagoalik, who at that time started to tell me the story of the High Arctic exiles, which is very much a key story in the eastern Arctic. One thing that I’ve learned from coming here today is the fact that there are similar but very different mythologies and histories between the eastern Arctic and the western Arctic. Last night, we had a wonderful documentary about the Inuvialuit. That story would not be well known in Eastern Canada and I think possibly the High Arctic exile story would not be well known here. So, Melanie is going to start by giving you a couple of readings from her book, so you get a sense of the flavour of the book and her approach to it. Then, she’s going to come back and sit down and we’ll have a conversation about the subject.

Melanie McGrath:  Hello everyone, can you hear me? Thanks for coming on such a lovely sunny day. I’m going to read two very short sections from the book. Then, after we’ve had a conversation, I’m going to come back and read a final even shorter section. But if I read that now, I’ll give away the ending.

Just to give you a very sketchy outline of the story, which we’re going to be talking about in much more detail, will help put the readings in context. In August 1920, an American, a prospector-turned-filmmaker, Robert Flaherty, who many of who may have heard of, arrived in a little eastern Arctic settlement of Inukjuak, which is on the east coast of Hudson Bay. He came to make a film, which became known as Nanook of the North, which is still widely regarded as one of the greatest documentaries ever made, and has influenced people as diverse as Serge Eisenstein, Orson Welles, and Charlie Chaplin. Robert hung around Inukjuak making his movie for a year. He left in August 1921. He never went back to the Arctic, incidentally.

In December 1921, one of the women who is featured in Nanook of the North, Maggie Nujarluktuk, gave birth to her and Robert’s son, who she named Josephie Flaherty. Nanook of the North was a fabulous success. It played in cinemas in such far-flung places as Beijing, which I guess was Peking then, and Malaysia. In fact, Nanook in Malaysian means “strong man.” At the same time as it was a worldwide blockbuster, the man who played Nanook, who was an Inukjuak hunter by the name of Alakariallak, actually started at the same time that Nanook was playing in the cinema. Josephie Flaherty, Robert Flaherty’s illegitimate son, was brought up by Maggie and his stepfather, Paddy Aqiatusuk. Paddy Aqiatusuk was a very gifted sculptor, and you can see some of his sculptures today in the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.

In 1953 when Josephie was about 33, the Canadian government forcibly relocated Paddy Aqiatusuk and about 19 Inuit families from Inukjuak to the High Arctic. The reasons they did this we’ll be talking about later, but they were mostly geopolitical reasons. The Inuit were relocated to two locations – Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island and Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island. They had a very hard time surviving. Two years later, Josephie Flaherty joined his stepfather and his stepfather’s family in order to try and provide more hunters, and to survive. The Canadian government promised these Inuit that they would send them back if they didn’t like the place. They didn’t like that place, they made that very clear, but the Canadian government refused to send them back. Forty years later, long after Josephie Flaherty had died, there was a Royal Commission on aboriginal peoples, which came to the conclusion that what had been done to this group of Inuit in relocating them nearly 1,500 miles north of their homeland was one of the worst human rights abuses in Canadian history, and they were awarded compensation of $10 million. The Canadian government has never apologized for what it did to Josephie Flaherty and his family.

The first reading I’m going to read is a short piece about Josephie Flaherty’s childhood. Obviously, Josephie Flaherty is not alive for me to ask him about his childhood, so I’ve had to re-imagine it on the basis of what I know about Inuit life during that period of the 1920s and 1930s. I will mispronounce the Inuit words; that will not be a deliberate mistake. If anyone would like to correct me afterwards, I’d be very grateful.

“Josephie Flaherty did not bother Paddy Aqiatusuk. Between the growing boy and the sculptor a firm friendship began. No Inuk boy could’ve wanted a better teacher, no Inuk man a keener student. True, Aqiatusuk was demanding and often grumpy, but it was through being in his salty, bear-like presence that Josephie began to leave behind his childish sense of the world and find his way as a hunter and a man. All through the early 1930s, Josephie and Aqiatusuk were companions on the land. During the soft summers they paddled their kayaks across the swell of Hudson Bay while the sculptor pointed out unexpected currents, odd tides, and anomalies of beach and shore, and the boy noted the bays and inlets, taking in the contours of the coast. For days they paddled along the Hopewell Islands out west to Farmer Island as far as Kogaluc Bay in the north, to the Nastapokas, the Marcopeet Islands, into the Sleepers in the south. For all these expeditions, Josephie learned to predict the tides, the effects of the winds and rain and the sun and the sea. He became familiar with the ice and the currents. He discovered where to look for bearded, harp and ring seal, walrus and beluga whale.

His education continued through the hard winters. From Aqiatusuk he learned how to harness dogs and ice the runners of the komatik and to pack a sled so it didn't topple when the going was rough. Together they drove out across the land-fast ice, through pressure ridges to the pack ice beyond. They ranged way beyond the low hills where Josephie and Maggie had stopped to pick willow, to the huge, empty spaces of the interior. Aqiatusuk showed Josephie how to lead the dogs, reading their mood, sensing when it was best to run alongside, and when more prudent to ride on the komatik with the whip, when to discipline the team and when to give them their freedom, when to offer them meat and when to let them go hungry. Gradually, young Josephie distinguished the different and subtle ways in which dogs use their intelligence. By his mid-teens, the son of Robert Flaherty was an expert in dogcraft.

Those trips were Josephie’s introduction to the tumultuous churn of ice. Slowly, he learned how to recognize the thin sheet ice which formed from freezing rain and could cover the lichen and starve the caribou. He learned how to spot the thick layer of frozen melted snow which could conceal deadly melt holes below. He sensed when the sikuaq or ice soup, which began to form in the sea at the end of August, became thick enough to bear weight and, later in the year, he recognized when the ice was likely to candle, throwing up the sharp spines that sliced sled dog paws. He learned to watch for ice rising up at the hinges between the ice foot and the shore-fast ice and to predict when it would rear up to form the turbulent, slabby ice ranges the Inuit call tuniq. He observed the shadows on the sea left by black ice, and those accompanied by frost smoke which marked open water. He discovered where treacherous ice skins were most likely to be lying across leads and where tiny tremors and the blanching of the air signalled there was land ahead.

Under Aqiatusuk’s guidance, Josephie acquainted himself with the habits of arctic animals, where each preferred to live and how and what it ate, where it travelled, how it paired and bred, for how long the young remained close to their mothers, where they were at their most vulnerable. He learned how to stalk caribou on the flat, wind-blown tundra, and how to use a white fur battle to outfox seal. He came to a precise understanding of where and when to fling the harpoon or release the bullet that would make a creature his. He discovered the art of flensing and butchering meat and where to store it so the wolves and foxes and dogs wouldn't take it. When Aqiatusuk had fox pelts to trade, he took his stepson with him. The boy learned how to talk to white men and how much not to say.

Another winter approached and Maggie Nujarluktuk took sick and, within a few weeks, she died. Her body, wrapped in skins and buried beneath the rocks, joined the company of silent souls out on the tundra, their skeletons kept from the prying paws of wolves and foxes, their stories meshed into the tangle of willow. The exact cause of her death remains unknown. In the 1930s, 740 of every 100,000 deaths among the Inuit were unexplained, and that’s a ratio 20 times the rate among the population of Lower Canada. The family said a prayer, burned Maggie’s clothes, and returned to their lives. Josephie was not encouraged to cry, nor to vent his rage. No one thought to write to Robert Flaherty with the news, nor did they look for explanations. Death was a well-worn path, too familiar to be mapped.

So Josephie found himself alone in the world. Alone, that was, but for Paddy Aqiatusuk, from whom this shy, sensitive, loyal boy began the slow processes of learning, as he was never able to learn from his real father, how to become the son to a man. Maggie’s death brought them closer. They wouldn’t realize quite how far each depended on the other until they were forced apart. But for now, all that lay ahead in a distant future neither could predict and to which, in the Inuit way of things, neither gave much thought.”

Okay, this second reading is after the families have been transported up to the High Arctic. It’s about their first experience of the dark period. As any of you will know who’ve been up to the High Arctic up as far as Ellesmere Island, the sun sets in October and it doesn’t rise again until February.

“On the 15th of October, 1953, the sun set over Ellesmere Island for the last time that year. For the next four months the Inuit would be living in perpetual darkness. On good days, when the clouds were drawn back, the sea ice reflected the moon’s glow, and so long as the Inuit were out on the ice, they could see their footprints. On bad days, and most days were bad days, they couldn’t tell what was beneath or above or around them, nor in what direction they were travelling or even when their journey, however short, might end. The Inuit of Inukjuak had no word for the void that opened up around them. At first, they tried to carry on with the routine they’d worked so hard to establish while there’d still been light. The men left to go hunting in the dark and returned in the dark. They ate and pissed and shat and made love and sewed and cooked and swapped stories and fed their dogs and cleaned their equipment in the dark. To cheer themselves, they made bone flutes and lutes with sinew and strings and they sang and played music and told stories. But the dark exhausted them, and pretty soon it was almost impossible to maintain a routine. Their body clocks broke down and the brain couldn’t tell whether it was day or night or something in between. The absence of life made hunting an almost daily terror. Though they couldn’t see it, the constant creaking and cracking of ice reminded them that they were surrounded.

By December the camp was struggling to stay alive. There wasn’t enough meat, and for weeks at a time they had to live on bannock bread and tea, but the bannock didn’t fill their stomachs and the tea didn’t keep them warm. Their bellies demanded niqi, fresh meat, nirimarik or real food, flesh and blubber, but by December there was no niqi to be had. To satisfy their cravings, they began to eat the carcasses of starved wolves or foxes they found laying on the ice. They ate ptarmigan feathers and bladders and heather, they boiled up hareskin boot liners and made broths from old pairs of sealskin kamiks. They chewed seagull burns and dog harnesses. They ate fur and lemming tails. They consumed their sick dogs and the bodies of their aborted pups. But nothing was ever enough. Before long some kind of stomach sickness began to spread among them. Their bellies knotted into fists, and their muscles trembled. The children leaked diarrhea then vomit which the women in the camp fed to the dogs rather than having it go to waste. Sargant – that was the RCMP policeman – came to see them, leaving rations of flour, tea and a little sugar, but it all raced through their stomachs and out of their bowels more or less undigested. The illness dimmed their spirits further. Everyone grew so demoralized that not even songs and music could cheer them up. They began to fret and pine for the people they’d left behind, and to talk about them constantly, remembering old times, events, celebrations. They came up with a new word to describe the dark period, Qausuittualuk, the Great Dark Time. They named their new home Qausuittuq, the Place that Never Thaws. In the dark, their loneliness and isolation took on a peculiarly schizophrenic quality, so they were no longer able to distinguish what was real and what was not. Qausuittualuk was more than a more physical blackout, it was a blind drawn across their souls.”

Botsford Fraser: Thank you, Melanie. There’s considerable irony, of course, that here we sit, two white women, discussing this very key story of the Inuit in the eastern Arctic. I think equally for Canadians, it is astounding that it has taken a British journalist to find this story and tell this story in such a wonderful, compelling way. Can you tell me why you told this story, how you found it, and how you came to go to the Arctic to write this story?

McGrath:  Well, I think it was one of those serendipitous, almost inexplicable events. It was a party of documentary filmmakers, and someone in the party mentioned to me that they had been trying to get a film off about a group of Inuit who had been forcibly relocated to the North, but no one wanted to know. I went home and forgot about it. But the story stayed with me and wouldn’t go away. It was only after I finished the book that I realized that, for me, the connection was that it was a story about a family really struggling to stay together against all odds and against tremendous environmental and geopolitical forces that they couldn’t control.

In a strange way, that spoke to me as the child of Irish immigrants to a very poor part of London. I went to my publisher and said, “I want to write about this.” The publisher said, “Are you mad?” I’d just completed a book about London – Silvertown – which had done rather well. The way publishers are, they wanted me to repeat the success of that book. But I wanted to tell this story and I felt that it was a story that needed telling and that it would be one of the great challenges of my writing life. It was a story that I was going to try to tell from the point of view of the Inuit.

If you go into the bookstore now and look on the Arctic shelves, certainly in the UK, you will see story after story after story about Arctic exploration, Arctic discoveries; you will see almost nothing about the Inuit. I was saying to Marian before we came on, for me this is a story about Canada’s history and about the history of North America. But in the States, this book gets shelved under “anthropology.” It seems to me that there’s still an awful lot of work to be done.

Botsford Fraser: You trained as an anthropologist, didn’t you?

McGrath: Yes, I didn’t complete it, but I did start an MA in cultural anthropology.

Botsford Fraser: I know you also worked with the San people, you did some documentary work with the San in Botswana, and also you lived in Nicaragua. Did you have an interest already in an aboriginal story?

McGrath: Ironically enough, when I wrote The Long Exile, I was living in the tropics. There was one particularly surreal occasion when I came down from Ellesmere Island and I had to get back to Nicaragua, where I was living, via London. I got a tiny bit of frostbite on my toe when I was up in Ellesmere, so I like to say that I’m probably the only person who had frostbite in the tropics. Of course, it was inexplicable to Nicaraguans, they had no idea what I was talking about. But I had made a documentary on the Namibia-Botswana border about the San people, who are more familiar as the bushmen. I had also spent some time when I was living in Las Vegas, I’d spent some time on the Navaho reservation that’s right near there. In Nicaragua, I’d spent some time with the Miskito and Nicarao Indians. We know this now, it’s almost too familiar to say, but the problems of indigenous people are the same the world over, and that struck me very forcibly. I guess it was a whole coming-together of all sorts of personal and political beliefs that made me feel that I really wanted to tell this story.

Botsford Fraser: Let’s talk about Nanook, the movie, the film that started it all. Flaherty, when he made it, he didn’t actually call it a documentary; that’s a term that we now apply to it. We try to apply the conventions of whatever we call a documentary, and blame him for not just turning on a camera and seeing what happened, which is not how documentary gets made, as we all know. But how do you think it stands up as a film now, especially after your experience of going up and meeting the descendants of Flaherty in the Arctic? What’s your feeling about Nanook of the North?

McGrath: Well, I have to say, for its time, I think Nanook, well, it was groundbreaking and revolutionary. Even though Flaherty actually made quite a lot of it up, in the sense that he dressed Alakariallak in the dress of the polar Eskimos, as they were called then, not of the southern Eskimos, and he took all sorts of other liberties, I think that given the time, 1922, that it was an extraordinary achievement. It was, relatively speaking, not condescending, it wasn’t patronizing, it wasn’t judgmental. The Inuit who were in the documentary got paid, which is no small thing.

Botsford Fraser: Flaherty himself has written quite extensively about the fact that he couldn’t have made the film without them, that they formed this incredibly inventive and supportive film crew, which did mean things like lugging water from rivers miles away in order to heat cauldrons, and things like that. But they had a technical expertise that he did not have, so they could always mend his cameras when he couldn’t mend them. They could also come up with all these inventive ways of really creating this groundbreaking process of making film under those conditions. So he never denied that he probably couldn’t have made the film if they hadn’t been so receptive and so helpful.

McGrath: No, I think it was very much a piece of teamwork, not simply because they were the subjects of his film, but also they were the technicians and also the film crew. He had a stills camera with him, and at one point he brought it in too quickly from the cold. It filled up with condensation and he had to take it apart, and could not remember how to put it back together again. His Inuk assistant, who’d never seen a camera before in his life, just sat there by candlelight and reconstructed it. They provided the brawn, but they also provided a lot of the technical help for the documentary. I think he gave them due credit for that. But he never went back to the Arctic. The rest of his life he made films about the South Seas, Ireland, Louisiana, but Nanook of the North haunted him for the rest of his career. Because of its phenomenal success, everyone he spoke to just wanted another Nanook. So it is quite an enigmatic fact about Robert Flaherty that he ran away from the thing that was haunting him, that he never went back to the Arctic. He never acknowledged that he had a son up there, although he must have known that he did. There’s proof in the book that he did know that he had a child up there. I’ve gone pretty extensively through his archives and diaries at Columbia University, and there’s never any mention.

Botsford Fraser: One interesting fact about the film is that it was actually financed by a fur trading company, Révillon Frères, who were competitors for the Hudson’s Bay Company. They were just starting their fur trading exploits in the early ’20s. They provided all the money and they sponsored the film. There’s even a product placement sequence, quite a long sequence of white fox fur being brought in. You see this rack of these gorgeous furs and you think, that must’ve been for the fur traders.

McGrath: I think you can make a case that Nanook of the North was the first sponsored film. It was also the first merchandized film. Although Flaherty had no control over the merchandizing, it was such a runaway blockbuster that all over Europe and the States, products started springing up that often had Nanook’s face on them. There was an ice cream, I think that was German. There was a brand of flour called Nanook. There were various other various merchandized products, for which of course Nanook himself was not rewarded.

Botsford Fraser: So Nanook itself is a very mythologized and a very beautiful picture of a family in the Arctic, but it is not in real time. At the time that he made the film, for example, by then the Inuit were smoking heavily, because they’d had this long history of relationship with the Europeans. He didn’t allow them to smoke anywhere near the film. As you mentioned, he made the costumes slightly different. He made them do the hunting sequences in ways that they were no longer doing. I think you have a thing in the book where they actually wanted to go and hunt, and he wanted to film them hunting in the traditional way, and he wouldn’t allow them to use guns. They, at one point, were calling to him to help, and he refused to because he was so busy turning out the film.

McGrath: He has said in interviews, apolitically, that sometimes you have to lie to get to the truth. He certainly did quite a bit of that, with all good intent. He'd been around in the Arctic as an iron ore prospector since 1910. He’d spent 10 years in the Arctic already before he made Nanook. He loved it; he was a great admirer of the resilience and resourcefulness of the people. But he wanted to tell a lie, which was about this pure culture that was fast disappearing but was nonetheless pure. The Inuit culture hadn’t been pure, whatever that means, for many centuries. It’s one of the ironies of Nanook of the North, the film, that it was bankrolled by fur traders who were the very people partly responsible, along with whalers and various other groups, for the Inuit traditional way of life coming to an end. I think the millstone around Robert’s neck was that he created a film that seemed so real to people who at the time had no conception of – as they called it then – Eskimo life, that they took it completely literally. That became the imprint of what Eskimo life was all about for many decades after. I suspect that the sense that southern Canadians had, as well as Europeans and Americans, of Inuit life was still very much coloured by Nanook of the North right up until the 1970s.

Botsford Fraser: Certainly, when we come to the period of the High Arctic exile, there’s a feeling that what the Canadian bureaucrats thought they were doing, for better or worse, with good intentions or bad, but in a sense they were returning the Inuit to that ideal, that romanticized past, putting them back into that world where they could be the kind of people that we always thought they were, and for which they did have survival skills. It really infected or even inspired that whole idea of the exile, didn’t it?

McGrath: I don’t think Robert Flaherty had any ill intent, but I think it really set the Inuit up as noble savages. That was a definition from which they struggled to escape, and struggle to escape even today.

Botsford Fraser: So then we come to the ’50s and the period leading up to the High Arctic exile. In your book, you talk about this web of dependency that was created, which trapped the Inuit and the characters who make up that web: the missionaries, the RCMP, the bureaucrats, the fur traders, the teacher, the social worker. Talk a bit about that community in which the Inuit found themselves trapped.

McGrath: One of the ironies of the stories is that what trapped them was becoming trappers. They became trapped by their own identity as fur trappers. They became more and more useful and identified only as fur trappers. The more fur trapping there was to be done, the more their populations were concentrated around the fur trading posts. The areas around the fur trading posts became over-hunted, so they became much more dependent on the fur trading than they had been otherwise, and they became more dependent on non-native food and money, for which they had to trap more foxes. There were various devious practices. The Hudson’s Bay Company paid them in tokens which could only be exchanged in the Hudson’s Bay store. The price of goods, other than fox traps, was six or seven times what it would’ve been in the South. The more they got enmeshed in this web, the more impossible it became to extricate themselves from it. At the same time, the fox fur trade was absolutely a free market, completely unregulated. The price of the commodity fluctuated constantly, and they were completely unprotected from that. They also were very often not paid a fair price for the fur. But at times when fox fur fell out of fashion – one of those was in the ’50s and is one of the things that led to the relocation of the Inuit – they were getting a tenth for their fox furs than maybe even five years previously. It made life utterly impossible for them. They had really been, themselves, the greatest victims of this trapping.

Botsford Fraser: The other web that had been drawn around them was this question, which still haunts us today, of the sovereignty issue and the sovereignty of the North and the geopolitical games that were being played and had been played since the Arctic became part of Canada in the late 1890s. You talk in the book about how since at least 1907, there’s been this dispute about who owns it, who names it, who does it belong to. It’s obviously a dispute that we’re still having, but now we’re having it under the sea as opposed to going over the earth. We’re not putting flags on the Pole, we’re putting flags under the Pole. That whole discussion goes on. But the way it played out for the Inuit in the Ungava Peninsula was the presence of the American military. Then I guess the Canadians had to have a Canadian military presence as well.  

McGrath: That really happened as a result of the Second World War, that the Americans moved into the Arctic and set up listening stations, mostly for monitoring what became the Soviet Union. The Canadians couldn’t keep up with the flow of Americans into the Arctic, because they simply didn’t have the resources. So by the end of the Second World War, there were more Americans living north of the 60th parallel than there were Canadians. This caused great concern for the Canadian government, because the area was effectively being Americanized. It was made pretty clear that the Americans weren’t going to get out any time soon, because the area was terribly convenient for surveying the most northern regions of the Canadian eastern Arctic across to Siberia. So the Americans started landing jets in the Canadian Arctic. There was even a bill put through the senate to establish an American naval base on Ellesmere Island, and the Canadians weren’t consulted about it. So there was a great deal of paranoia in Canada about being taken over by the Americans, who were in themselves full of paranoia about being taken over by the Soviets. The people who got buried in these layers of geopolitical paranoia were the Inuit, who were entirely unaware of all the machinations that were going on around them.

Botsford Fraser: So in 1953, a telegram comes from Ottawa into the community where Josephie and his family and the Inukjuak are living. This telegram announces that this exile is going to take place. Tell us a bit about James Cantley, who was the fur trader who somehow has become a bureaucrat, who’s part of this idea for the exile of the Inuit.

McGrath:  The idea was kind of cooked up at a conference on Eskimo affairs, to which it will not surprise any of you to know the Eskimos were not invited. There were missionaries and teachers and welfare representatives and people from all different departments of the Canadian government, but not Inuit. At that time, the Arctic bureaucracy was a real gentleman’s club. It was run by a bunch of very talented and, in general, well-meaning people. That’s one of the things that interests me about the story – the kind of terrible consequences that can come not from evildoing, but from simple ignorance and presumption. I don’t think there was any evildoing in this story, not intentional anyway. But that’s what the result was. Most of them had been fur traders at one point or other, so they had a fur trading mentality and thought that the various problems of the Arctic could just be solved by trading more furs. And by and large, almost to a man, they were first-generation immigrants, mostly from the UK, and had that sense that moving somewhere a long way away to make your life better was no bad thing. Which it wasn’t, if you were moving from Edinburgh to Ottawa. But moving from Edinburgh to Ottawa is quite a different thing than moving from Inukjuak to virtually the North Pole. So they had this conference. Unfortunately, a great many of the papers from that time have been lost and are no longer in the Canadian national archives in Ottawa, particularly memos from the Department of Foreign Affairs. But it was decided that the Inuit should be moved, because there was pressure on resources around Inukjuak, precisely because of the concentration of population who were there to trade furs. The decision where to move them was a geopolitical decision. There was absolutely no rationale to move them to the High Arctic, other than for geopolitical reasons. No one had done any wildlife surveys at that time; no one knew whether it was survivable. The area had been completely uninhabited since the Tule moved out after the Little Ice Age, which I think was in 1600 or so. Even the RCMP posts there had been closed, simply because the ice conditions made it impossible to service them with supplies and so on. There’s no doubt in my mind that the reason for moving these people 1,500 miles north was absolutely a geopolitical one, about which they were not consulted. They often refer to themselves, even now, as “human flagpoles.” I think that’s pretty much what they were. They were Canadian citizens and they were standing for Canada, and they were the only people likely to be able to have a chance at surviving up there. That’s pretty much why they found themselves up there. They were sold a lot of half-truths by the RCMP constable, who was expected to round them up and find volunteers. This was his first Arctic posting; he’d been in British Columbia before. He was a very inexperienced rookie policeman; he knew nothing about the High Arctic. He told them it might get a little bit dark and a little bit cold, but otherwise it would be okay. From his point of view, they lived in snow houses anyway, so they’d be living in snow houses. They ate seal, and they’d be eating seal anyway. So what was the difference? One of the things that interested me about that attitude was that it seemed to me so much a product of a kind of colonial view of the Arctic, which we suffer from still in the UK and maybe the rest of Europe, as the Arctic as this great undifferentiated white space – that it’s all the same, that it doesn’t contain any variation in it. Of course, that’s a big fat lie. One of the things I tell people when they ask me about how it is up on Ellesmere Island is that it’s not white. There is no snow, or very little snow up on Ellesmere Island – it’s desert. That was one of the greatest problems for the Inuit right there. You live in a snow house and there’s no snow – what are you going to do? In the case of the Inuit, what they had to do is live in tents, in temperatures that often reached more than -50°C. They had to wait until January or February before there was enough snow to even begin to build snow houses. But these things were not taken into account, because the only people who’d had experience on Ellesmere Island were a few junior RCMP.

The High Arctic has the highest alpine crags, other than the Rockies on the North American continent. It’s phenomenally mountainous, frighteningly so. The interior is almost entirely icecap and the sea around there never completely thaws. But the currents are very strong and pronounced, so the ice is constantly moving, which makes it an incredibly dangerous place. You can’t kayak up there, for example, it’s too dangerous; your kayak would be crushed. But the southern Arctic, the east coast of Hudson Bay, where these particular Inuit were from, it’s rolling tundra, very gentle hills, gentle cliffs going down to the sea. It’s on a migratory bird route, so in season they get many different species of gull and duck and eider that they hunt. There are cloudberries and little blueberry-type things, various berries that grow on the tundra. In contrast, in Ellesmere Island there’s nothing that grows bigger than my little finger. To put it into context, up on Ellesmere Island it takes 20 years for an arctic poppy to reach maturity. It takes about the same time for an arctic char to be mature enough to breed. Things grow very slowly; it’s the limit of life. Life is only possible on certain parts of Ellesmere Island, because there are areas of clear water where plankton can flourish, and the plankton bring the fish, and the fish bring the marine mammals. But the caribou population, it’s a different species of caribou, the Peary caribou, which are much smaller and tend to be much more solitary and therefore more difficult to hunt. The Greenlandic Inuit call Ellesmere Island “Muskox Land,” but they’re pretty few and far between.

Botsford Fraser: There’s also that whole thing about how the bureaucrats determined the hunting rules for the Inuit. The good news was that they were supposed to go up there and hunt; the bad news was that the RCMP got to say how many caribou they got to shoot, and they didn’t get to shoot any muskox. There were all these conditions placed on them, which made starvation even more likely.

McGrath: And they were completely unfamiliar with the migratory routes. There are quite large populations of marine mammals up on Ellesmere, but they’re all migratory. They don’t hang around; they get up there, they eat the plankton, and they get the hell out – which is something I think the Inuit had planned on doing, but didn’t quite manage it. Of course, the Inuit didn’t know where these areas of migration were. To put it in context, I’m always putting these areas in a European context because that’s how I think of space. Every time I think of the spaces, I’m just overtaken with awe at the fact that these people managed to survive at all. Ellesmere Island is about the size of Great Britain, and has a population of maybe a few thousand caribou, so you really are hunting for needles in haystacks.

Botsford Fraser: There was that whole question of the fact whether or not they would be allowed to return to their homeland. There’s a very strong sense that they were led to believe that if they weren’t happy up there they would be able to return. You describe their feelings about being there very much in terms of homesickness for the land and way of living that they knew. Yet that aspect of the exile has never been recognized by the government. How do the Inuit talk about that? How did you get at that part of their story, that whole idea of being homesick? How did you, as a white British journalist, get to that piece of their experience?

McGrath: I think although my experience of home is entirely different from theirs, the idea of home is always something that I was very attached to. I was a child of immigrants myself, in my case Irish immigrants, and we moved around a hell of a lot when I was a kid. The idea of being so viscerally attached to their home that if you take them away from their home they become a different person, and a person they don’t recognize, is something that spoke very loudly to me. To the Inuit, home wasn’t simply where their ancestors were buried, the spirits of their ancestors lived, and they were dependent on the spirits of their ancestors for advice about hunting and so on. So suddenly, they were bereft of the place where their ancestors could talk to them, and that, for them, was very devastating. They’re also very family oriented; even today, they’re very family oriented. In those days, families were the units of survival, so to be taken away from your family was devastating. The idea of dying and being buried away from your ancestors was devastating, an idea that was so lonely to them that they could barely begin to contemplate it. Their survival depended on how well they understood the idea of home and how well they knew their home, because they needed to know the land very well in order to hunt on it. So, to take them somewhere and just dump them where the landscape was completely different – they had none of their ancestors’ spirits to call upon for advice or comfort, and they were in a position where they were never going to see the family members they left behind – was as near to genocide as it’s possible to get without actually killing someone.

Botsford Fraser: And there were all those tiny details, which again could’ve been simply bureaucratic error or ignorance. But that whole business of the fact that even when the families got to the High Arctic, they were arbitrarily separated. Some parts of one family went to one location, others went to Resolute. There was that whole business about how their supplies were so inadequate and somehow didn’t make it to the various areas, about how even the dogs were different. The kind of dogs that you needed up there in the High Arctic is very different from what you need in the Ungava Peninsula.

McGrath: The paws of Greenlandic dogs are very hard and calloused, so they’re much more protected against the kind of candle ice and very sharp ice that you get up in the High Arctic. So their dogs permanently had terrible trouble walking; their feet were constantly made ragged by the ice. They were supplied, but they were supplied with such useful equipment as fingerless wool gloves, which I think as Canadians you probably know, against -50°C, is not going to get you anything but frostbite. A heap of overalls turned up in size extra-large; anyone who knows the Inuit knows that extra-large isn’t going to be a size that will apply to most Inuit men. They weren’t given caribou skins, they were given buffalo skins instead. But the buffalo skins are too inflexible to make clothing from. They put them on their tents, but of course they’re very dark, so they cut out all the light. This meant that the women couldn’t sew without going blind, which is what a lot of them did. Their choice was to sew out in -50°C weather, with kabatic winds and ice and churning all around them, or to sew by the light of a blubber lamp.

Botsford Fraser: How did you get those details of information? Where are these records held?

McGrath: Because this was a bureaucratic decision, there is paperwork in triplicate, in quadruplicate. But a lot of it, as you can imagine, is mighty dull stuff. I spent a very dry summer and autumn in Ottawa. I was looking for the little telling details, like the details about the fingerless gloves. The devil is in the details, and never more so than in this story.

Botsford Fraser: At this point, at least until the ’60s, Josephie Flaherty would’ve just been a number to the Canadian government. I can’t remember what his number was, but the Inuit didn’t actually have names, did they?

McGrath: No, Josephie Flaherty’s number was E9702 or 704, something like that. E9 designated the particular bureaucratic area of the Arctic that the Eskimos, as they were called then, came from. Naming was a very complicated thing, because all the Inuit had their own Inuktitut names, by which they’re never referred in all the official documents. They’re always referred to by their Christianized names, which very often meant nothing to them. On more than one occasion, they weren’t even conscious of what their Christianized name was. Then in the ’60s, the Canadian government required all Eskimo to adopt surnames, but without suggesting any particular plans to how they might do this. That was all terribly chaotic, and was one of the difficulties of the research of the book. They all refer to themselves in a completely different way from the official documents, and are not conscious of the way the official documents refer to them. I’d often say, “Well, are you the Liziana Gurlik in the official document?” “Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t Liziana Gurlik at all until 1965. Before then, I was some Inuktitut name.” So that made it very difficult to keep track of who was who. As for their numbers, that meant absolutely nothing to them whatsoever.

Botsford Fraser: Did you meet Josephie’s wife, Rynee?

McGrath: Yes I did. She’s a very tiny – and tough, as you’d have to be to survive.

Botsford Fraser: When we were looking at the Tom Radford film, Worlds Collide: The Saga of Herschel Island and the Pan-Northern Progression Collage from 1970-2000, I was wondering if she were similar to the grandmother figure in that film we saw last night. That’s how I pictured, as very tiny and fierce.

McGrath: Yes, very tiny and fierce, and rather a wounded person, as you would be, having the experience that she had. Often for the women in general, the exile was even more intolerable than it was for the men. They had gone with their husband’s family rather than with their own family. More than the men, they had left behind siblings and mothers and fathers and grandparents. Plus, they had children to look after. Rynee had a very young little boy called Peter. She had three children. Martha Flaherty – who is now quite an eminent figure and broadcasts regularly on CBC – and Mary and Peter. Mary was taken from them during the voyage, because she was found to have the first signs of TB. She wasn’t sent back to them for three years, and during that period they had no idea and were not able to get any news about her fate, even whether she was alive. What had happened to Mary was that she was sent down south to a TB sanatorium, and got well quite quickly and was sent back to Inukjuak, which is where her parents had just been removed. Then it was another year before the ship came around again, and she was put on the ship and shipped off to Resolute Bay, which was also not where her parents were. By the time that mistake was identified, it was another year again. So by the time she was returned to Josephie and Rynee, her parents, she had no idea who they were. Peter’s case was very tragic, too. During the voyage – it was a 40-day voyage on the C.D. Howe, which was the Department of Transport supply ship which ran the eastern Arctic patrol – Rynee’s diet was so poor. The Inuit were fed on porridge and potatoes. At that time and I believe now, Inuit have trouble digesting carbohydrates. They have a very protein-rich, meat-rich diet. So they all became very ill, and Rynee was unable to breastfeed. There was no substitute on the ship, so she was in the position of having to beg other Inuit mothers to allow her son to suckle with them. Peter is now what Rynee would describe as slow. He certainly has some problems, and these she puts down to the fact that he, for the whole of the voyage and for quite a while after, was unable to get any milk.

Botsford Fraser: And Josephie himself, his character, his mental condition became quite sad, didn’t it?

McGrath: Josephie went up two years later than Paddy Aqiatusuk and Paddy Aqiatusuk’s family. He went up because Paddy asked him, because there simply weren’t enough hunters in each family group to cover the terrain. Even now, the Inuit hunters on Ellesmere Island cover more terrain in their annual hunt than any other Inuit group in the world. So Paddy Aqiatusuk very reluctantly – because by that point it was made clear to him that he couldn’t go back – he very reluctantly asked Josephie to come up and be with him. Ironically, by the time Josephie managed to make the voyage, Paddy Aqiatusuk had actually died. The reason for him coming up was no longer extant, and he was in a position where he was having to hunt not only for his own family, but for Paddy Aqiatusuk’s widow and her children.

Botsford Fraser: There’s that awful parallel between the story of Nanook himself and Alakariallak, who played him, dying in the tundra, unnoticed. He was a huge international star because of the film, and he’s dying on the tundra. And Paddy, too.

McGrath: You can’t imagine that happening to George Clooney, can you?

Botsford Fraser: And Paddy too, at the time he was suffering in the High Arctic, he was having all these exhibitions of his sculpture in Europe, and being acclaimed as this great artist, and at the same time he was dying in the High Arctic.

McGrath: Yes, another terrible irony, that he’s still regarded as one of the foremost Inuit sculptors, although he was not informed of this fact himself.

Botsford Fraser: Melanie is going to do another reading from the book, but I just wanted to ask you about your personal feeling about the Arctic, and what it was like to go there to do the research. I’m assuming you spent some months up there. You must’ve been living in the communities. I just want to know how you feel about the Arctic now. What is your sense of its place for you as a writer and as a woman?

McGrath: Just from my selfish point of view as a writer – and I’ve travelled a lot in my job as a journalist – and nowhere is so rich with metaphor than the Arctic. It’s a writer’s dream. Here you have the history – bones and stuff don’t rot up there in the Arctic. So there you have the history exposed; you’re living in a place surrounded by its history. As a European, that’s something that spoke to me a great deal. And the sense of space was something I’d never even imagined that I would ever be able to witness. I also found it quite a physically frightening place. I’ve been caught in coups in West Africa and not been so frightened as I was in the High Arctic. It’s constantly moving, and as it moves it makes these giant, growling, alive noises. It really is almost as though you’ve gone to live on the back of a very cold dinosaur. At the same time, it’s tremendously inspiring. It struck me very much that one tends to take the place one knows for granted, but the Inuit never do. They were as conscious of the beauty of the place as I was as a newcomer. The beauty of the place was as fresh to them as it was to me. Having said that, the settlements are kind of hotbeds, like any tiny settlements anywhere, they’re sort of hothouses of gossip and counter gossip, and who’s been sleeping with who. That struck me as being a wonderful irony of these settlements – they’re incredibly claustrophobic, and yet they’re in the middle of more space than any European could possibly imagine. Grise Fiord had had television three years when I went up there, but only for three years. The satellite signal they got was from Detroit, so they spent a lot of time watching cop shows and wildlife programs. I assumed, and it was a very naïve assumption, that they kind of could relate to the things they were seeing the same way I could relate to them. But of course they’ve never really actually seen a skyscraper or road and so on. I spent one day giving a talk in the school, and I just couldn’t get through to these kids at all. I knew it was my failing, but I was unable to reach them. I knew that I was on a no-hoper when I saw that they had been doing a spelling bee. They were six-year-olds, I think. One of the words that they’d been required to spell in their spelling bee was “baleen,” which is not something you’d be required to know how to spell as a six-year-old in a London school. Eventually I got out a $20 note and showed them a picture of the Queen, because they’d asked me to talk about where I came from. I thought that would be common ground, but no. I then had to explain that the Queen drove on a big gold dogsled; she was a hunter, but not very good at it. So bad at it, in fact, that the only thing she’d ever killed were birds. As far as I knew, she wasn’t even capable of bringing down a polar bear. So I don’t know what impression I left of life in England, but it was probably as surreal to them as the Arctic was to me.

Botsford Fraser: One of the things that Edith Iglauer mentioned the other night was when she went out there, that loneliness that she had. Did you experience that?

McGrath: Tremendous loneliness, yes, and a feeling of alienation as well, which was compounded by the fact that when I was up there, it was 24-hour light. The body clock just disintegrates. You would think the Inuit living up there all the time would adjust to it, but no, their body clock disintegrates too. So it was no uncommon sight to go out at 3 o’clock in the morning and see children playing football on the sea ice. The whole process of being up there was one of extreme disorientation and loneliness. But I think that was a great learning process. If I was lonely up there, well supported, nice comfortable home, being cooked for, generally being welcomed, knowing that I was going to get a plane out in the not-too-distant future, how did these people feel when they were just literally dumped on a piece of shingle with a few belongings, and left?

Botsford Fraser: Why don’t you read that final little piece from your book?

McGrath: I’m going to read the final little piece, because I don’t want to leave you with the impression that this is a real downer of a story. For me, the great triumph of this story, the great inspiring fact of it, is that after 40 years of knocking on doors, after 40 years of writing to Canadian bureaucrats, and being stalled and ignored, the Inuit were finally listened to and finally heard. They got their day in court, and to me that is a great and inspiring story about how a group of extremely disempowered, remote from all senses of political power – if you go on long enough and you shout loud enough, eventually someone will be forced to listen to you. This is a very short piece that more or less concludes the book. It is after the 1993 Royal Commission on aboriginal peoples heard the testimony of the High Arctic exiles, and concluded in their favour.

“The April hearings were nothing short of a rebirth of a people. At the time of the relocations, 40 years before, the Inuit had been broken and demoralized. Inuit voices had been voices in the wilderness, they went unheard, often they went unsaid. Years of quiet, sometimes unintentional but nonetheless ruthless disregard had colonized their hearts and made them, on the surface at least, the smiling inscrutable, happy-go-lucky Eskimos of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. After hundreds of years of patronage and domination, they’d finally shrugged off that legacy. It had taken 40 years, but the dignified, insistent voices of the Barrenlanders had won through. At last their truth had been accepted as a matter of public record, and no credible history book would ever dare deny it. Those 35 men and women who turned up at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, and the others who had, over their long exile, stood up and spoken out, had put the Arctic on the map in a way hundreds of years of European exploration had never been able to do. They had given the Arctic back its authentic voice, which was not the voice of the great white explorers or the drama of expeditions and heroism and derring-do, but the quiet, still voice of the men and women whose antecedents had meandered across the Arctic from Asia, and who had loved it enough to make it their home. The history of the Arctic had been given back to the people it belonged to. In the most profound sense, the people of the Arctic had, finally, come home.”

McGrath, Melanie. The Long Exile. London: Fourth Estate, 2006.

 

 
McGrath, Melanie. Silvertown. London: Fourth Estate, 2002.

 

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Gordon Morash is an Edmonton-based writer and editor. As an Athabasca University Visiting Graduate Professor, he teaches MAIS 617: Creative Nonfiction.

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Related Links

Aurora Online - Edmonton LitFest 2006: Truth and Lies: Telling Tales in Creative Nonfiction

http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/72/84

Official site: Edmonton Literary Festival

http://www.litfestalberta.org/

LitFest Edmonton – Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/LitFestYEG

 

An Aurora Update

Sadly Gordon Morash passed away August 28, 2009.

Updated March 2018

 

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Aurora Online

 

Citation Format

Gordon Morash (2008) Edmonton LitFest Moves to the Hot North, Aurora Online