>>> Saturday 10 May <<<
Bright and early we got up and headed out with Marco to meet a different clinic doctor, Gabe from Guelph, to go dog-sledding. Our leader, Dawn, has such a rough life. She plays with dogs, takes sleds out on the ice, and gets pulled along this magnificent landscape occasionally being called on to goad one of the dogs into pulling its fair share, or warning the rider to hang on as the sled is about to do something unusual. Brutal.

The dogs are harnessed on traces that allow them to fan out across the ice, each finding its own way. In the forested regions, the dogs are harnessed in a line of pairs, one behind another. This is obviously necessary for pulling a sled through the trees. It doesn’t work on the sea ice or the tundra however, as an error in footing by one dog screws up everything for all the other dogs behind that one. Allowing the dogs to find their own way is a better plan in this environment.

The sled, or kamutik, is low to the ground and covered with caribou skin tied down with lots of criss-crossing ropes. These are great for holding on with, and the caribou skin is comfortable to sit on. The ride, once the sled is on clean ice or hard-packed snow, is incredibly smooth and comfortable. The transition from land to the sea ice, however, is pretty jarring, as the dogs are moving really fast in their excitement to get going and the edge of the sea ice is very rough.

The sled doesn’t follow exactly behind the dogs, so there are times when surprising things happen. The dogs, like us, don’t like running on ice, and so seek out snow-covered ice which has better traction. So if they are forced to go on clear ice for a while, and then spot a place with a snow cover, they move over to the snow. The sled continues in its original trajectory until the change in angle from the dogs’ traces forces it to pivot, or until one of the runners hits the snow. This can cause the sled to change direction quite radically, or to try to cut corners that the dogs themselves did not cut, and it becomes necessary to actually hang on. Otherwise it’s just a comfortable ride.

The other thing that causes the sled to whip around is calling to the dogs to go home. Excitement!! They make a quick U-turn, as does the sled, and pow! you are heading in the other direction.

We had a fabulous time, absolutely magic. The sled glides slowly across the ice, the dogs pad on the snow, the wind whistles across ice formations, and the landscape goes slowly by at a pace fast enough to always be interesting and slow enough to allow savoring. This is infinitely superior to traveling by snowmobile. (Thom doesn’t totally agree with this assessment, preferring speed, but the noise and smell of a snowmobile really turn me off.) I could travel this way for weeks, I think.

James took us out for lunch, and we had a great time. He is such a nice, friendly, funny and interesting guy. I really like him, and am glad I got to know him a little. I hope we see him again.

In the evening, Patricia threw a going away party for the final doctor at the clinic, Tom Nunan. (He and Thom were distinguished as Old Tom and Young Thom.) We were told that he doesn’t like crowds, and so might not show up at all, but he was there, contradicting a few of the stories that Marco told. Also there was Eileen, who told great stories about taking a boat trip down the Yangtzee River before it was dammed; Francis and Judy, two nurses from the clinic I have met before; and Gabe. It was a nice gathering, a little slow at times, but with excellent food and some interesting discussions about health care, epidemiology, travel and other cultures, and the like. Naturally a number of truly nasty medical stories were told, several involving eating meat.

This has been a great visit. I will miss this place when I am gone, and hope to come back soon.


>>> Friday 9 May <<<
Now we have another roommate. Monica went back south and was replaced by Marco, the new doc at the clinic. He’s from Vancouver and will be here for five weeks. Although he is certainly interesting, personable, and liberal politically, his habit of name dropping is a bit annoying. He is an expert in everything, which is a tad tiresome. Still, he is a very nice person, and his knowledge of history is extensive so I am enjoying the stories for the most part.

I finished the third book in a trilogy of quasi-children’s books (way too mature and complex for most children though). It’s called The Amber Spyglass, and it was quite long, complicated, and ultimately rewarding. Although I have very little tolerance for science fiction and fantasy, I enjoyed this book because, well, it sort of raced along and I got swept up in it. I confess though that if I hadn’t already read the first two books in the trilogy, I wouldn’t have even given this one a try. If you do like this kind of thing, you will love this particular instance of it.

Thom and I spent the afternoon together going to galleries (one was closed, in the other we bought a couple of gifts); to the cemetery (spectacular view of Hudson Bay from there); and visiting sled-dog puppies that were oh so cute.

>>> Thursday 8 May <<<
Monica tells me that the racism I have seen here is not typical for Rankin Inlet, and that the people who espoused these views are an exception. I hope she is right.

As the sun sets ever further to the north, ever more slowly, and ever later, we approach suicide season, as paradoxical as this sounds. In the winter, when it is dark and cold, the land and bay are frozen, and travel is easy – by dogsled or snow mobile. During a few brief weeks in the spring, the sun is up, the temperatures are humane, and the land and waters are still frozen. However this passes quickly, and once everything turns to mush travel is severely restricted. This is when suicides start, a grim testament to how deeply connected the people of this region are to community, family, and friends. “Inuit” means “the people,” and so many aspects of this culture revolve around personal connections: the strong tradition of oral history, communal leadership, large extended families, and a deep reliance on each other for mere survival.

In the fairly recent past, the Inuit were completely self-sufficient as a people, and inter-reliant as individuals. They turned the worst parts of their hostile environment into assets, using the bitter cold as a tool, for example, by freezing seal skin into sled runners, and packed snow into homes. Their leadership was communal, rather than hierarchical, and was guided by the tribal elders who had earned their positions of authority through accomplishment, wisdom, and hard work. And their relationship with the land was intimate and personal.

Today so much of this is being destroyed. Most Inuit have moved to communities that are heavily subsidized by the Canadian government. Fuel is brought up each summer and burned to create electricity, for which locals pay only 20% of its actual cost. Virtually all materials and a large proportion of the food is imported; some families still hunt and eat “country food,” as it’s called, but not all do, and it doesn’t make up all of anyone’s diet.

The work available in Nunavut is primarily with the government: health care, government administration, the schools, etc. Other options are to provide services to the people of the community: staff the stores, repair machines, construct and maintain buildings. Many buildings are paid for by the government, and most other members of the community are employed by the government, so for these businesses, most of the work is paid for by the government indirectly.

What does the government get out of this? To answer this, you have to go back a little way in time, to the turn of the last century. At the time, the Arctic region that now makes up Nunavut had been “discovered” by people from England, Denmark and Canada, although most of the documentation of the area had been made by English explorers. American and Canadian traders were doing business in the region, and “Danish” Inuit from Greenland were hunting there.

The British offered to Canada all these lands, asking in exchange that Canada protect the English claim to have discovered them. What this meant in reality was that Canada was suddenly responsible for them, which entailed all sorts of expensive things: establishing a Canadian-government presence, maintaining Canadian law and regulation of commerce, and providing health care and education. It’s not clear to me why Canada thought this was a good trade, but perhaps they hoped that great wealth would be discovered in the area. There were some reports at the time of gold being found, which all turned out to be false.

Anyway, once Canada “owned” this land, they were pretty much obligated to maintain it as part of Canada in order to prevent other countries from staking a claim to it and just snatching it away. (No, no one asked the local residents if they were interested in being Canadian or English or Danish or whatever. Don’t be silly.)

After many decades of contact with white whalers and traders, the Inuit were not interested in going back to the old days without rifles and ammunition, food from stores instead of food gotten by hunting, and the other modern conveniences that the Hudson’s Bay Company introduced them to. They were starting to cluster around trading posts, and were jeopardizing their subsistence lifestyle by spending all summer trapping foxes so they could trade their pelts for credit at the store, instead of spending it hunting and stashing caribou and other game for the long winter. This started a cycle of dependency that was exacerbated by the introduction of TB from the south.

In a subsistence hunting society, each able-bodied man is a huge asset, and the loss of even a single man can be devastating for the group. TB, fox trapping, and other changes brought by the white traders had major effects on the families. A tremendous wave of starvation nearly wiped out the inland Inuit, and the health of the remaining Inuit was tremendously compromised.

So, with subsistence hunting severely, maybe fatally, disrupted, life in the north had changed irreversibly. The Canadian government stepped in and interfered even more, removing all the children from an entire generation from their parents and shipping them to boarding schools in Southern Canada. There they were taught in English, beaten for speaking Inuktitut, and given no exposure to the northern ways of life. In addition to the trauma of being removed from everything familiar to them – family, community, culture, landscape, way of life – they were all too often abused physically, psychologically, even sexually. It was an appalling way to treat these children individually and the culture collectively.

This definitely killed subsistence hunting. This generation of Inuit is now in their 50s and 60s, and they are moving into the position of elders. Without having learned the ways of the land, they can’t provide the guidance that their elders provided. Most Inuit would be incapable of returning to a life on the land, even if they were interested in doing so.

So, if the government were to stop subsidizing these hamlets, there would be mass starvation. The people of Nunavut are completely dependent on the largess of the government, and what the government gets in the exchange is that they are not called genocidal.

This has, I believe, two highly negative consequences. One is that it creates an unease in a community that doesn’t have control over its future. It can’t direct the development of the community because it has nothing except guilt to bargain with. With no major exports, with nothing of value to trade with, it can only ask and hope to receive.

Second, it removes the pride that the community as a whole and each individual has in their role in life. When the Inuit were self-sufficient, each individual made a critical contribution to the community’s survival and health. Today, their community has broadened to include all of Canada, and they contribute so little the entire region is barely even known of. (I refer you back to the border crossing, when the immigration agent had never even heard of Nunavut.)

Both of these effects are, I believe, ultimately deleterious to the community’s ability to sustain itself, to grow, to thrive. To make it worse, the education available up here is so dismal that Nunavut-educated high-school graduates are woefully unprepared for college, and so cannot progress past their alleged high school diploma (which in reality represents about an eighth-grade level of education). How can they possibly advance themselves with such a handicap in the modern world? With few natural resources they can’t export raw materials. With a miniature workforce and limited transportation options, they can’t export processed goods. With an under-educated workforce, they can’t export information resources. What’s left? A little tourism, a few animal products, and a mother lode of well deserved guilt. Not much to build a sustainable community on.

Nope. I don’t have any recommendations just yet. Hopefully they will come.


>>> Wednesday 7 May <<<
We have a roommate, a woman named Monica who is in town working on something to do with rehabilitation. We don’t interact a whole lot. Like everyone else flying into Rankin Inlet, she brought Tim Horton’s doughnuts with her. Unlike everyone else, she didn’t bring any alcohol.

In the evening, Thom and I went for a walk to catch the sunset, which happens around 9:40 pm now, way in the northern part of the western sky. We found a little bump of land topped with rocks, from which we could see out across the tundra for ever and ever. The sun set on the distant horizon, melting slowly back into the earth and painting the sky a brilliant pink. At times like this I believe I could live here happily ever after. The landscape is so magnificent, the natural world so close and intimate, the land such a vibrant part of life.

Alas, the hamlet of Rankin Inlet itself leaves a lot to be desired. It’s such a mess. The architecture (not really an appropriate term) is so uninspired, and it’s not even because it’s built for the Arctic weather. Iglus, Quonset huts, and geodesic domes would be better than the square little pre-fab houses that take the wind so badly. And all the buildings here need an entry way, to prevent winds bearing temperatures of seventy-below from whipping all the heat out. Everything is gray and dirty, from the springtime mud, and covered with trash that the receding snows have revealed. Vienna it ain’t.

I understand, however, that Baffin and Ellesmere Islands are so incredibly stunning, naturally, that the dull architecture is dwarfed by their beauty. People here swoon when they mention Pangnirtung, a town on the southern end of Baffin Island, or Resolute, on a small island off the end of Ellesmere. We will have to find our way back here, to see these magical places.

>>> Tuesday 6 May <<<
It’s slightly colder today, and the slush has frozen. After walking gingerly across it, I have decided that slush is preferable to frozen slush. It’s got more purchase. Thom disagrees. Coming home for lunch yesterday he tromped through a big puddle, and discovered the bottom was still ice covered when he slipped and landed on his ass. He came home soaked.

I’ve finished Arctic Justice, and highly recommend it for students of law, oral culture, or Arctic history. It’s really interesting and incredibly well researched. It’s frustrating to read, though, because you know from the second page that Nuqallaq will be found guilty – despite the fact that the killing was completely justified – because of cultural misunderstandings, political pressures unrelated to the events, and the bias inherent in colonial relationships. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You see the two trains coming together, close-ups of the cute young girl in curls and the darling of the town coming home from college; you know that the switch operator is asleep at the wheel and the person coming to wake him up will be just a few seconds too late; you can’t do anything except imagine how it will end up, and despite all that preparation, your heart is wrenched and your stomach lurches when the little girl and her mother are killed, and the town darling goes down trying to save an old man.

Over the weekend Thom and I watched A Few Good Men on TV, a movie with fabulous courtroom scenes. Makes me want to be a trial lawyer. Law is such an interesting field. Thank you, John, for pushing me to go to law school. I owe you a beer.

Speaking of beer, Thom and I are jonesing bad for beer. Coke is an inadequate substitute, as is the Kahlua I brought up with me. What we crave is a cold, foamy, light beer. This is made much worse when we receive e-mails from Ray describing the fun the rest of the Security Council had in New Orleans for Jazz Fest, characterized by drinking, dancing, and sweating (with the latter predominating). Says Ray, “We also ate the most decadent food that I could possibly imagine. The highlight was a crawfish boil (40lbs. of live crawfish, a whole cooler full) and the consumption of about 7 dozen gulf oysters at
Brian's* house.” Wish we could have been there too.

*Brian has lived in New Orleans his entire life, and John says he “considers snow to be a novelty for keeping a keg cold.” Apparently he had some trouble picturing (a) what Nunavut was like, and (b) what on earth apparently normal people [i.e. Thom and I] were doing up there.

Political aside: check out this editorial in the New York Times. And this one too. These are really important issues facing America today.


>>> Monday 5 May <<<
Slush. Slush and mud. It’s the latest season up here in Nunavut, in some ways an improvement over bitingly cold winds. For example, I have graduated from wearing a full-length down coat to wearing just a parka, and no longer need two pairs of gloves, a hat, a neck gaiter, and sometimes a balaclava, just to go to the store a few blocks away. However, I erred in my choice of footwear and brought my clean, white tennis shoes instead of Wellington boots, so I take peripatetic route wherever I go, to avoid the massive puddles of mud. Thom, because he evolved only recently from a fourth-grade boy, tromps straight through the puddles in his big furry boots. “I’m testing their waterproofing,” he says scientifically.

Walking around the lake yesterday (a route which follows the main loop road and, unlike all the other roads in town, is paved most of the way around) I saw a young boy up to his thighs in a mud and ice puddle, pushing out a bicycle that was immersed up to its handlebars. I asked if he rode into the puddle, and he said, “Yep. Good thing I was wearing hip waders.” And as he climbed out of the muck, I saw he was wearing hip boots that went to just an inch above where the water had been. As a child, I would never have thought to pull on a pair of hip waders to go for a bike ride.

The sik-siks are out, crawling in and out of their burrows and calling out “Sik! Sik! Sik!” whenever someone approaches too closely. These little ground squirrels are about as shy as a Central Park squirrel, a little bigger (closer to the size of a beaver), and communal. They are pretty cute. Thom and I are thrilled to see them, but I think everyone else in town thinks they are just squirrels.

My parents experienced the same thing in Uganda, thrilling to see a Superb Starling when they first arrived, yawning at them by the end of the first week because they are so common. This is the nature of bird watching. Imagine if Mallards were rare – their iridescent blue necks and green sides would delight instead of bore. When Thom and I were staying in a forest cabin in Brazil, hanging outside our porch were several toucans. I would sit in the hammock with binoculars and watch them for hours. On the fourth day, Thom referred to them as “trash birds,” and we never saw them again.

>>> Saturday 3 May <<<
Thom and I studied for most of the day – he reading about the heart, me going back and forth between Thinking Like a Lawyer and Arctic Justice.

Re thnking like a lawyer: fortunately, the whole process makes perfect sense to me: identify the facts, identify the rules that govern these facts, create a framework of the relevant facts and rules, and make the case. Simple enough in the big picture. What will delight me is the way that statutory law and case law intertwine to create a living, evolving, flexible system of laws, and the order and creativity required of a lawyer to move forward in time through the legal system. What will frustrate and madden me is the complete lack of oversight, the way that many legislatures and courts all contribute to this matrix, this fabric, of laws, and the contradictions and gaps that this chaotic system of making laws has created. These two are, of course, the same thing.

I am frustrated that I have to wait a whole year to begin law school, but glad that I have a year to spend poking around in the areas of law that interest me.

Thom and I spent a lot of time discussing the kind of housing we want in Michigan, a subject that has eluded us in the past. We don’t have any resolutions yet, but have eliminated a few options and appear to be converging on one of two possibilities: one is a townhouse and the other an old Midwestern house in the neighborhood to the west of campus. Hopefully we can buy a place that needs cosmetic work, and I can spend a month before school starts painting, landscaping, etc. Given the country kitsch theme that dominates in the Midwest, we are likely to need to spend a good month ripping out cow-themed wall paper, removing swirly wood trim over the kitchen sink and around the cabinets, and replacing all the wall plates. I hope there is an Ikea nearby so we can replace lights and other things with something tolerable.

At sunset we walked out to the end of a road on a spit of land that sticks into Hudson Bay, forming a narrow inlet on one side. This is apparently where the container ship docks in the summer, and the strip of land is covered with containers, pallets, shacks, old boats, cars, trucks, snow mobiles, and other detritus. It’s not clear what proportion of the machinery there is waiting for summer, so it can be used again, and that proportion has just been dumped. Although the path to the road is clear of snow, the road itself is covered with a thick layer of snow and the piles from the snow plow tower over our heads.

At the end of the road, a dog team is chained in place, each dog with its own individual dog house, not able to reach the other dogs. From what I have read, this is to prevent them from developing grudges and complaints about each other and killing each other. The sled dogs are clearly not pets, and don’t behave in a pet-like way at all. They are kept outside all winter, as they would have trouble working outside if they became acclimated to an indoor climate.

I got a number of sunset-lit photos that I hope turn out well. The magic of this place is in its light and simplicity, and if I am lucky I captured some of that on film.

At ten o’clock in the evening, someone called the on-call nurse to request a full-body X-ray. He explained that he hadn’t had anything X-rayed in a long time and thought it would be a good idea to “get things checked out.” She declined to meet him at the clinic for this request, now or ever.


>>> Friday 2 May <<<
An Inuit nurse at the clinic told Thom that her husband would be returning from a hunt today, and she hoped that he would bring back caribou. Thom asked if she preferred caribou raw or cooked, and she said, “Frozen. It soothes the throat.” It’s a common way of serving caribou here – raw and frozen, sliced thinly and eaten plain. Makes perfect sense. I wonder what it tastes like.

The new doctor that Thom is working with has done a lot of international work – in Nigeria, the Marshall Islands, Peru, other countries. Health care in the Marshall Islands is paid for by the United States government, because of the bomb testing done on the Bikini Atoll, so it’s pretty excellent care. Seems like a cush assignment. Thom likes working with him, as he enjoys teaching and is interesting personally. Seems like all the doctors here are exceptional people.

The clinic doesn’t schedule patients for Friday afternoons, to give the clinicians a chance to catch up on their paperwork. Thom was done by two, so we headed out into the tundra for a walk.

I pondered earlier how it was that Pakalak Days were scheduled at this time of year, how anyone knew it was spring now. Today that all became clear, as the temperature is right at freezing and everything is melting. Snow is becoming slush, rocks and ground are showing through, and the winds have died down to almost nothing. It’s still cold enough to wear a coat, but there’s no need to fortify oneself against the howling Arctic winds. It’s quite pleasant to walk around.

Receding snow reveals the tundra’s plant life, one of my very favorite ecosystems. Tundra plants are very short, close to the ground. Pussywillow bushes come up to my ankle and dwarf everything around them. The ends of the pussywillow branches are tipped with pale green, furry new growth, an inch or an inch and a half long, getting a head start under the snow to take full advantage of the short growing season. Other plants are various mosses and hedges, none taller than an inch, plus assorted plants that would be bushes in other climates, like blueberries. Looking at the fairly dry, brittle, tightly curled plants it’s hard to imagine that they support caribou, but clearly they do.

The colors of the tundra are subtle – pale and dark greens, muted reds, the white of lichen, and lots of browns. I find the palette soothing and elegant, subtle and kind, but requiring the viewer to take care to see the details. Some of the mosses sprout miniature palm trees that appear above the snow first, casting itsy tiny shadows just large enough for a flea. Others are interconnected with tendrils that form a lacy covering over areas as large as a table cloth. Colorful rocks peer through, and seed pods dot the land.

Biologists like to call certain plants “belly plants” because you have to get down on your belly to see and appreciate them. Tundra plants definitely qualify for this moniker, as do the tiny cacti that live just under the sand in most of the world’s hot sandy deserts. The Arctic is a desert by most definitions, receiving very little precipitation and experiencing very high winds, but the similarities to the Sonora or Sahara are minimal. I love both environments, but it’s the Arctic that truly captures my heart.

Thom and I walked across tundra and frozen water along the edge of the airport lands. Nothing prevents us from walking across the runway save for a sign, jammed into a pile of rocks, stating that this is restricted property. The world of international terrorism, the war in Iraq, and the North Korean nuclear threat are so remote here, seemingly unrelated to us. It will be a major shock to return to Seattle and be thrust once again into the globalized world. Although I am looking forward to being back in my own home, I am also dreading leaving the relative tranquility of the Arctic, its simplicity and beauty.

>>> Thursday 1 May <<<
This is the coldest May Day I have ever experienced. Four degrees (F) and pretty windy. Beautifully clear, though. The air up here is so clear (and the land so flat) that you can see for miles and miles. The ice and snow features are crisp and bright, and everything seems pristine and pure. I genuinely love this place.

I spent much of the day responding to emails that have been stacking up, but still have many more to respond to. Nice to feel remembered up here, as I know so few people that I sometimes wonder if I am still me, if I still exist. There’s an odd sense of anonymity, living in a community in which I know very few people, but it is not real. I stick out like a sore thumb, so people know who I am even if I have no idea who they are. It keeps me on my best behavior.

An odd event at the clinic: a nurse flew into town and took a taxi in. She stopped at the clinic to drop something off, and asked the taxi driver to wait for her and then take her home. He got impatient waiting and came in and started yelling at everyone. After he left, someone pointed out that this had happened earlier in the day, at the Arctic College, with the same taxi driver, and the clinic staff decided he must be drunk. They called the RCMP, who found the driver passed out drunk in his bed. They declined to do anything, as it was clear he was sleeping it off.

About alcohol: Rankin Inlet is, in theory, a dry town. All this means, though, is that you can’t buy alcohol here. You can certainly bring in plenty when you fly (and everyone does), and you can get a permit for $3 from the capitol of Nunavut, Iqaluit, and fax that to a store in Churchill along with your order. They will get the order to you on the next flight in. If you fax it in early enough in the day, it will go on that afternoon’s flight. Sometimes passengers’ luggage is bumped for alcohol, as it’s more profitable for the airline. Because of this, however, there is no beer here, and Thom and I have been craving a nice cold one for a looong time now. It’s getting really bad.

In the evening, Thom and I walked around the industrial part of town and visited a number of sled dog teams chained to individual dog houses out near the ice of Hudson Bay. Nice dogs, but clearly not pets. We saw a polar bear hide stretched out to dry, a seal half butchered on the snow, a new Jeep just delivered by snowmobile and sled, and lots of caribou skins left out in the snow so that they don’t rot. (They aren’t tanned, and have to be kept cold.)

At eight (in theory, closer to nine really) began the evening Pakalak festivities, which Thom and I characterize as A Random Series of Events. They all took place in the same community center as the Talent Show.

For a long time, people milled about and children played tag and chase and kick the can in the middle of the room while someone played an accordion. (Should have been in the talent show – this guy was really good.) The children were wearing the oddest things: a fur-trimmed parka, snow pants, and socks; a crop-top t-shirt, velvet tights, and snow boots; tie-dyed jumpsuits; pajamas; you name it.

Eventually the first event started, which was the Traditional Inuit Fashion Show. It was really incredible. A dozen men, women and children dressed in traditional Inuit clothing (mostly furs) paraded through the hall. Wow, these are phenomenal outfits. They exhibited a full range of functionality. One little girl was wearing so much fur she could barely be seen. Her hood was a good four times as big as her head. One woman was wearing a fairly functional winter outfit, again with so much fur she was dwarfed. The hood was large enough for a child wearing a fur suit the size of the little girl’s. These are apparently for winter living, as it gets down to 80 below and yet the people still need to go outside for travel, hunting, preparing food, feeding the dogs, and socializing so they don’t go absolutely crazy sitting in an iglu for six months in the dark.

Another woman wore a wedding dress, which was an elaborately decorated fur suit – elegant, beautiful, incredibly flattering, and far smaller than the winter outfits. I spoke to her later, and she told me that each woman had to make her own for her wedding, and this had been her mother’s. It was stunning.

Three women wore summer outfits, which are the same basic cut as winter outfits, but are made of white cloth instead of fur. I imagine these were developed after the Inuit first encountered white traders, whalers and explorers in the 1800s, as there is not enough plant life up here to support making that much fabric. They’d be lucky to get enough for a washcloth. These too are both decorative and functional, providing protection from the winds, July’s mosquitoes, and August’s black flies; providing a hood for carrying a child; and covered with beads and ribbons and tassels. Really spectacular clothes. Seeing these it’s sad that the audience (and the models, after the show) wears southern clothes that have so little style, comparatively. One thing I really liked about Morocco was that the traditional clothing was still worn by almost everyone, and it is so incredibly beautiful. In Peru, the traditional clothing is worn as a way to get money from tourists, who pay to photograph the people. In Patagonia, everyone looks like a cowboy, which I suppose they all are. The homogenization of fashion takes some of the spark from the world.

After more adults milling about and children running around came the International Fashion Show, better recognized as a costume show, featuring a woman in a Sari, a woman in Hawaiian dress, a couple in Catholic school girl uniforms (Scottish clothing perhaps?), someone dressed as a pirate, another as a punk, and someone wearing what appeared to be regular clothes. Odd. Thom and I were wishing we’d brought our Moroccan outfits, as again cash prizes were awarded.

Then more milling about, more running around. Children here either run or stand still – they don’t walk. Adults are restless too, walking around constantly, even during events, coming in and out and generally adding to the chaos.

The MC announced it was someone’s anniversary, and after applauding people resumed milling about.

More milling, more running. Then from the second-story windows overlooking the hall loads of candy came raining down, and everyone went into a mad dash to get as much of it as possible.

Milling, running. Then the MC took the microphone and, in Inuktitut, announced the winners of several contents, and handed out more cash prizes. I have no idea what the contents were, as my Inuktitut is still pretty rusty and the PA system in the hall renders even English nearly impossible to follow.

Mill, run. A band appeared on stage, and the slow painful process of tuning up began. At what point it turned into music I am not sure, but eventually it did, and sounded like “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain when She Comes,” done to an Irish jig, on guitar and accordion. After a good half an hour or more of this going on and on and on, three men stood up in the middle, amongst the children running around furiously, and began to dance. They all had on dress shoes and tapped out pretty complex steps, rapping against the floor but not moving. Some of the children imitated them, but most kept running around. Now that the dancing had started, the band stopped. The men stood there and talked. The children kept running after each other. Adults kept walking around, in and out, blocking the doorway and crossing the room.

The music started again. The three men started dancing again. A fourth joined them, and now they were in a square. Square Dancing had been advertised for the evening, and eventually a second square appeared, and soon each one had eight people and they were moving in a pretty complexly choreographed pattern. Some of the eight were enthusiastic, dancing with energy and flair, making complex foot taps and using their whole bodies. Others looked like they might really be on line to claim unemployment. Still, it was clear that this was complex enough that a novice couldn’t just join in.

Ruth Ann, the lab tech I met the first day here, showed up with her partner, Randy, who had just returned from a two-week hunting trip on which he killed two wolves. All night I worried about the pack (or packs) that lost adult members, and wondered if he got the alpha male, if he killed a needed sister who would have been feeding the pups all summer, how many wolves were in mourning right now. I can see killing caribou, because they provided sustenance for so many people and there are so many of them. I have a little trouble with polar bears, but they are also eaten and provide a tremendous amount of fur. But wolves and foxes aren’t eaten, their meat is just thrown away (now – it used to be fed to the dogs), and this man wasn’t even going to wear their fur. I am not sure what he was going to do (hopefully sell it so that it could be used for something useful), but it’s quite possible he was trophy hunting, which I think is about as low an activity as child abuse. I don’t want to single Randy out for this criticism, but if he is a trophy hunter he deserves it too.

Killing animals, disrupting family units, burning lots of fuel in two-stroke snowmobiles while crossing the tundra, polluting the pristine Arctic air, and frightening countless other animals – all in the pursuit of proving that you are somehow a man – is as appalling as beating your child to prove that you can. And there is nothing honest about it, as the hunter has several generations of technology on his side, whereas the animal has none of these advantages.

As I have said, I am not against hunting period. I believe that in the north a balance has long existed between human and animal inhabitants, and that wolf and fox and wolverine fur have been critical for human survival, and the animals haven’t been killed excessively. But now people who live in apartments heated by diesel brought from Saudi Arabia, who eat food flown in from Costa Rica, who wear clothing made in China, and who contribute nothing but pollution and waste to the Arctic environment are taking its precious resources and hanging them on their walls. Given the tremendous birth rate, the fact that people born here stay here, and the minimal death rate, this region simply cannot support trophy hunting for long.

Thom and I left shortly afterwards, donning our synthetic clothes and returning to our overly heated apartment, and made pizza from veggies flown in from around the globe. Sometimes I wonder if there is anything one can do that is not hypocritical and wrong.


>>> Wednesday 30 April <<<
The weather report predicted a blizzard today, but nothing much happened. It was a little windier, that was all. I do hope a spring blizzard comes by while I am here, though, as all this clear, cold weather is a bit dull. A little excitement would be nice.

This afternoon Pakalak Time had a Dog Fashion Show. Probably twenty dogs of all shapes and sizes were dressed up and stood around on the ice of Lake Williamson to be judged. Some were working dogs (Husky mixes typically) and others pets: a pug-terrier cross, several terrier mixes, a black Weimeraner type, and a few fluffy dogs of assorted types. Pure breds don’t seem popular here, which is a good thing, because I don’t see any evidence that there is a vet in town and purebreds often have many more health problems than mutts.

One poor old working dog was so old and crippled that he just sat on the ice, seemingly happy to be clothed because it added a layer of protection. The Weimeraner type was dressed as Abraham Lincoln. I suggested to his owner that she not take him to any plays, and she didn’t get the joke. I explained that Lincoln had been shot during a play, and she said, “Really?” It’s interesting what information from the U.S. comes here and what doesn’t. At the clinic, Thom and a few nurses were talking about the housing shortage in Nunavut, because they have a few semi-homeless patients (which has just got to suck in a place where it’s below freezing ten months of the year). One said, “Why doesn’t Habitat for Humanity come up here and build some houses? George Bush isn’t doing anything these days.” Thom was horrified. He explained that indeed George Bush wasn’t doing anything (never did, if you ask me), but that it was Jimmy Carter with HFH, and indeed he was pretty active all things considered.

Pop Quiz: Name the last three Canadian prime ministers, and for each one name a single accomplishment or trait.

Pop Quiz for the Lame: Name the current Canadian PM. Spell his name correctly.

[Answers can be found here]

The dog costumes met with mixed success, for both human observers and canine bearers. One particularly patient working dog (who might have been the nicest dog I have ever met in my entire life) was dressed as “a cool dude,” according to his shy, thin, elegant owner. The dog was wearing those funny socks that have brightly colored individual toes, a tie-dyed t-shirt, denim overalls, and surfer sunglasses. He handled it all with aplomb, allowing anyone to adore him and not fussing with the clothes at all. A German Shepherd mix dressed as a beach girl, in a slinky skirt and low-cut blouse, just could not handle the whole gig. He pawed off the over-sized sunglasses, hat and wig, and tried to chew them up. He howled miserably the whole time.

The two tiny dogs dressed as infants, and carried in the hoods of their owners as Inuit children are, were pretty tolerant of the whole thing, and I got the impression they are used to being dressed up.

A note on the hoods: the women here wear pull-over parkas with massive hoods which are so large that they carry their children in them until they are about three years old. The child has quite a bit of freedom in the hood – he can stand up, lie down, hug his mother, see over her shoulder, or be covered with the hood itself if it’s really cold or windy. The mothers have their hands free and can drive snowmobiles, carry things, hold their older children’s hands, etc. It is such a great system, far better than the American way of buying an expensive, massive plastic contraption and pushing it around. I just do not understand why we buy ten times more plastic than the child itself, distance ourselves from our children, and burden ourselves with yet another object to keep track of and haul in and out of cars. This hood business is the way to go.

There were several cash prizes: $20, $30, $40, $50, $60, and $75 – all handed out as cashola. I was surprised, and am not sure who funds this thing. It certainly wasn’t a sponsored event. “Welcome to the Kiviatiq Convenience Store Dog Fashion Show, brought to you by Rankin Inlet’s favorite source for pop and chips!”

After the dog show I changed and went running around the lake, on the main road which is clear of snow. Big mistake. A minor injury I got before leaving Seattle – a pulled adductor muscle – was aggravated so now I am hobbling around the house. Arg.

Still reading Arctic Justice, which is a very thorough historical analysis of the event and the period. Very very interesting. I wonder if there is a way to incorporate some of this into a law career – working with indigenous people and the governments that are trying to enforce laws in a culture that doesn’t have the same values and ideals. Something to think about.

>>> Tuesday 29 April <<<
The white nurses at the clinic have a theory that all the published times for the Pakalak events are wrong, and that only the Inuit know the correct times. I headed out to Williamson Lake, where the elder skate race was scheduled for one o’clock, and finding it completely deserted I thought there might be some truth to this, although perhaps it was due to poor communication between the groups, rather than a conspiracy.

However, I stopped in at the Hamlet office and spoke to the organizer. He told me that Pakalak Time would be celebrating the arrival of spring indoors today, because it’s so cold he was concerned people would get sick. It’s about 5 degrees, and with the winds racing across the Arctic plains, the wind chill temperature is closer to 40 below. Yea spring!

Although I missed the elder skate race, there was more on the schedule. Later in the day, I trekked across the frozen lake to the hockey rink to watch what were advertised to be traditional Inuit games, but what turned out to be Incompetent Hockey. The teams consisted of elderly men, several of whom had apparently never been on skates before. Not that they were all wearing skates. Two were wearing tennis shoes and one a pair of kamiiks. Most had on helmets, one a baseball cap, and one no headgear. Only one had a mouth guard in, and when he took it out during a break it turned out that he had no teeth at all. Instead of using a puck, which could be dangerous in these hands, a foam rubber ball was used. The goalie at one end shrewdly noticed that the players were not capable of lifting the foam puck into the air, and so deftly defended his goal by lying on the ice in front of it. All attempts to score were thwarted, and he remained unhurt and indeed didn’t even break a sweat during the game.

A woman next to me, a radio commentator for the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC)’s northern radio franchise told me that the elder’s skate race was contested by these same men, and that to make it more challenging the organizers had the contestants skate backwards. “It took them forever,” she said, laughing. Our conversation was periodically interrupted when she called out encouragement to the players, particularly to Charlie who was wearing a bright green jersey and spent more time on the ice than on his feet, and to Qanak, who was older than dirt. “Go Qanak!” she would yell. “He’s never been on skates before,” she would say to me more quietly.

With players sprawled out on the ice willy nilly, the puck drifting along untended, and the game apparently on hold as the team took an unofficial break, I left and headed to the bookstore.

I bought two books, and have started the first: Arctic Justice, by Shelagh Grant, a story of three Inuit men who were tried by the Canadian government for murdering a white man. The gist of the plot is that they conspired to murder this man and were successful. They had been chosen by a council of elders to shoot him after he became dangerous to the community during the winter. He had threatened to kill their dogs and to start killing them for failure to hand over fox furs he believed belonged to his trading company.

It’s a familiar story: two cultures with radically different environmental pressures come to different conclusions about how to handle a problem, and when they try to resolve it neither can fathom what the other is talking about. In the Arctic, conditions are so severe that each able-bodied man is an incredible asset – he is needed for hunting, providing shelter, and maintaining the tools. The Inuit elder council does everything it can to rehabilitate errant behavior so that the family group does not lose any hunters. However, when someone in the group crosses the line and becomes a liability to the entire group (through insanity, criminal behavior, etc.) it is deemed best for everyone to kill this person. They haven’t got the luxury of insane asylums, and indeed supporting the insane is a sure way to get everyone killed if times are tough or if the insane is dangerous.

The white man was deemed dangerous because he threatened to kill their dogs, on which they rely completely for hunting and following the caribou, and the council decided that he must be killed. In Inuit culture, the men who actually do the killing are not personally responsible because they are merely the hands performing the group’s decision. In Canadian culture, however, this is plotted, calculated, cold-blooded murder, and it must be punished. You can see both sides.

The first couple of chapters are a good history of the cultural changes brought to the Canadian Arctic by European and North American whalers and trappers. Good reading and well documented.

>>> Monday 28 April <<<
The heat was still broken this morning and the temperature outside had plummeted to 4 degrees, with 40 mph winds. I turned on the oven and called maintenance. Two guys came over to fix it. I commented to them that today was a good day for indoor work. The older guy said, “Yeah, the winds are bad. It’s a good thing it’s not cold too!” Yikes. I stayed inside all day, writing a short story about the Hindu god Ganesha.

>>> Sunday 27 April <<<
Leaving the Rankin Inlet Talent Show tonight, Thom looked at me and said, “Well, we’re not likely to forget hearing someone singing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ in Inuktitut to the beat of an electric keyboard.” Can’t disagree with that.

The whole town of Rankin Inlet seemed to be in attendance, sitting on orange plastic chairs, leaning against the walls, and (in cross-culturally typical fashion) hanging out just inside the door and blocking entrance by late-comers. The venue was a community hall – a largish hall lit by rows of fluorescent lights that periodically went off, providing mood lighting, then came back on again, re-illuminating the crowd. (The spotlights facing the stage were never turned on, so the talent acts performed in the dark.)

Although the show was scheduled to start at seven, for the first half an hour or so little happened save for the mumbling of the MC. Sometimes he spoke in English, which was virtually indistinguishable from his Inuktitut. An older man joined him on stage for an Inuit drum dance, singing and beating a large Caribou-skin drum held on a stick. Once that was over, the talent show began, and the show of talent ended.

The program (hand written and photocopied) listed 22 acts, from such powerhouses as Alvin Qanak, Qayaviniq, and Chris Eccles Daughters. The MC called the first act, Catherine Pilakapsi, but apparently she got a bad case of stage fright and hadn’t turned up for the show. Neither had act #2 (Eva Nukapiak) or #3 (the highly anticipated Alvin Qanak) or #4 (Mary Arnasaluk Qaput). Fortunately #5, Mr. and Mrs. Makayak, were in attendance and ready to perform.

Mr. Makayak played the guitar, and Mrs. Makayak “sang.” Thom had suggested that I could not perform in a talent show because I am tone deaf, but Mrs. Makayak broke that barrier tonight with a stunning performance of a song with no discernible tune. The tone deaf community rejoices at this important, precedent-setting, act, however singing a second song was, perhaps, unnecessary.

Act #6, Qayaviniq, didn’t disappoint, but recited a poem (I think) in Inuktitut, and sang a brief song as a finale. Act #7, Catherine Tudlik, an older woman, and Act #8, Tommy Tudlik, an older man, set a pattern that was followed by most other acts. An electric piano’s automatic beat was started, two teenagers on guitars strummed quietly in the background, and the performer sang an insipid Christian song in Inuktitut. I must give credit where credit is due: Thom was able to identify these songs even before the crowd, which would applaud as soon as it clued in. I was never able to recognize them, perhaps the consequence of never going to church save for weddings and the odd funeral.

Chris Eccles Daughters (#10) were no-shows, but Molly Aukaut Amarok (#12) performed (following the patterns established by the Tudliks) and then little Petula Inuk Tausseor (#11 – don’t blame me, I didn’t order the performers) showed all the old folks what an elementary-school student can do: sing in tune. The first verse of her song was in Inuktitut, and the second in English. Before she could launch into the third verse (in French? Chinese?) the MC (her father) took the microphone away from her.

Charmaine Okatsiak (#13), a pre-teen, got over her stage fright enough to get up on stage, but not so much that she could keep from giggling when the microphone appeared in front of her face. The MC, being a man of many talents, allowed her to play the electric piano (to the accompaniment of its automatic beat) while he sang … another Christian song in Inuktitut. I can’t tell you how this entire show pained me.

We left soon afterwards, having identified the pattern, and largely because during the few moments when the MC was speaking in English, instead of Inuktitut, we couldn’t follow what he was saying anyway due to his poor enunciation and the dismal acoustics of the hall. We did catch the tail end of a joke, though, a conversation between two people(?):

#1: And what is caribou skin used for?
#2: We use it to make kamiiks (boots), qayaqs (kayaks), things like that.
#1: Oh. I thought it was used for holding the caribou together.

Thom and I were the only ones in the place laughing, and we laughed perhaps more loudly than the joke deserved because we actually understood it.

The real entertainment of the night was the toddlers running around the place. There were dozens of them, playing in the back of the auditorium where there weren’t any chairs. Most were dressed in a combination of northern and southern clothing. The most overwhelming aspect of their interactions – with each other, with older children, with parents and other adults – was just how much love and affection there is among people. Unlike the typical interactions at a Safeway in Seattle, in which children’s arms are yanked out of their sockets, parents tell them to shut up, and children respond with tears and shouting, the parents were gentle, the children playful and kind, and everybody seemed happy to be there. I can’t even begin to speculate what the relevant differences are (culture? city size? venue? sun spots?) but regardless of the cause, it was a beautiful thing to see.

We walked home in the glow of the setting sun, to an apartment that had dropped from 18 C to 15 C. Alas the heat appears to be broken again. Good thing this place has an oven.

>>> Saturday 26 April <<<
Although James will stay in Baker Lake for another few days, seeing more patients, Thom is done and we both headed back to Rankin Inlet. Fog delayed takeoff for an hour or so, and while waiting I looked at a collection of photos of Baker Lake from the 40s and 50s in a small gallery in the airport. As recently as 1956 there were only 25 buildings of any size in Baker Lake. It has exploded in the intervening fifty years.

While looking at these pictures, an older Inuit woman joined me and showed me one picture of several Inuit people – she pointed out that the toddler in one woman’s arms was her. The caption identified her as Susan. We looked at an aerial photo of the town and picked out the buildings we could recognize – the geodesic dome-shaped Anglican church, the high school, the fuel storage tanks. The hotel had not yet been built, and there were very few houses.

We left Baker Lake in the fog, and 45 minutes later touched down in Rankin Inlet in bright sunshine. We walked back to the apartment, turned the heat back on and took a nap. When we awoke, it was three degrees colder (from 21 C down to 18 C).

Pukaluk Time, a local spring festival, is right now, and in theory there are lots of interesting things to do in town, so we headed out to find them. At the grocery store, we saw a snowmobile drag race advertised that was surprisingly high stakes – a $125 entry fee and a top prize of $3000. It’s not clear why this is interesting or worth competing in, as drag races are won by those with the most powerful machines, not those with the best skills.

At the high school we found a list of upcoming events, and my week will be packed with things like a talent show, an elders skate race (is this a good idea??), a dog fashion contest, and assorted games and contests we don’t understand yet (just what is jerry-can bowling?). I should have plenty to report in the upcoming days.

For dinner we opened the bottle of wine I smuggled into town from Seattle, and had a nice romantic dinner – paper towels for napkins, mismatched silverware, and wine drunk out of jelly glasses. An emergency candle stuck to a saucer added to the ambience. It was wonderful.


>>> Friday 25 April <<<
Thom spent the day in the clinic, and I spent it in town. I walked along the lake shore to the snow fence and saw another herd of caribou and another arctic hare. I visited the high school, and was distressed that the library consists of a double-sided set of shelves with about 250 books, total in a room the size of an apartment kitchen. There is a new high school building being erected right now that should open in August, and the man at the door of the old building showed me where the new library would be. It will be considerably larger, and hopefully a budget for books is included.

On the walls of the hallways are posters made by students in what appears to be a civics class. Several posters were headed, “Congratulations! You know you are showing respect when …” and then listed several ways to show respect. Some were obvious (not using other people’s possessions without their permission), some were from the Inuit culture (respect Elders), and some were an odd combination of new-age language and Inuit sensibility (recognize that people need personal space and quiet).

Another set of posters showed causes and cures for stress. Two posters side by side caught my eye. On one, “travel,” as illustrated by an airplane, was listed as relieving stress. On the other, “leaving home,” as illustrated by an airplane, was listed as causing stress.

According to information Thom has gathered at the health clinics in Baker and Rankin, the infant death rate is higher than the south, and life expectancy is lower. However, the birth rate here is still about six live children per couple, often all born before the mother turns 30. Apparently very few people leave the region, because their education and social skills don’t lead to easy assimilation and success down south. This exponential growth is certainly going to cause some massive upheavals in the region – environmental destruction seems inevitable. As all of the communities in Nunavut are heavily subsidized by the Canadian government, the financial impact of this growth is highly uncertain. What will the Canadians want in exchange for continued support of these communities? What compromises will the people of Nunavut have to make to continue to live here, and what will the impact on their culture be?

I also finished Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, a novel about a half-Chinese half-Jewish man living in London and trading celebrity autographs to collectors, a story that is about as out of place up here in Nunavut as any. I searched through the whole town for a place to buy or borrow a new book – the two grocery/supply stores, the two hotel gift shops, the high school and college libraries – and came up empty handed. The high school library was closed (I could see the poor selection through the glass walls of it though), and the college had no library. No wonder there is a literacy problem here.

Rankin Inlet has a much better education system. For one thing, the town is bigger and has a larger population of visiting white workers from the south. Often the people who come in from the south bring along a well-educated spouse who works in the schools. (Getting a college education is pretty rare up north, and pretty common in the south.) One of the teachers at the elementary school in Rankin is incredibly motivated and aggressive about introducing innovative techniques and tools to the schools, and has made huge progress in improving the quality of education in Rankin. And Rankin is a government seat, and so gets more attention from the powers that be. Baker Lake suffers in its obscurity.

At one of the galleries in town, I bought a sculpture for my parents, and at another some locally made greeting cards. The third gallery was closed, which is too bad, as the owners are the son and grandson of Henry Ford (no relation to the car guy) who was the manager of the original Hudson’s Bay Trading Company in Baker Lake. It would have been interesting to hear some of their history.

I met one of the guests at the hotel, a man named Andy Newicki who is the goalie coach for the L.A. Kings NHL hockey team. While living in Los Angeles, I went to a few of their games, which is an incredibly LA experience. Down on the ice massive gap-toothed swing sticks at each other in a violent yet curiously elegant game, slamming into side boards and bleeding on the ice. In the stands, model-beautiful waitresses present menus with items such as pesto pasta salad and braised tuna steaks to model-beautiful fans sitting in leather seats.

Andy was in town, he said, because the Kings didn’t make it into the Stanley Cup playoffs, so he had some free time. He would be visiting four communities in Nunavut where he was holding skills training camps for children of all ages, from can-barely-stand-up-on-skates to just-about-ready-for-a-pro-contract. He had been doing this for years, and really got a lot of joy out of it.

One of Nunavut’s darlings is a boy named Jordin Tootoo, an Inuit who is such a good hockey player that he is playing the for Canada Junior League, which is essentially a farm team for the NHL. His brother was also at that league, but apparently the pressure of being a poster boy for the Inuit and for Nunavut was too much, and after he was arrested for (I believe) public drunkenness, he committed suicide. He and Jordin had produced several anti-drinking/drug public service ads, and people close to him think he was too afraid of the censure that would follow this arrest. It’s really quite a tragedy. Jordin continues to play – both hockey and role model – and I hope that he is getting the counseling and guidance that are needed for someone in his position.


>>> Thursday 24 April <<<
Our fifth anniversary! James insisted that Thom take the day off (he even tried to get Thom to take Friday off too, but Thom refused). Thom and I went to a gallery in the other hotel in town and bought a beautiful carving of a Musk Ox, a souvenir of our stay here in Nunavut.

We borrowed the clinic’s snow mobile. Apparently clinics have these snow mobiles to make visiting doctors more comfortable, so we weren’t taking it away from some potential medical use. It was a very nice machine, big, powerful, and comfortable.

We headed to the west, visiting an Inukshuk by the airport. Inukshuks are piles of stones that are shaped like humans. If they have no arms, they signify that the land in the region is that of a family group. If they have arms, they are usually marking a good route – a pass to take, a place to cross the river, etc. Some of them have a hole in the middle, at eye level, and looking through this hole you will see the next Inukshuk and thus will know which direction to travel in.

Several caribou herds of roughly 20 animals hung out in valleys, pushing the snow aside with their hooves and eating the moss that sustains them year round. When we got too close they leapt and ran off, so we tried to keep a comfortable distance, not wanting to stress them more than necessary.

Turning around and heading east, along the ice, we saw several people fishing. The whites here use fishing huts, as they do in Minnesota. The Inuit eschew such shacks and lie face down on the ice peering into the holes directly. We don’t know what advantage this brings. It certainly points to the value of well insulated clothing.

Once past the end of the ice highway (maybe a mile west of town) we never saw another person. There were snow mobile tracks, but never any people. We stopped and looked at (and took pictures of) some of the more unusual ice formations. Sometimes thin slivers of ice form and are thrust vertically, appearing like so many glistening sharks slicing through the pack ice. They are typically a quarter to a full inch thick, and can be as large as a dining room table. Snow accumulates behind them sometimes.

The ice on the lake is between six and seven feet thick. Sometimes it is opaque white, and other times clear so that you can see the cracks and bubbles trapped inside. Bubbles can be tiny, like champagne bubbles, up to the size of softballs in collections of 20-30 bubbles – vainly attempting to reach the top, but stopped by the faster freezing forces. We made ice angels (which is fun, but doesn’t actually change the surface of the ice in anyway) and generally had fun sliding around on the ice.

Continuing east, we saw what appeared to be a line of trees. The only outside plant we had seen so far was caribou moss, so this was quickly ruled out. Caribou? Wolves? A fence?

We headed to this gray line, and eventually it revealed itself to be a wall of ice along a pressure ridge, an astounding 20 feet high, crenulated and wrinkled, with caves, tunnels, windows, and pits. It was surrounded by sheet ice in a pale yellow color that was slipperier than any other ice we had been on so far. Arctic fox footprints lined the ridges and slid down the sides of the ridge. We took our annual anniversary picture in front of this ice barrier, clad head to toe in cold-weather gear, faces obscured by goggles and balaclavas, so you will have to take our word for it that this is really us.

Heading back to town, on the ice highway, we flew along at 50 mph, which causes the apparent temperature to drop precipitously. Wind finds its way into every weakness in the layers of protective clothing you are wearing. My coat, for example, has snaps at the wrist. When closed, they leave a little keyholes open, each the size of a quarter. When snowmobiling, these patches of my arms get so cold I worry about frostbite. I have sewn in a flap of fleece inside each sleeve to cover that keyhole, but it’s not really thick enough even with a polypro turtleneck and a thick wooly sweater also protecting my arms. The cold here is a major player in all decisions – how to build a structure, how to make and wear clothing, what food can be eaten, when and where to travel. It’s also really dry, especially compared to our waterfront home in Seattle, and staying hydrated is a constant battle.

Back in town, but not ready to go in for the day, we headed up in the hills above town to the snow fence. This is a massive fence, 20-feet high, and running across the hills west of town to protect the entire town from the gales that whip across the hills in the winter. Wind power should be developed here, to reduce the region’s dependence on imported diesel fuel and also to reduce the air pollution. The power company in Rankin Inlet is apparently moving in that direction, and a single windmill has been erected. More are planned. I haven’t heard anything about plans for similar conversions in other communities, but it seems like the obvious way to go.

Dinner was dull and without wine, certainly the worst anniversary dinners we’ve had, but the day was so fantastic, the ice and the caribou and the sun so magical, that nothing could bring us down.


>>> Wednesday 23 April <<<
I walked the entire quarter of a mile to the airport, and took a 12-passenger Fokker prop plane to Baker Lake. I shared the ride with five other passengers, all of whom were carrying boxes of Tim Horton doughnuts, and a lot of cargo.

The weather was brilliant and clear, so I could see across the tundra for miles and miles. Baker Lake (the body of water, not the town) is a cul-de-sac of water at the end of a long inlet off Hudson Bay. We flew up the coast of Hudson Bay to this inlet, where Chesterfield Inlet (the town) is located, and then along it to Baker Lake. Like the Bay, it’s all frozen, and also like the Bay, there is tremendous variation in the texture and colors of the frozen surface. Massive pressure ridges marked borders between bodies of water with different origins, and snow drifted to create hills and valleys with gentle contours.

The town of Baker Lake sits on the edge of the lake, more picturesque than Rankin Inlet, but not much. It’s still a frontier town. Talking to my dad on the phone recently I realized that it’s probably not well known that the towns here in Nunavut are very recent additions to the landscape, most of them having been created in the 1950s. Although most towns are located on sites where people used to congregate and spend a significant amount of time, the Inuit were nomadic until the middle of the twentieth century, and these sites were not occupied year-round. Rankin Inlet, for example, provided access to Hudson Bay, where the seal and walrus hunting were good, and where whales such as Belugas could be taken in the summer. Just inland, in the Meliadine lake district, Arctic Char (Salvelinus alpinus) fishing was good in the spring (and still is).

Baker Lake (both the lake and the town) is located in the Barrens, an inland area of Arctic Canada that has huge numbers of Barren-ground Caribou (Rangifer arcticus), plus ptarmigan (Rock Ptarmigan, Lagopus mutus and Willow Ptarmigan ), Arctic Hares (Lepus arcticus), Arctic Foxes (Alopex lagopus,), and the lake provides habitat for Arctic Char and other fish. The Inuit of the region moved across the land in ways that maximized their ability to hunt, and much of their movement was based on the movement of the caribou. They didn’t follow the caribou around like Deadheads, but instead moved to ensure that they were at places where the hunting was advantageous at certain times of the year. When the caribou would cross the Thelon River, which empties into Baker Lake, the Inuit would be there in their kayaks to spear as many of the crossing deer as possible. These would be used throughout the coming months for food, tools, clothing, housing and art. Changes in caribou migratory patterns spelled starvation for huge numbers of Inuit.

Many of these areas became settlements when white traders from the south set up trading posts, and the Canadian government began providing an influx of wealth in the form of food, weapons and ammunition, housing, health care, fuel, and other resources. Some settlements, like Rankin Inlet, were associated with extraction ventures. A nickel mine outside of Rankin provided wages and wealth for six years before shutting down, but in those six years enough of an infrastructure was established that the residents essentially demanded that the Canadian government continue to support it. Attempts to make Rankin Inlet self-sustaining were all failures, and included a pig farm (the pigs were fed fish, the only available food, and produced fishy-pork, and the polar bears climbed the enclosures and ate them, not minding the taste of fish in their pork), pottery studios, and farming (a ridiculous idea in a place where the ground is covered with snow 9-10 months a year).

Baker Lake is the only inland community subsidized by the Canadian government, probably because its location on the inlet allows container ships to deliver goods and fuel. It’s about half the size of Rankin Inlet. The health clinic there is staffed by five nurses and a support staff of probably five other people – administrators, a janitor, a receptionist. There are no doctors, lab techs, or X-ray techs. General practitioners from Rankin Inlet visit periodically, seeing the more complex cases that the nurses save for them, and labs and X-rays are sent out for analysis.

Thom and James had pretty heavy patient loads while they were there, with cases ranging from the mundane to the truly puzzling. Both complained that getting a personal history from the Inuit patients was made exceptionally difficult for cultural reasons – most notably, the concept of cause and effect is not universal between whites and Inuit. A few examples to clarify:

A patient of Thom’s complained of difficulty seeing, and Thom asked had he ever had any other problems with his vision before. No. Had he ever had a head injury? Yes, 30 years ago. What happened then? “Couldn’t see for two years.”

A patient of Thom’s complained of ringing in her ears. Did anything in particular seem to cause it? No. Did it just happen randomly during the day? No. What were you doing just before it happened each time? Listening to loud music with my headphones.

A patient of James’s complained of abdominal pain that he said he had had for a month. When pressed, he professed that this is as long as he had had such pain, and had not been examined or treated for it. However, a review of his charts showed that he had been complaining of abdominal pain since 1975, and that he had had CAT scans, barium enemas and a dozen other tests in Winnipeg and Churchill.

Other problems for the doctors is getting all the existing medical and behavioral conditions so that treatments can be prescribed that won’t exacerbate other conditions, or interfere with existing treatments. A patient with a heart condition won’t mention being on four medications when being prescribed a fifth for depression or pain control or something else. They aren’t seen as relevant. Because there is very little continuity in health care providers up here (most doctors aren’t here for more than a year or two), the contents of the charts become incredibly important so that such conditions and treatments can be discerned by the current provider.

And finally, another big frustration is what is commonly called non-compliance, meaning that the patients don’t take the advice of their doctors. This is common throughout medicine – but up here it is a little different. In addition to the general resistance to quitting smoking, exercising, and eating a more healthy diet (the new Inuit staples are Coke and chips) are such cultural barriers to self-help as not taking pills of a size or color that (for reasons whites cannot understand) are perceived as bad. Certain colors (or maybe color combinations) aren’t taken, nor are pills over a certain size.

Patient: I don’t take these because they are too big.
Thom: Do you have trouble swallowing them?
Patient: No, pills just shouldn’t be that big.

James: Have you been on this medication since it was prescribed (a year ago)?
Patient: Oh yes, I have taken it all this time.
James: But the chart shows that you haven’t refilled the prescription for the last four months.
Patient: Oh, well, that’s true. I haven’t taken the pills since the prescription ran out in December.

Thom notes that the patient responses I have noted are overly wordy, as the Inuit communicate with very few words. However, as all of you know, terseness is not one of my strengths, so you will just have to imagine each patient comment has having a quarter of the words that I have ascribed to them.

The other problem the doctors face in these nurse-staffed communities is perhaps born of local nurses caring a great deal for the patients who are their friends and neighbors, and affected by the lack of tools available to the nurses here. Patients are prescribed antibiotics for viral conditions, probably in an effort to do something, anything, to help. Also, patients tend to be over-diagnosed, and consequently over-treated – for example, a diagnosis of pneumonia is regularly made with no chest X-ray and in patients with no fever. The abuse of antibiotics is absolutely rampant up here.

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I was met at the airport by Kevin, the cook at the hotel where I would be staying, who picked me up to save me the three mile walk from the airport at the end of the lake. The hotel is a pair of Quonset huts attached to each other. Our room is on the second (top) floor, and consequently has curved walls. When I arrived, it was so warm I took a walk without a coat, heading down one of the two main roads in Baker Lake, each of which parallels the lake shore. I stopped in at the clinic, to let Thom know I was there. The doorway was an obstacle course of boots kicked off by patients and staff, and the waiting room filled with people of all ages.

I visited the Jessie Oonark art gallery and studio and bought a pair of earrings for my mother. The clerk, a high-school age Inuit girl, wrote up the receipt for me. Sadly, she didn’t know how to spell silver, ivory or even cash. As she also didn’t know how to read Inuktitut (the Inuit language), this means she is essentially illiterate at age 16 or 17. She can speak both languages quite fluently.

Walking through town I saw an Arctic Hare, perfectly white against the snow, and Snow Buntings (Plectrophenax nivalis) flitting around the snow banks outside the high school.

Along the lakeshore, on the lake itself, is an ice highway, used for moving from one end of the town to the other by snow machine. It’s even plowed, so cars use this too. Between the land and the ice highway dozens of boats are frozen in place, as are piles of detritus – scrapped snowmobiles, wooden crates, caribou pelts, sleds, you name it. Our overly controlling condo board would have a cow. Snowmobiles hit upwards of 60 miles an hour along here. Cars move more slowly, given how icy the ice highway is.

All meals at the hotel are prix fixe, which is perhaps providing a level of cache to the meal that is undeserved. Spices, even salt, seem to be completely absent from the kitchen. Most meals are centered on a very poor quality cut of meat and include heated frozen veggie combos and potatoes. They are generous in volume, however, and as many of the guests are workers staying en route to a gold mine in the process of opening to the north, it is probably just what most people really want. Thom, James and I, however, were underwhelmed. It’s the nature of eating in the far north.

After dinner, Thom and I took a nice walk along the ice, and went to bed.