The Long Exile: A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. Melanie McGrath

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      Around Inukjuak itself, dwarf willows are the only tree-like shrub, but south of Inukjuak a few dwarf birches grow, though these rarely venture out more than six inches or so from the root. Among the perennials are the Arctic heathers, Cassiope, and Arctic cottonheads, whose stems Maggie Nujarluktuk gathered to serve as wicks in her stone lamp. In September, the berry-bearing members of the genus Vaccinium growing on Ungava's southern slopes produce the tiny blueberries and lingonberries so beloved of Ungava Inuit and of their children in particular. Furry mosses grow around Ungava, too, and, in summer, Arctic poppies, rosy sedges and pretty, bobbing saxifrage poke up from the willow carpet. On alluvial flats beside the Ungava's many rivers, cotton grasses wave above the thick cushions of sphagnum moss which the frost heaves up into tussocks. Where the rivers disgorge into the bay there are white strands of sand, and in the pockets of soil trapped by boulders, sandworts and scurvy grass flourish. Sea pinks raise their heads above the rocky parapet and crowd the tops of the low cliffs where the air is warmer than at the frosty selvage of the shoreline.

      In Ungava human life has always been concentrated along the coast where there are seals, walrus, beluga and, in the past, large whales. By comparison, the interior is forbidding, and in Maggie's time it had become more so, because the once dense herds of caribou had been reduced by the introduction of rifles. Before 1900, the caribou were uncounted and uncountable. Like the American buffalo, they ranged in herds with no discernable beginnings or ends. In 1900, when naturalists, sensing a sudden and dramatic drop in their numbers, began counting, there were something like 1,750,000 caribou living in the Canadian Barrens. Fifty years later this figure was 670,000, 60 per cent down on the previous half-century and in 1955, only five years after that, the herds had diminished to 277,000 individuals, 60 per cent down again. Changes in the pattern of the weather and gradual variations in the tree line have always made caribou populations vulnerable to catastrophic but temporary declines but nothing had done anything like the damage caused by the rifle. By the fifties, those quarter of a million or so surviving caribou were scattered across land larger far than western Europe and locating them had become a hunt for needles in haystacks. Between 1900 and 1950, caribou had virtually disappeared from central and northern Ungava and Inuit living around Inukjuak were forced to paddle south by kayak or umiak, often as far as Richmond Gulf, near Kuujjuarapik, a round trip of 400 miles, to stand any hope of hunting them. And hunt them they must, not so much for the meat, nutritious though it is, but because the animals' skins were absolute necessities of Inuit life. Caribou hair is cone-shaped and hollow, making its insulating properties second only to those of musk-ox hair, while being a good deal lighter and more flexible. Without caribou pelts for clothing and sleeping bags, neither Inuit nor any other human being would ever have been able to settle in Arctic conditions.

      In Maggie's time, Arctic hare and fox remained relatively plentiful in Ungava and there were trout in the lakes and Arctic char in the rivers. The waters of Hudson Bay have always been home to large numbers of sculpin, harbour, ring and bearded seals and, more rarely, beluga whales and walrus. Ravens and ptarmigan have always been permanent Ungava residents and migrating birds arrive in their millions as early as July and stay until the September snows. The islands off the coast of Cape Dufferin are so densely populated with birds during the summer months that the rocks and cliffs at the shoreline seethe and foam like pots of boiling milk. At McCormack Island, 20 miles north of Inukjuak, vast colonies of murres nest on the leeward side along the headlands and in the hollows carved by glaciers beneath them. Nourished by their guano, clumps of deep, luxuriant moss grow. Fantastic numbers of geese and ducks gather on the rocky edges of the Hopewells, the Sleepers and Nastapokas. All along the island festoons of the Belchers, one of which now bears Robert Flaherty's name, eiders, snow-geese and American pintails make their summer homes. During the annual moult, when they temporarily lose their flight, Inuit would go out in boats and scoop them off the beach.

      Autumn arrives relatively late at Inukjuak and is relatively mild. The first snows begin in September, but it does not start snowing heavily until October. By November the snow is so dry and wind-packed you can walk on it with the same ease as asphalt. The days draw in and the nights are coloured by displays of the Northern Lights. The snow continues to build up through December. In January, conditions change sharply as the sea ice in Hudson Bay thickens and stabilises. It stops snowing and temperatures plummet. The air becomes crystalline. The Arctic midwinter begins. In contrast to the summer, with its bustle of insects and yammering birds, midwinter is almost deathly silent. There is rarely a sound to be heard beyond the rush of the wind and the cracking of the ice, a terrible, raw, geologic sound. Midwinter is all about ice. A short way out to sea an ice foot forms, its base lying on the beach. Beyond it sits a rough strand of barrier ice, which takes the brunt of the tide. Further out still, the land-fast ice stretches smooth all the way to the floe edge. The pack ice, or floe, slides over and under the land-fast ice and grinds against it, lifting pressure ridges as solid as ice walls or as jumbled as ice boulders. As the tide pulls out, a hinge appears where the barrier ice and the land-fast ice join and the floe edge separates more widely from the land-fast ice, creating a tumbled mass of ice which moves with the tide. Frost smoke, ice flowers and hoar crystals appear where the floe edge pulls away from the land-fast ice, exposing liquid sea. These movements all have their own sounds. As children, Inuit become accustomed to them and learn to distinguish between them but to any outsider it can seem as though they herald the end of the world.

      In Ungava, the temperature rarely slips below −40°C in winter and in the blaring January, February and March sun it can feel much warmer. Conversely, when a northwesterly wind is blowing, the windchill can take another ten or fifteen degrees off the ambient temperature. January is often still, though, and January, February and March are all good months for hunting seals at their breathing holes and for trapping foxes. The wind is low, the snow is packed and the ice is stable. The sun shines for at least a few hours on most days and by March the days are long and almost blindingly bright. In April it snows again but this snow never really dries and hardens. By May it is beginning to soften, by June it is in full rot and ice is beginning to melt from the edges of the lakes and at the shoreline. Summer arrives in July, along with the birds.

      Generations of Maggie Nujarluktuk's family had made this land their home. Ungava was all they knew and all they were. They were bound to it by blood and by the spirits of their ancestors. Their stories were all here. For centuries, Ungava Inuit had moved around the coast following the migration of whales and birds, jigging for fish in the lakes and rivers and hunting seals, walrus and whales just off the coastline in the bay. They had married and given birth and died. They had played drums and cat's cradle, staged sled races and played football using walrus skulls for balls. They had sung their songs of great hunting exploits and passed them down to younger generations. At times they had eaten well, at other times, starved.

      Contact between the Ungava Inuit and white men had been infrequent and short-lived. Every so often an explorer and his crew would overwinter somewhere along the east Hudson Bay and hire a few locals to hunt or sew skin clothes for a few months. The explorers often traded metal needles, harpoon heads and blades, tobacco and cooking pots in exchange for the Inuit's skins and meat and, sometimes, for sexual favours. While they stayed, the whites seeded a few half-breed babies and passed on their diseases, but for the most part, life on the east coast of Hudson Bay went on as it had ever since the Thule had settled the place.

      Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, whalers came into the bay, and although whaling along the eastern shoreline never assumed the large-scale industrialised killing that was taking place along the bay's western coast or off Baffin and Herschel Islands, the presence of the whaling ships and, in particular, of those from New England which, unlike the Scots, overwintered in the region, increased the fraternising between white men and Inuit, with mixed results for the natives. Tuberculosis, measles, diphtheria, syphilis and missionaries spread through the region with equal enthusiasm. Entire families died of TB, whole settlements were ravaged by influenza. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the entire population of Southampton Island, around 300 souls, was wiped out in a measles epidemic.

      The first mission was established by E. D. Peck in 1894 at Kuujjuarapik. Increasingly, СКАЧАТЬ