The author learns about a terrible battle between Attachie’s and Kinarnaq’s camps. Thirty bodies were later dumped on a small island known as Iluvirqtuq.
In desperation, hunters place the lifeless body of one of their friends into an iron rendering vat. Several years later the body is removed and given a Christian burial.
THE OLD WOMAN WHO WAS CARRIED OFF BY WOLVES
Fantastic tales about Arctic wolves, real and mythological.
The author serenades a old friend on his death bed.
Final words to the elder Joanassie Salamonie.
An everyday experience as simple as observing the melting of ice reveals an event of epic proportions.
Pudlo Pudlat watches as his nephew floats out to sea on an ice floe to face certain death. Miraculously, the young boy is saved by the turn of the tide.
The transcendental part of the world that lies between the land and the open sea and between different hunting techniques.
THE PEOPLE WITH THE POINTED SHOES
Simeonie Quppapik talks about the Sami reindeer herders and 600 reindeer who arrived in the Canadian Arctic in 1921, in a failed experiment to establish the herd in Canada.
What was the meaning of the tattoos on Charles Gimpel’s arm, Qaqqaq Ashoona wants to know.
Abuse in some camps during traditional times and repentance.
On a trip with a dominant hunter, the author experiences abuse and humiliation, but in the end a measure of redemption as he is carried ashore by his tormentor who becomes a close friend.
THE LAST TRADITIONAL INUIT TRIAL IN SIKUSIILAQ
The author comes upon a site where the Great Council sat in judgement, and offers a unique account of the Inuit traditional system of justice in action.
The author recounts what he has learned about the Tuniit, the mysterious people who preceded today’s Inuit.
The Inuit understanding of the Tuniit.
WORDS: THE VANISHING ARTIFACTS
The importance of gathering names, meanings, and characteristics of places considered significant to the elders. For the Inuit, words are carriers of culture, and their loss is profound.
Osuitok Ipeelie reveals how Inuit shamans kept alive ancient words spoken by Tuniit shamans; life in the early days before the arrival of guns and missionaries; and how the magnetic North Pole is constantly shifting its position.
THERE IS GREAT BEAUTY IN FOND MEMORIES
The author accompanies Itidlouie on the elder’s final trip to his most beloved places.
The author shares stories with a niece of one of the elders, and learns about his Bukovinian roots from a former Polish cavalryman.
WHAT A WONDERFUL THING IT WAS TO KNOW YOU
FOREWORD
When Martin Frobisher arrived in the Canadian Arctic in 1576, searching for the Northwest Passage in three small sailing vessels, the Inuit had lived here for only about 250 years and had already experienced major environmental and social change. They had replaced the previous Dorset inhabitants (known to Inuit as Tuniit), had met Norse and Elizabethan explorers, had acquired iron, and had seen their major subsistence resources — bowhead whales — disappear as the Little Ice Age closed down their summer waterways. This is not exactly the image of the “timeless” Arctic people that emerged from the late 18th and early 19th century ethnographies of Franz Boas and Birket-Smith, and Knud Rasmussen, a folklorist; and it pales before the realization that Inuit predecessors — the Dorsets and/or Tuniit — had been living here four thousand years. Yet, as Norman Hallendy demonstrates, during their relatively brief tenure the Inuit built a world that is richly preserved — not only in artifacts, campsites, and ethnographies — but in the little-investigated field of Inuit language and toponymy.
Norman Hallendy’s long-term relationship with the Cape Dorset region of southern Baffin Island brings us closer to understanding the world from an Inuit perspective than anyone since Rasmussen, whose work and publications from the Central Arctic in the 1920s first documented linguistic aspects of Inuit culture. Hallendy did not come to these lands as an anthropologist or explorer. This first generation Canadian immigrant with heritage from Bukovina in Eastern Europe wandered into the Canadian Arctic by chance as a mining prospector’s assistant; he became captivated by its people and geography, and for the next forty-five years returned again and again, mesmerized by the vastness of the land, his genial hosts, and the spell of the evocative Inuit language. During seasonal visits to Cape Dorset as a high-ranking Canadian Government housing official he began to explore the meaning of words, concepts, and place-names. Over time his social ties with the Dorset community, particularly elders whose early years had been spent living in camps throughout the year, grew into trustworthy bonds. Visiting homes, travelling far and wide to inspect old camps (nunalituqaq), historic and sacred sites (saqqijaaringialik), and places of power (itsialangavik), he has come closer to seeing through Inuit eyes and thinking in Inuit ways than any previous visitor to the Canadian North. Learning Inuktitut and working closely with translators and knowledgeable elders, he recorded nuanced words for places, states of mind, and relationships, and has made these words and their meanings available in an extensive