The “aunt” who wanted to adopt me as long as I looked after her for the rest of her life
TABLE D’HÔTE
I’m often asked what I eat when travelling with elders in the North. The simple answer is that I eat whatever is edible and available. When I’m with other qallunaat, I eat southern food. When I’m out on the land, I eat what the Inuit eat. I must admit I was pleased to discover from the onset that I could eat raw meat without the consequences suffered by some qallunaat. There are only a few things I avoid if possible without offending my host: fermented meat or fermented fish, the eyes of animals, and fully formed chicks still in their eggs. I have tried those delicacies and, while they taste fine, I’ve found that they don’t agree with me. Eyes taste somewhat sweet but have no texture. Fermented (rotten) meat or fish has a taste and smell similar to very ripe Stilton cheese and works through me within minutes of its consumption.
The pleasure of feasting
The elders I knew favoured caribou — raw, boiled, dried, or cooked — above all other food. I asked a few elders to categorize their preferences in food, resulting in the following list: walrus, caribou, ringed seal, bearded seal (square flipper), beluga whale, Arctic char, goose and ptarmigan, various bird eggs, and when available, berries and edible seaweed. Once while travelling with Kiawak Ashoona, I discovered a chunk of dried caribou in the bottom of my parka that must have been at least two years old. Having deftly picked off the debris that had accumulated on the meat over the years, Kiawak and I proceeded to have a delicious and well-seasoned snack.
It can be amusing to watch a qallunaq eating country food for the first time. They tend to take a small piece of meat, pinch it between the fingers, and display an exaggerated chewing motion as if they were really enjoying the food. Even more amusing is seeing a person trying to eat maktaaq, whale skin, for the first time. Though the taste is similar to that of walnuts, maktaaq tends to have the consistency of Indian rubber, leaving the unsuspecting qallunaq desperately trying to find a place to hide it while no one is watching.
I remember the time I met Joanassie Salamonie coming in from hunting at Kiaktuq. He carried a brace of ptarmigans and asked me to come and join him for a meal. After plucking the entire bird, the Inuit eat it raw, innards and all, except for the beak and claws. “You can taste the season of spring,” Joanassie said. He went on to describe how the taste of an animal in its prime allows you to “taste the season” in which it was taken. I reminded Joanassie about the time he visited me in Carp, Ontario brought me a snow goose from the Arctic. Upon examining the bird, I discovered that it was half-eaten. “It was dinnertime,” Joanassie said with a shrug and smile. “I got hungry waiting for you.”
I found that eating country food when travelling or out on the land is both nourishing and satisfying. Even a single boiled eider duck egg kept me going for a long time. There is, however, one dish that makes my mouth water whenever I think of it. First you make a small iga (fireplace) with three rocks and place a fourth flat rock on top to act as a griddle. Then you gather an armful of Arctic heather and, if available, dried Arctic willow twigs. Place the heather and twigs beneath the flat rock on the fireplace, light it, and allow the griddle to become very hot. Then place strips of fresh caribou on top of the griddle, feeding the fire with heather until the meat is cooked to a golden brown. The sweet smoke of the heather infuses the meat with an exquisite flavour. It is not the taste of a season; it is the taste of paradise.
NUNANNGUAQ, “AN IMITATION OF THE EARTH”
Travels with Inuit companions inland, on the open sea, or on the ice without a map or compass never ceased to amaze me. This was especially true when we kept moving while enveloped in dense fog at sea or wrapped in a blizzard.
“Maps” were registered in memory as a series of images illustrating features, places, and related objects located in a temporal and spiritual landscape. Each one of these entities had names. I was able to document 230 different geographical terms in Sikusiilaq alone, ranging from the simple nuna, the land, to laumajurniavissagalaaluit, areas that can support life, to najuratsaungittuq, places forbidden to ordinary human beings, places where evil things were practiced. Inuktitut terms for hills, rivers, lakes, eskers, and mountains were familiar to people living in widely separated regions. I found that topographical names collected in Arviat are almost identical to those throughout the Foxe Peninsula.
The names of places and objects, however, often reflected how they appeared to the eye and thus how they were imagined. The images they evoked were multi-dimensional, recognizing that their appearance varied depending on the relative position of the traveller, season, or position of the sun. Because the Arctic landscape changed about every hundred days, these cognitive maps were dynamic, reflecting the prevailing conditions of the seasons, weather, and tides.
Nurrata, on the east coast of the Foxe Peninsula, is an example of an ephemeral landscape whose character is reflected in the name of an ancient site. The name Nurrata implies, “where the land and the sea appear as one in winter.” Nurrata lies in the region of Qaumarvik, which is the region beyond Tikiraaqjuk, the “Great Finger,” or the peninsula pointing to Southampton Island. Thus one could construct a vivid mental image as follows: beyond the place of the great finger where the land is in brightness lies the place where there is no boundary between land and sea in winter.
Some places had more than one name. They would have a common name known to most in the region and an arcane name not disclosed to outsiders. An example of such a place is Igaqjuaq near Cape Dorset, southwest Baffin Island. Igaqjuaq is described as “the overturned kettle” because of its appearance, but its name implies a great fireplace, suggesting a place of feasting. Its archaic name is Qujaligiaqtubic, according to the elders in Dorset, a name so old that its exact meaning is no longer known. An elder interpreted Qujaligiaqtubic as, “the place from which one returns to Earth refreshed”. Qujaligiaqtubic was where the people of Sikusiilaq had gathered once each year for generations to celebrate the ancient fertility ritual of siiliitut.
There were places, essentially retreats, known only to women, who referred to them as arnainnarnut qaujimajaujuq. Men could merely speculate about what occurred there and ascribed little importance to such places except to acknowledge that they existed.
If you examine a contemporary map of the Foxe Peninsula and superimpose the traditional travel routes of the Sikusiilarmiut, it is difficult to comprehend how entire families travelling on foot, laden with children and gear and confronted by countless bogs, rivers, and lakes, could find their way there and back on their annual journey of well over nine hundred kilometres. During these journeys, the most important consideration was where one could safely cross rivers; the complex geography was one of shallows that could vary in depth depending on the prevailing conditions. The vital element that the families added to the visible landscape is where they could find food along the way. It was essential to know the locations for intercepting caribou, finding geese, and, if need be, catching fish. There were no paper maps, no way-finding tools, only memory providing a sense of direction. Occasionally they would encounter an inuksuk known as a nalunaikkutaq, literally “a deconfuser,” placed in a strategic location during some forgotten time to help the traveller.
These mental maps could be translated to sand, snow, or even paper if need be. There are several accounts of Arctic whalers and explorers who engaged Inuit as pilots and map makers. One such account can be found in Robert Huish’s book on the travels of Captain Beechey along the coast of the Bering Strait in 1826.
On the first visit to this party, they (the Eskimos) constructed a chart of the coast upon the sand, of which, however, Captain Beechey at first took very little notice. They, however, renewed their labour and performed their work upon the sandy beach in a very ingenious and intelligible manner. The coast line was first marked out with a stick, and the distances