An Intimate Wilderness. Norman Hallendy

to handle than any umiak. Umian are for women, children, and dogs, not for hunting.

      When the hunters saw the spout from a whale, they came together. They took their panar [bone knife] and lashed it to their qajaq paddle, so as to make a spear. In the old days it took a long time to make our weapons and tools because we had no saws or metal tools. We cut bone and ivory with pieces of “glass.” We found that special glass that looked like icicles growing from certain rocks. We would take a sliver of that glass and set it into a piece of caribou bone so as to give it a handle. That was our saw. We would then scratch a line over and over again on both sides of the bone or ivory until we could break the piece exactly in the right way. We could do other things with that glass, like make holes, grooves, and decorations.

      Now I will tell you how we killed great whales. You must understand that the great whale is a peaceful animal. It doesn’t kill other animals, nor is it afraid of any animal except arluk [killer whale]. When we saw whales, we could move among them and they were not afraid of our little qajait. They moved slowly, feeding on things that lived on the top of the ocean. There was no fear of trying to kill a great whale if you knew how to do it. My father was such a man. He was the one who knew the right place to stick in the spear. He would paddle beside the whale, carefully looking at her body. There is a place below her spine where you can see a movement.

      At this point the old man put his left thumb under the flap of skin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and began to make a pulsing motion.

       You see, there is a place on the whale that moves just the way I am showing you. That’s where the kidney is, and that’s the only place where it is safe to stick in the spear.

       This was done carefully and quietly, and you may be surprised to know that the whale did not even know that she was being killed. There was no fight. She kept swimming on and began to bleed to death. We would follow her sometimes for a very long time until she died. As soon as she was dead, we would come to her side and fasten lines to her body. Our lines were made from walrus hide, and the hooks on the end of the line that were stuck into the whale were made from polar bear claws.

      Each hunter fastened a line to the whale and together we paddled toward the shore. There was much hard work and much rejoicing because she gave us food and oil and everything else that we needed in the making of things, even a new panar [snow knife].

      The old man looked into his empty teacup and quietly said, They were such peaceful things, such beautiful and peaceful things. I left Pangnirtung (Pangniqtuuq) the following day with many fond memories.

      Various forms of inuksuit.

      SILENT MESSENGERS

      There are places across the circumpolar world where the Inuit and their predecessors have left traces of their presence on the land reaching back thousands of years. The most enduring signatures of the Inuit are stone figures known as inuksuit — objects that act in the capacity of a human.

      My interest in inuksuit began in 1958, on my first visit to Cape Dorset. Inuksuit could be seen in many places along the entire southwest Baffin coast. I photographed each inuksuk from at least three perspectives, wrote short notes about its location and orientation, and any other details that seemed relevant. During two summers travelling along the coast, I had produced more than 100 images and decided that it was time to seriously study these remarkable and puzzling figures. I wrote a polite letter of inquiry to most universities and other institutions in North America with an interest in Arctic studies. Of the five responses I received, four stated that they had no information on inuksuit in their holdings, and the fifth letter from a well-known Arctic archaeologist advised that the purposes attributed to “those cairns” were often exaggerated and serious study of them would be a waste of time. Instinct caused me to think otherwise.

      At first, I attempted to classify inuksuit into obvious groups. I noted their morphology, size, the type of rock used, and a number of other physical traits associated with each inuksuk. What little written information I could find was included in my ever increasing pile of data and notes. That gave me a feeling of making headway, but the Inuktitut expression “he hides its meaning within words” gnawed away at me. I realized that by arranging and rearranging facts, I was merely conjuring an illusion of progress. In real terms, this seemingly logical approach had done little to increase my understanding of what had been revealed to me about inuksuit. Once again, I reviewed all the information I had collected: interviews, pages of field notes, and hundreds of photographs. No matter how I arranged and rearranged the data, insight was nowhere to be found.

      Then one evening, while idly shuffling papers, I noticed that a single expression, utirnigiit, referring to traces of coming and going, appeared often in my notes. That word prompted me to examine my data in a new way. By grouping Inuktitut words and expressions related to utirnigiit, I created what I later learned to recognize as a semantic field. What emerged was a totally different way of perceiving the meaning of the things I struggled to understand.