Hallendy’s explorations have made him something of a modern ‘Rasmussen’ of the Canadian Arctic. Rasmussen was more interested in Inuit mythology, religion, and oral history, whereas Hallendy focuses more on lexical matters like names, meanings, and states of being. Like Rasmussen, he travelled and lived with Inuit, winter and summer, exploring the words Inuit use to describe weather events, ice conditions, or geographic and cultural features. Called by Inuit Apirsuqti “the inquisitive one,” Hallendy developed friendships that provided him with access to inner worlds that anthropologists since Rasmussen have ignored or taken for granted. No one before has explored the connections between Inuit conceptions of place, geography, and philosophy in such depth. It is indeed, for the Inuit and for Hallendy, an “intimate wilderness” created through the meaning of words that he reveals in a memoir written as an autobiographical tribute for the Inuit who opened their world to him.
Hallendy is best known through his interviews and lectures and for his documentation of the Inuit stone structures known as inuksuit (“acting in the capacity of a human”), whose singular form is inuksuk. His beautiful photography and book, Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic, illustrate these mysterious rock sculptures, revealing them not only as works of art but as structures with special meaning. Today their most iconic forms have become symbols of Inuit ethnicity and Canadian national identity. In Intimate Wilderness we meet more of these creations and learn their meanings and stories as told by Inuit elders.
Because of his previous book Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic, the once-enigmatic inuksuit and their stone relatives are not as mysterious as they once were; they have Inuit names and meanings and tell stories that add to our knowledge of Inuit and Tuniit history.
Intimate Wilderness tells many stories in different ways. It is a memoir, a tribute, a linguistic ethnology, and a story of lives and history in a small part of the Canadian Arctic whose lexical world has never been studied in such depth before. For thousands of years Inuit Paleoeskimo ancestors created a world we know only through abandoned houses, stone tools, food remains, and tiny but beautiful carvings of people and animals.
By eliciting memories of them and their names from the few Inuit still directly familiar with the old Inuit way of life, Hallendy gives us a glimpse of a world that before, was closed to all but the Inuit themselves, a world that may even include some Tuniit history. While we will never fully understand the full significance of their ‘silent messengers,’ through the narratives and words the Cape Dorset people use to describe their landscape, Norman Hallendy has cracked the door and provided us a glimpse of this land of vast horizons.
William W. Fitzhugh,
Director, Arctic Studies Center,
Smithsonian Institution,
Washington DC.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Inuktitut terms and expressions used in this book were given to me by the elders of the Cape Dorset. The terms were transcribed by the Manning sisters — Annie, Nina, and Jeannie as well as Leetia Parr and Pia Pootoogook. Some terms would be considered archaic in one area of the eastern Arctic and common in another. In the Kinngait area, for example, the term Inuksuk is used while in Igloolik the equivalent term is Inuksugaq.
In the early days, I often wrote out words phonetically, as a standard orthography was still in development. Recording the names of people and places presented a challenge and still does because there are variations of their spelling in various documents. For example, is it Ashuna or Ashoona, Kiawak or Kiugak, Itiliarjuk or Itiliardjuk, Nuratta or Nurratta and so forth. After several years accumulating Inuktitut words and expressions and their meanings, I began arranging the information in English and Inuktitut in a simple database using Roman orthography. The database now provides a particularly rich collection of 1,500 Inuktitut terms and expressions many unique to Sikusiilaq (Southwest Baffin).
The database enables one to explore words and expressions arrayed in a semantic field. For example: if one searches the term caribou, 73 different words related to caribou in both English and Inuktitut are displayed. The database has another valuable feature, with the click of a button, it will produce a unique 99 page dictionary containing the Inuktitut word, the English translation of that word and it’s meaning. I considered having the entire collection of Inuktitut words and expressions in this manuscript vetted and, where necessary, altered to conform to present-day usage. I was encouraged by my Inuit mentors to leave them be, as the words accurately render the meaning ascribed to them by the Sikusiilaq elders.
I chose to write in a manner that reflected how the stories were told to me. In this way, it was my hope to bring you, the reader, into those moments of intimate conversations and experiences.
Reflections of the few weeks of summer.
INTRODUCTION
I am visited by a gentle sadness, for soon, like the geese, I will leave this place and fly south where summer lingers. Sekkinek, the sun, rises later each day while darkness arrives ever earlier. It is late August, a time when caribou shed the soft brown velvet from their antlers. Among the shards of summer scattered across the tundra, little grey spiders dart in and out of silken tunnels spun below the now pale gold leaves of Arctic willow. The women and children have picked the berries. White tufts of Arctic cotton have been carried away on the wind. Early morning frost has transformed the grey-green tundra into a vibrant landscape of red, orange, yellow, and gold. My footsteps on the dry lichen sound as if I am walking on crisp snow. Soon, another sound is heard, the moaning of the sea.
There is a place on a hill that opens to the vast horizon. Here we can sit and reminisce upon the sweet thoughts of life and wonder what lies beyond the horizon of our dreams. We can journey along a trail of memories to places so hauntingly beautiful they have to be seen to be believed, and to places so powerful that they have to be believed to be seen. I will shake the dust off my notes that tell of shamans and a world inhabited by spirits, and share with you all that was given me by men and women who lived at the very edge of existence in one of the most demanding places on Earth. They were people who had the genius of knowing how to create an entire material culture from skin, sinew, ivory, bone, stone, snow, and ice. They spoke to me of hardship, love, wonder, and all that defines the human spirit. Sargarittukuurgunga, a word as old as their culture, suggests travels across a land of vast horizons.
An Intimate Wilderness is an account spanning 45 years of journeys in Canada’s Arctic. Travelling in the company of Inuit elders, I learned about unganatuq nuna, the deep love of the land often expressed in spiritual terms. Other journeys were inward, across the last great wilderness within ourselves. There were times, when travelling on the sea ice to a distant camp, that we ached with cold, and there were times when we snuggled in an igloo beneath warm, soft caribou skins.
One of many notebooks filled with observations while in the field.
In a real sense, these journeys made it possible for me to live in two different worlds in a single lifetime. The familiar world was the one defined by the daily requirement to make a living. I spent my career in various capacities within the federal public service; eventually, I became a senior vice-president of one of Canada’s Crown corporations. I married, and my wife and I had two daughters, but our marriage suffered and ended while I worked gruelling twelve-hour days.
The other world was one in which I was free to traverse a place of endless wonder and where, for a brief time, I could become the person I had always wanted to be. Being in the company of elders exposed me in an intimate way to the land and to a way