On one memorable occasion, I was travelling with Lukta, the son of the angakok (shaman) Qiatsuq, who was taking me to his father’s old camp. I wanted to visit Qiatsuq’s now abandoned camp because I was curious to learn why some people were afraid to go there. Heading off by boat with neither map nor compass, Lukta and I navigated safely through a dangerous narrows and across the yawning bay to reach the camp. After I had finished documenting the area, we got back into our boat and began crossing the bay.
We were not far into our return trip when I noticed a white line quickly approaching us. I thought it was ice, but it turned out to be a very dense fog that overtook us within half an hour. The fog was so thick that I could barely make out the other end of the motorized canoe seven metres away. Sharing my concern, Lukta shut down the motor and listened carefully. It was what he could not hear — the sounds of waves lapping on the shore — that troubled him. He thought back to the time we had set off, when the sun was shoulder high, and estimated we had been travelling roughly an hour.
He took out a package of cigarettes, removed the silver foil, and folded it into a tiny boat with a sail. He placed it on the water, where it quickly drifted off. From its direction, and taking into account the time of day and season, Lukta knew that the tide was going out into Hudson Strait, which was definitely not where we wanted to be.
Lukta restarted the motor and continued in the direction opposite to the drifting silver paper. We would go along slowly, stop, listen, then continue. Listening was the most important thing. Then, suddenly, we bumped into an outcrop, something not indicated on the map I had. In the middle of the still dense fog, we quickly got out of the canoe, and Lukta looked around. He could tell by the presence of lichens that the outcrop was not covered at high tide. Aware that it would be all too easy to slip off the rock and fall into the icy water, we carefully sat down facing where we thought the land would be and waited.
It took a few hours and then, sure enough, the fog dissipated and we could see the land facing us. The first thing Lukta did was to pick up some loose rocks and build an inuksuk that pointed toward the land. In his mind, he recorded the image of precisely what the outcrop looked like.
When we finally returned safely to Cape Dorset, Lukta told his fellow hunters all that had happened; that if ever they came upon the outcrop out in the bay and saw an inuksuk in the shape of a pointer, it indicated the direction toward the land.
And so a new image was added to the cognitive maps carried in the minds of the hunters of Sikusiilaq.
Simeonie Quppapik my mentor for over 40 years.
REFLECTIONS
By the time I met him in 1958, Simeonie Quppapik was a respected elder. Simeonie, claimed he had been born twice: first when his mother’s midwife brought him into the world, when whalers still visited the area, and second when the Canadian government said he was born, which a bureaucrat determined to have been in 1909, duly written on what looked like an important piece of paper. In either case, Simeonie was adopted as a young child.
I remember clearly one of my visits with Simeonie. I watched him watching something in the distance but, try as I might, I could not detect what he was looking at. Was he dreaming or was there something moving out there? I scanned every inch of the horizon looking for clues that might lead me to the object that had captured his attention. There was nothing floating on the sea. No sign of bad weather approaching. No movement on the land. My curiosity got the better of me. “What are you looking at, Atatasiak [Grandfather]?” I asked.
“I am looking toward the place of my childhood,” he replied in a whisper.
“Where is it, Grandfather?”
Simeonie took a piece of paper and a stub of a pencil, and drew the entire coastline from Kinngait (Cape Dorset) to Qarmaarjuak (Amadjuak) on south Baffin Island, a distance of about 300 kilometres. “There,” he pointed, “that’s where I was born and had my childhood captured, put into a box and attached to a piece of paper forever.”
In 1923, when Simeonie was fourteen, the legendary American filmmaker Robert Flaherty captured his likeness on film. At the time, the Inuit with whom Flaherty lived had given him the name White Swan. One of Simeonie’s relatives, the beautiful Glass Nose, was White Swan’s girlfriend and likely influenced him to photograph members of her family before he headed back south. I’ve often looked at that sweet photograph, then looked at one taken when Simeonie was a strong and handsome hunter. In later years, I would turn and see a small and delicate man who had not wielded a harpoon for some time. But until the end, Simeonie possessed a remarkable memory. He could still sing the songs he had learned many years ago when he lived in skin tents and snow houses while growing up at Qarmaarjuak, the land of the ancient sod houses.
Bright and inquisitive, Simeonie often offered sharp insights into the importance of words. I remember one story about how some qallunaat (white people) came to Sikusiilaq many years ago to make nunannguait, “imitations of the Earth,” or maps. Just off the end of Itiliardjuk is a small island that was the traditional summer camp of the Kinngnarmiut, the people living in the Dorset area. When the qallunaat arrived, their maps made in the South showed that the island had no name, so they asked their guide, “What’s the name of the island?” The guide’s son made a slight misinterpretation by telling his father that the qallunaat wanted to know who was living on the island, to which the guide replied, “Alariaq.” So the place that the locals referred to as Shaqu or Sarku or Saarru (the armpit), named for its pleasant little bay, was inadvertently given the place name Alariaq, the name belonging to one of the most influential angakkuit (shamans) in all of Sikusiilaq.
I had assumed that all the people living in southwest Baffin referred to themselves and were referred to by Inuit living in other distant places as Sikusiilarmiut, meaning the people of Sikusiilaq. Yet when Simeonie referred to himself as once having belonged to the Qarmaaqjummiut, people of the sod houses, and not to the Sikusiilarmiut, I thought it prudent to have a little ethnogeography lesson.
One Sunday in July my interpreter, Jeannie Manning, and I visited Simeonie after church armed with the usual paper, pens, pencils, and his favourite snack, a garlicky sausage I had brought north from my home in Carp, Ontario.
Simeonie began by explaining that the place where you were born and lived most of your life denoted the general name given to all who lived in that place. For example: Pauta was born in Nurrata, and therefore he belonged to the Nurrattamiut. The general area, however, was known as Qaumarvik (the land that is in brightness), which included the ancient camp Nuvujuaq, as well as several small camps whose people were known as Nuvujjuaqmmiut. Therefore, the Nurattamiut and the Nuvujjuaqmmiut would be regarded as the regional group the Qaumainnasuuqmiut, the people from where the land is bright.
Who, then, were the Sikusiilarmiut? I asked Simeonie. He explained that the name of the people from where the land is bright began to change from the Qaumainnasuuqmiut to the Sikusiilarmiut as they vastly expanded their hunting territory due to the introduction of fox trapping by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1913. Just when I was beginning to grasp Simeonie’s teachings, I learned that the Qaumainnasuuqmiut, later regarded by other Baffin Islanders as the Sikusiilarmiut, had yet another name. Their relatives in Nunavik, Arctic Quebec, referred to them as “the people of the other half.“
Simeonie went on to explain the meaning of the name by offering the analogy of a pair of mitts. One mitt represented the people of the Arctic Quebec coast and the other the people of southwest Baffin to whom they were related. Just as I was beginning to understand the lesson, I asked Simeonie to tell me what the Sikusiilarmiut called their relatives