Chapter 5 ~ Point of Collision
The Eskimo people were lured to Frobisher by the prospect of money to be made on the air station, built by the Americans in 1942. Many of them did earn good salaries for a while, but it was a brief prosperity without permanent basis and a short future. The pull was irresistible to hunters, many of whom had never seen a coin of the realm and who had no idea of a coinage system. They were men who had lived by trapping in winter when fox pelts were thickest, travelled by dog team and lived in snow houses on the long trapline. They lived on seal meat and a barter system with the Hudson’s Bay Company traders, who granted them credit and who demanded that they stay out on the land. The fur trade had small use for hangers-on round a trading post.
With the advent of World War II, when Arctic air stations were built to support the West’s strategy, and in the Cold War, when the DEW line radar sites were built across the Canadian Arctic, there was a shift in population distribution. Frobisher in the Eastern Arctic proved to be one of the greatest magnets and from all over Baffin Island, howling dog teams drew komatiks, piled high with tents, kettles, hunting implements and children wrapped in caribou skin robes, racing across the snow into the Atomic Age.
The Eskimos who went to Frobisher camped at Iqaluit – The Place of Many Fish. Faced with a settled existence, they began to build more permanent homes with materials they found littering the perimeter of the American Air Base.
Probably the greatest point of transition occurred when a former hunter bought a clock and learned to divide time into hours and his life became harnessed to a routine never before experienced. He was no longer a part of time itself, governed by tide, weather and the seasons. His children began going to school and he was enmeshed in a web from which he could never escape and be the same seal hunter again.
Iqaluit became a squatters’ village scattered on the shore between the neat houses of Apex and the gleaming huts of Frobisher town. The village was forbidden territory to non-Eskimos. Entry was obtainable only through direct permission of the area administrator. So we called at his office one morning. Permission was given and we were escorted by a young, pink complexioned civil servant down the track to Iqaluit. At its outskirts we passed a huge notice, painted in English, saying “Out of Bounds,” I asked the young man why. He said there were three reasons: “We don’t want people to see this mess. Construction workers are looking, for girls. And it prohibits sharp practice.”
As we entered Iqaluit, the huskies which had survived a disastrous epidemic the previous winter set up a mournful howling as we passed the bald patches of fouled ground where they were chained. Nearby was the first church built in Frobisher, a leftover from the earliest U.S. camp. There were a few rigid frame houses, built and paid for by wage earners, but most of the dwellings were built from scrap and stood as monuments to Eskimo ingenuity.
The civil servant who escorted us was delivering sacks of relief to a number of families who were without food. The relief rations were dried beans and the sacks were dumped down, without ceremony, outside some of the scrap heap houses.
One of the most talented carvers in the area was a man named Inuksiak. His name meant Beautiful Person. He was an elderly man who had travelled 800 miles to Frobisher from his old camp in Hudson Bay. Inuksiak’s home was the first Eskimo dwelling we entered.
From the outside it looked like the dumped load off a truck, an enormous bundle wrapped about with a patched tarpaulin, held down by lengths of knotted rope and anchored by great stones. Its frame was made from discarded packing cases, pieces of assorted timber covered by pieces of fabric salvaged from truck canopies, old army tents and ships’ hatch covers. In any other society, Inuksiak would have stood a chance of founding a fortune as a scrap dealer.
His welcome was unmistakable, and we entered his house while Rosemary took photographs of him carving a lump of soapstone into a lovely, slender-necked goose.
The interior was laid out in the same pattern as an Eskimo tent dwelling. The rear half of the floor space was a sleeping platform and Inuksiak patted the low shelf and invited me to sit while he settled himself on the left hand side (looking towards the door) and worked away on his soapstone.
I looked round his house. Its walls were lined with pieces of corrugated cardboard and brown paper which bore a postmark from somewhere in the southern United States and the instruction, “Do not open until Christmas Day.” The single window over the low wooden door had once been the windshield of a vehicle. The vehicle had evidently been involved in an accident because the glass was fractured in a pattern of fine splinters. A sound of crumpled clothes were strewn on old arm mattresses on the sleeping ledge of stones. There was a collection of saws, two hunting rifles, an accordion, a battered radio, a tool box with hammers, files and chisels, a dipper from inside a deep frying pan, an enamel pail for water and a set of blackened pans. Just forward of the centre of the sleeping platform was a bucketful of strong smelling, foul mixture of urine, kitchen scraps and Inuksiak added some sputum while we watched him carving. To offset any undesirable odours there ’were two chlorophyl deodorisers on a small cooking bench where- the oil stove was wedged.
Inuksiak put down his carving and drew from beneath the mattress a fisherman’s needle and a length of char fishing net. His fingers, white with powder from the carving, were supple and deft, knotting the twine into a mesh for catching Arctic char. He was an obliging man and shifted his position for the sake of photography. Then by common assent, we bundled out of his home into the bright sunlight and fresh air.
Our escort had a call to make at the home of Iqaluit’s matriarch. She was Ooa, a keen witted woman of great age, the oldest person in Frobisher Bay. She sat outside her neatly kept modern house, sewing sealskin trousers with a length of caribou sinew, using the age-old skill and traditional patter employed by Baffin Island Eskimos for countless centuries.
Ooa was born at Lake Harbour on the South shore of Baffin Island and had lived in the seal hunting camps about Cape Dorset but when her children were drawn to Frobisher Bay she accompanied them. Through an interpreter, she told us she still fished with a spear but it didn’t stop her from drawing the old age pension. “I think I must be getting old though,” she said, “because the last fish, it wriggled too much.”
Ooa might have been old, but she moved with the times. Then a teacher at the school proposed classes for adult Eskimos, to teach them how to cook white man’s food, there was a shy reluctance on the part of the women of Iqaluit. They appealed to Ooa for advice and she said, “The women will go to school,” and they obediently went. For most of them it was the first time in their lives they had been to a lesson.
A place like Iqaluit was inevitable in such a violent collision of cultures with its casualties and debris. But to further compound the impact, the government sanctioned the licensing of a bar in Frobisher in 1960, and many Eskimos took to liquor like babes to silk.
