Chapter 25 ~ Getting Religion
The missionary, Mike Gardner was a kind man with prematurely thin, fair hair. He arrived in Cape Dorset the same summer as ourselves although he had already spent five years in the Arctic at Lake Harbour, where there was a fine church, but few parishioners any more. Lake Harbour had been almost deserted by the Eskimos, who had migrated to Frobisher, and the former, busy camp with its snug harbour and good hunting had declined, leaving the trading post with few customers, the police with an empty dominion and the church with only a handful of parishioners.
The missionary was transferred along the coast to Cape Dorset, where the Eskimos were of the same Anglican faith as the Lake Harbour people, and where for ten years, they had had their own church, but no minister.
I asked Mr. Gardner if he had not found it convenient to have a ready-made congregation of Anglicans. His reply warmed my attitude towards him when he said, “The Bishop might not like to hear me say this, but it really does not matter to me whether the Eskimos are Anglican or not. As long as they are Christian.” The church building in Chapel Valley had an unusual history – it was paid for mostly with white fox skins and it had been built by the Eskimos themselves under the leadership of a man named Pootoogook, who once made a bargain with God.
The story was told to me by Mr. Gardner. Pootoogook was a hunter and a trapper. A generation or more ago, he met a missionary of the Anglican faith and learned the story of a God who cared about him.
It made a deep impression.
One day, Pootoogook was hunting seals in Foxe Basin and he was boat- wrecked in icy seas and flung into the water. There was little chance of him surviving long enough for help to reach him, but Pootoogook clung to the upturned boat and made a bargain with God. If God kept him alive, he would do something for the sake of the church. Pootoogook was rescued and he kept to his vow.
He resolved to build a church. It was an almost impossible thing to do for he lived by trapping and hunting. Anyhow, Pootoogook went to the Hudson’s Bay Company trader at Cape Dorset and asked the trader to import the materials. He would pay for them with half of the credit he earned from trapping white fox. It took many years to pay for it, because not only did they have to import all the wood and nails, but the carpenters’ tools as well.
In time, the church was built in the valley furthest from the trading post at Cape Dorset. It was above a stream by which many of the Eskimos pitched their tents in summer. The first roof they put on was blown away in the first strong wind, because they were unused to building houses of wood. They then received help from the Anglican church outside and carpenters were sent in to secure the roof more firmly.
When the work was done the Eskimos found they had a place in which to worship, but they had no minister and no organ for the hymn singing. During a large part of this episode, two Roman Catholic priests established themselves in Cape Dorset with a house, a church and an organ which fascinated the people. The two Roman Catholic missionaries stayed for twenty years amidst a population which remained Anglican, despite the priests evangelising and despite the lack of any opposition in the shape of an Anglican priest. From Monday to Saturday, the Eskimos were friendly and visited the mission. They were good neighbours, shared cups of tea, enjoyed singing round the organ, but when Sundays came, the Eskimos went to their own church and an Eskimo catechist conducted their own services. Finally, the two priests were withdrawn and their church and house were closed. They left in the same year I went to Cape Dorset.
The Hudson’s Bay Company trader was a young man with an eye for business, and when the priests were preparing to go, he bought the organ from them for a hundred and fifty dollars. Within months, the Lake Harbour Anglican Mission was closed down too, and the missionary, Mike Gardner was transferred along the coast to Cape Dorset.
At last the Eskimos had their own preacher to go with their own church, but Pootoogook did not live to know it. He died, a victim of tuberculosis. Pootoogook had three sons at Cape Dorset, and the youngest and brightest was Kananginak, president of the new West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative. Kananginak carried on his father’s tradition for when the church got an organ history repeated itself.
Shortly after Mr. Gardner’s arrival when ice was still lingering in the harbour, Kananginak and three other hunters set off in a canoe when a white whale was spotted in the harbor. A sudden squall hit the boat when they were out of sight of the people on shore and the canoe upturned, tossing the four men into the bitterly cold water.
Two men were able to reach the boat and hold on, but Kananginak and Pinguartok were unable to reach the boat because they could not swim and they lost consciousness and began to drown. Rescue seemed impossible, but by a strange and lucky twist of fate, a man was returning to Cape Dorset in an empty canoe. He had been to maroon his dogs for the summer on an island. He saw the men in the water and raced towards them, picked them up and took them to shore. Artificial respiration was applied to Kananginak and to Pinguartok. A crowd gathered on shore, including the newly arrived missionary. As Kananginak recovered consciousness, the first words he heard were the heartfelt prayers of the missionary who said as he saw the almost drowned Eskimo open his eyes “It’s a miracle. A real miracle.”
And Kananginak, son of Pootoogook, took the words to heart.
He also, resolved to do something for the church, and so did Pinguartok. Convinced of divine and miraculous intervention, they too, went to the HBC trader. They had the organ in mind.
Doubtless the organ had been in the trader’s mind for some time. They agreed on a price and the two Eskimo hunters promised to pay one hundred and sixty-five dollars when they had saved enough. So at last, Cape Dorset had its church, its minister and its own organ.
The only thing they did not have was an organist.
And that was why Mr. Gardner, a diffident fellow under normal circumstances, called at our tent late one Saturday night in September. It had started off as a fine, calm day, and every boat and canoe had been taken to sea as the men went seal hunting. There was scarcely an able bodied man left in camp.
The trading post was closed down as the trader had gone. Jim Houston, the assistant schoolmaster, the three print makers and even the baker had gone too, because basically, the Cape Dorset people relied on seal hunting for their lives. When the weather was good, it was always the same. Everything else stopped because seal hunting took precedence.
The weather broke late in the afternoon, and with so little diversion and our work for the day ended, Rosemary and I decided on an early night. The sky was pitch black and streaming with rain when I went to collect water from the swollen stream which had broadened and deepened with the downpour. I picked my way with a hand lamp across the gully, up the low hill to the plateau where our tent glowed with a mellow light. Nothing stirred out on the hillside, and I let myself in through the low wooden door.
A few moments later, there was a rustling outside. Something was fumbling there in the darkness.
Clutching the handle of a pan of hot cocoa, I undid the cord which served as a latch, I did not know what to expect, and always lurking foolishly at the back of my mind was the notion of some polar bear coming to the tent where the bully beef was kept.
Outside stooped a glistening figure in black oilskins.
It was the missionary.
He immediately apologised for his late arrival and explained only urgency brought him out so late on such a night. He had been unable to come earlier as he had only just ended the funeral service of an eight months old baby. (The child had died two days previously, and was said to have been the product of an incestuous union.) The men had been hunting all day and the grave had been dug on their return, after which, the service had been held by lantern light in the storm.
The missionary was wringing wet, and he said that while the grave was being dug by one party of hunters, another group had ferried the harmonium from the trader’s place to Chapel Valley. The men had carried it up the shore in the gusts of rain, and it now stood in the church of Pootoogook. And then Mr. Gardner asked me the question which had brought him out so late on such a night.
“Will you please play the organ for the Eskimo service tomorrow?”
I told him I might have played the piano but I had never played an organ in my life.
“It doesn’t matter. The Eskimos won’t mind how many mistakes you make, if only you will play it for them,” he said.
So we agreed I would try to play the organ.
The Reverend Michael then deftly flipped a hymnary from his pocket and a prepared list of five hymns and suggested I practice in the morning, and he gave me the church door key. One of the hymns had eight verses. I boggled a little, but I was assured the Eskimos sang very slowly and there would be plenty of time for me to find the notes and pick up the tune.
By eight o’clock next morning I was wide awake and uncurled from my sleeping bag. Overhead I could see a peculiar mottling on the tent roof. I pulled on my sealskin boots, because by now I had gone fairly native and found Eskimo Kamiks were incomparable in cold, wet weather. Shivering I looked through the tiny window in the door. Outside, the world was white. The date was September 11. The mottling on the roof was the first sprinkling of winter snows.
I hurried over breakfast and dashed off over the thin cover of snows to a do-it-yourself lesson in organ playing and to practice the hymns. After all the Eskimos had gone through to get their organ, I felt I could not let them down. It was a massive instrument which required a sprint cyclist’s muscles to play it, I pedaled furiously and produced very little sound. I presumed the climate had finally nobbled the organ. My knees flashed up and down until I became quite breathless, yet still no recognisable music came from it.
It was apparent the Eskimos had bought a lemon.
The loudest noise happened when, tired out, I flopped and my knees sagged on to two movable rails on either side of the knee hole, and soon, I realised you had to function in several directions at once if a tune was to be wrung from the old harmonium. You had to pedal, press the knees outwards, tug the organ stops and vamp the keyboard. All at the one time.
I decided to decline the post of organist.
I was uttering a few harsh words to myself when I became aware of soft voices trying to keep in time with the hymn I was attempting to play. I looked about me and down in the church were dozens of women and children, watching and smiling, shyly giving me encouragement. They had seen me walk over the hill and silently come into the church to hear their own organ played.
Whether I liked it or not, I had got the job.
At about noon as I wrestled with “Onward Christian Soldiers,” one of the children called in English, “An aeroplane,” and we all dashed out of church to see it.
It sounded like divine deliverance for me from the sky, and I followed the others down to the beach in time to witness the arrival of the Judicial Party for the North West Territories. There were the judge, a Queen’s counsel, a sheriff, a court recorder and the pilot, and they all disappeared into Jim Houston’s house. Alma Houston had left a few days previously for the Outside, so Rosemary and I were asked to help entertain the guests.
The housekeeper, an Eskimo widow named Ikaluk, beamed with relief when we went into the kitchen and helped her to prepare lunch for the visitors.
The barrister was an engaging man with an Edwardian white wing collar and black tie contrasting oddly with his fur trimmed parka. The sheriff was cheerful, tall with a somber navy blue suit, spectacles and sleek grey hair. He took a sandwich from the plate I offered him, and said with a confidential raise of his eyebrows, “I’m the hangman too.”
I gaped at him, and he said reassuringly, “Oh, it’s all very painless you know.”
The judge was a resonant voiced man of about seventy, and although he had a physical disability and limped, he was Canada’s most itinerant judge travelling the North West Territories on an arduous circuit administering justice so it was seen to be done. His sentences were tolerantly adapted to the Eskimo way of thinking and to Eskimo conditions, in which survival of the race has dictated social its mores.
When lunch ended, I repaired to church to practice. Children came close to watch and listen. Feet rustled softly to and fro in sealskin hoots, and by three o’clock the women were crowded in their pews. A quarter of an hour later, all the men were present, and we launched the new harmonium and my new job with a very martial version of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
Once I mastered the organ’s idiosyncrasies, I enjoyed every moment of my vocation – even the long winded sermons delivered in the Eskimo language which gave me time to watch the rapt absorption of the congregation.
They loved to sing, so my time in Cape Dorset was full of music. We had choir practice on Tuesday night; carol practice on Thursday night, even though Christmas was a long way off; I rehearsed the hymn selection on Saturday nights, and on Sundays I performed at the two-hour-long services.
The church was simply designed – a hall about twice as long as it was broad. An old-fashioned wood burning stove with bow legs was strategically placed in front of the preacher’s delivery platform, and where the stove pipe was angled to a vent hole in the roof, an empty Fort Carry coffee can was tied with wire to catch the drips of condensation that ran down the chimney in cold wet weather.
Christianity more than anything else had caused the Eskimos in Cape Dorset to divide the days into seven-day weeks, and they adopted the practice of wearing their best parkas for church on a Sunday – provided they had not gone hunting.
Host of the women washed their hair in their tents on Sunday mornings, ready for afternoon church, and with the exception of one girl, who had lived in Frobisher, they all had the same hair style – long black plaits, shining with cleanliness and brightly coloured ribbons. Both men and women had their own copies of the New Testament, printed in syllabics, and they carried them in specially made embroidered bags, or bags of sealskin.
The New Testament was not all they took to church. Those particularly afflicted with chest complaints carried some kind of tin which they set in front of their places on the hard wooden benches and accurately expectorated into them, as taught in the best sanatoria. In church, the sexes were divided – men and boys to the east, women and girls to the west. They were all completely unselfconscious about leaving the building for any natural cause during the long services, and they would relieve themselves outside among the rocks near the organist’s window, hitch up their trousers and return for more sermon and song, rolling their eyes upwards in the direction they had heard Heaven lay.
The Eskimo women must have rocked some of the early missionaries who had lived in sheltered parsonages in their own countries. Mothers had no hesitation in baring their bosoms during the services and feeding their youngest children, some of whom were nursed into their third year.
The missionary, Mr. Gardner left Cape Dorset in late September to spend a holiday in England, and the services were conducted by a catechist named Simonee, a devout, bespectacled trapper and hunter who spoke no English. He made me understand which hymns he required by singing them to me in a husky voice, and whenever I failed to catch the tune I compromised by having Cwm Rhondda, so we had Cwm Rhondda every Sunday. The men sang it with all the enthusiasm of a shift of Welsh colliers although they always had difficulty with the descant. It was closely rivalled in popularity by Crimond, but most of all they like to sing a hymn, the English words of which begin “From Greenland’s icy mountains.” The melody was published in no hymn book. It had been composed by Simonee seven years before.
Simonee was out on his trap line, catching white fox, and he was with two other men. As they travelled they built snow houses at night for shelter. One night when they had made their igloo in the vicinity of Mingo Lake, Simonee woke from his sleep, dreaming he had made a new song. The tune was clear in his mind so he wakened his two companions and sang it to them.
When they came sledging over the snow back to Cape Dorset, they carried the song with them. It caught on like a prairie fire and swept Baffin Island like a pop song and it became known as the Mingo Lake Hymn. No one had ever written down the tune, so one Saturday night at practice, Simonee and his brother sang each phrase to me and I picked the notes out on the keyboard and wrote them down on a sheet of paper.
The light we used was a flickering hurricane lamp from Simonee’s tent, and the paper was given to me by one of the print makers. When I had finished writing it, I played it fortissimo for Simonee who had never before heard it played on an organ. No one could have looked more delighted than he.
The following day we gave it full treatment at the service, and when I left for the Outside, I sent a copy of Simonee’s composition to the church’s headquarters in Toronto in the hope they would publish what is probably the first Anglican hymn composed by an Eskimo, and someday, maybe, The Mingo Lake Hymn will appear in the hymnal of the Anglican church in Canada.
