At the End of the World Read online

  “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic system,” wrote environmentalist Aldo Leopold. “It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

  Where are the Aldo Leopolds, the Rachel Carsons, the John Muirs, the Barry Commoners, the Loren Eiseleys, the David Browers, the Teddy Roosevelts, and the Edward Abbeys now? Lurking behind screens rather than being out in the field, what’s left of it?

  Rant: A computer is only a tool, but so, too, is a guillotine.

  Person after person I’ve watched lose their heads in a realm of total busyness because of their computers and iDevices. “I have to answer more than 200 emails a day,” a Cyberian professor recently told me, “but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Meaning: I’ll never be able to escape this gulag.

  In the Siberian gulags, a small pink flower in the spring would bring prisoners to the point of ecstasy, whereas prisoners in the Cyberian gulags seldom notice flowers regardless of their color or season.

  If you don’t see Nature, why would you want to preserve it?

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  “Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy,” wrote mythologist Joseph Campbell.

  No mercy: Either you believe in me, a computer declares, or else you believe in me.

  I recently gave a lecture on Arctic ecology at a local junior college and, as usual, most of the students were paying attention to their iDevices rather than to my lecture, so I changed the subject …

  … and asked my audience in a suddenly loud voice: “Do you realize that many drakes lose their penises because female ducks mistake them for a postcoital snack?”

  Hardly anyone looked up, laughed, winced, seemed dumbfounded, or even said “cool,” awesome,” or “ohmigod,” currently three of the most often used words in the English language, for their iDevices were saying to them, “Look at me, for I am God.”

  Oral tradition is as much about listening as it is about telling stories … and listening, like storytelling, seems to be going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon.

  After the class, the teacher took me out for lunch, but I lost my appetite when she informed me that the school’s library would soon be getting rid of all of its books and going completely digital.

  I’d lost my appetite because of similar revelations before. For more and more libraries are retreating to a pre-Gutenberg age (i.e., before 1450) by dumpstering their books.

  When I was at Walden Pond searching for owl pellets, I realized I’d left my pocket knife at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. After I returned to the cemetery and retrieved the knife, I approached Thoreau’s grave. “Henry David,” I said, “I think we’re in trouble.”

  There was no response, but in a nearby tree a white-throated sparrow was singing “Poor Sam Peabody, Poor Sam Peabody,” perhaps the saddest of all bird songs.

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  In 1945, Peter and Mina—still considered risky individuals—were relocated to the Nastapoka Islands north of Great Whale River and then, a year later, to the village of Port Harrison on the northeast coast of Hudson Bay.

  At the time RCMP Major McKeand wrote: “Transportation of any kind between Port Harrison and the Belcher Islands … is difficult summer and winter.”

  Meaning: regardless of the season, Peter and Mina would find it almost impossible to make their way back to the Belchers.

  In Port Harrison, the two Belcher exiles prayed at an Anglican church whose bell the local Hudson’s Bay Company factor often rang to summon his employees to a poker game.

  Robert Flaherty filmed Nanook of the North in and around Port Harrison in 1920–21. While he was making the film, he was also making more offspring. I can imagine Peter and Mina meeting these offspring, who would now be adults, and thinking, There are Flahertys everywhere.…

  My Eskimo Friends is the title of the book Flaherty wrote about the Belcher Islands as well as the making of Nanook. Nowhere in this book does he refer to any of his liaisons with Inuit women. If the book had been more accurate, it might have been called My Eskimo Girlfriends.

  In 1947, all of the Qiqiqtarmiut almost became exiles, for the Canadian government had a plan to relocate them to the High Arctic, the better to establish its sovereignty there. The plan was never put into action.

  If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again … especially if the issue is sovereignty. In the early 1950s, Canada more or less forced a group of Port Harrison Inuit to inhabit the High Arctic islands that had been designated earlier for the Qiqiqtarmiut.

  One of the High Arctic exiles was a man named Josephie, born from Flaherty’s union with Nanook’s leading actress Maggie Nujarluktuk (film name: Nyla) three decades earlier.

  Josephie’s designation, in spite of the fact that neither “Josephie” or “Flaherty” would have been hard to pronounce, was E9-701.

  Stuck on Ellesmere Island since 1953, Josephie had a mental breakdown in 1968 and died in 1984. He had petitioned the government repeatedly to please please let me go back home, but his requests were ignored.

  “We were the government’s guinea pigs,” Rynee Flaherty, Josephie’s widow, told a reporter for the Toronto Star in 2009.

  Rynee’s own designation was E9-551.

  Robert Flaherty, often referred to as “The Father of Documentary Film,” was also the father of no one knows how many Inuit in the Hudson Bay area. He died in 1951 without ever meeting a single one of them.

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  Port Harrison, now called Inukjuak, has so little touristic appeal that it doesn’t have any listings, biased or unbiased, on Trip Advisor. Which is a good recommendation in itself.

  Another good recommendation: one of Inukjuak’s residents once fought off three polar bears with only a wooden tent pole.…

  The stick wielder was Johnny Inukpuk, Nanook’s cousin. In the 1970s, the three bears in question tried to enter his tent, and he wielded one of that tent’s poles as if it were a samurai sword, driving them away.

  “Those bears didn’t seem to be hungry,” Johnny told me. “I think they just wanted to meet somebody who thinks Nanook of the North is funny.”

  He meant unintentionally funny. Did I want an example? He mentioned the scene where Nanook bites a phonograph record to determine whether it might be edible … despite the fact that, in real life (as opposed to reel life), his cousin owned a record player, albeit one that had a broken spring, so he had to twirl the records with his fingers.

  Not funny enough? How about the scene where Nanook heroically battles an already dead seal and at last pulls it up from the ice in a state of advanced rigor mortis?

  The future of documentary cinema would probably have been different if Nanook had been made by an ethnographer like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, or Claude Levi-Strauss rather than a self-styled artist like Robert Flaherty.…

  “Mr. Flaherty thought us Huskies (that’s what he called us!) were always fighting against our environment,” Johnny told me, “because that’s what qallunaat do. But we believe in living with our environment, not fighting it.”

  “We also believe in living with sea ice, or with what’s left of it,” Johnny added.

  Sea ice nurtures the ocean floor. When the algae clinging to the bottom of this ice die, they sink down to feed benthic creatures such as clams. With the loss of ice, the clams are getting less to eat, so they’re getting smaller, and the eider ducks that depend on those clams are getting much less nutrition …

  … which is one of the reasons why they’re starting to die off in the Belcher Islands, among other places in the North.

  Walrus also depend on those clams, with the result that their numbers are plummeting, too.

  While I was visiting Johnny, he picked up the long baculum of a walrus and raised it into an upright position, then grinned and said Flaherty’s oosik (penis) would “go like this” at the sight of an Inuit woman.

  Since it’s a bone inside the penis, the baculum of a walrus is stiff all the time, a fact that tourists
find so amusing that a carved oosik souvenir is often the first item they ask for when they meet an Inuit artist.

  Carved oosik

  A recently dead seal was lying on the floor, and now Johnny went back to flensing it with a briskness that belied the fact that he was in his early nineties.

  On the subject of dead things: Johnny owned a television, but he almost never watched it. “I can’t see sitting and looking at an itsivautaq all the time,” he told me.

  Itsivautaq means “a piece of furniture.”

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  Inukjuak’s undeclared but highly visible motto: “My satellite dish is bigger than your satellite dish.”

  If they were living in Inukjuak today, Peter and Mina could now be eating pork rinds dipped in Cheez Whiz—both available at the local Northern Store—while watching Duck Dynasty on satellite television.

  Context: The vast microbial domain called Archaea, which constitutes at least half the life on our planet, lies in deep geological strata directly beneath anyone who watches Duck Dynasty or anything else on a screen.

  Observed Norwegian ecologist Arne Naess, “All organisms are equal: human beings have no greater value than any other creature, for we are just ordinary citizens in the biotic community, with no more rights than amoebas or bacteria.”

  And, he could have added, Archaeans.

  More context: Some of the world’s oldest rocks, called greenstone, rest in the ground twenty-five miles south of Inukjuak. These rocks are 4.28 billion years old, whereas Cyberia is hardly more than thirty years old.

  I asked Johnny whether he remembered Peter Sala. “He spent his time in the church, and I spent mine in the bush, so we didn’t see each other much,” he told me.

  But he did remember that Peter would sometimes sing “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” This English nursery rhyme/song had probably been taught to the Qiqiqtarmiut by Robert Flaherty.

  Peter had gone from being God to being a devout worshipper of God. Maybe he thought such devotion would bring him forgiveness, but it brought him only more devotion.

  “It is not God but grief that has the advantage of ubiquity,” wrote the French-Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran.

  By the late 1970s, Peter had undergone another relocation and was back in Great Whale River. A photograph of him at this time shows an elderly Inuk with a framed painting of Joseph holding the infant Jesus in the background.

  In Great Whale, two Anglican priests, the Rev. Tom Martin and the Rev. John Sperry, visited Peter to administer the eucharist, but they found him asleep. They decided not to wake him up, since—as the Rev. Martin later quipped—“it’s better to let sleeping gods lie.”

  If Peter could not live in the Belchers, at least he could die there. In 1982, Canadian authorities decided that an eighty-two-year-old Inuk could not cause much harm, so they granted him his wish, and he was allowed to return home.

  For Peter, the events of 1941 were a closed book, one that he never opened again, or he would have doubtless become even more overwhelmed by grief than he already was.

  Internet posting on a recent article about the Belcher murders in the Inuit newspaper Nunatsiaq News: “I am the grandchildren of Peter Sala. My dad never says to me about the story.”

  In the years before his death, Peter was still more or less a pariah, even among his own family members. Some of the Qiqiqtarmiut would spit in his direction when they saw him.

  The old woman did not spit at him. “When Peter came back here, I forgave him,” she told me. “He had already suffered enough.”

  “I could have stopped all those killings,” Peter told Taliriktuk shortly before his death in 1988.

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  Murder in the name of religion has become a trademark of the human species. Shortly after I wrote those words, a presumed Islamic terrorist killed forty-nine people in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub.

  Citing 9/11, the Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition, comedian-philosopher George Carlin stated: “Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself.”

  “Hey, let’s surf the Web,” a Cyberian friend said to me recently, and I was tempted to reply: Keep thy religion to thyself.

  “When I’m sitting behind my computer, I feel like I’m in heaven,” this same Cyberian once told me.

  Speaking of heaven: Many Arctic missionaries promised the Inuit that they would meet God and Jesus in person if they succeeded in making it there … and that the seal meat in heaven tasted far better than it did on earth.

  “But we only want to do good for them,” a minister on Baffin Island told me when I complained about the damage his forebears had done to Natives in the North.

  “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life,” wrote Thoreau in Walden.

  There’s another, very different heaven from the one situated somewhere in the sky. A northern Dogrib Indian told a missionary about this realm, as reported by nineteenth-century Arctic explorer Warburton Pike.

  The Dogrib man (Pike wrote) asked the missionary if his heaven had musk oxen, flower-covered hills, winds that make you feel like the wind, lakes blue with the summer sky, and nets full of fat whitefish, adding: “If your heaven doesn’t have these things, Father, please leave me alone with my land.”

  I bet you didn’t leave him alone with his land, Father!

  Despite the claims of certain religious groups, the sky doesn’t seem inclined to send us humans signs, portents, omens, messages, symbols, warnings, prophecies, or directives.

  It’s a pity that Ouyerack didn’t simply gaze up at the meteor shower and regard it with wonder …

  … as did nineteenth-century naturalist Alfred Wallace, whose ship had burned and who was drifting randomly in a leaky lifeboat. He wrote: “During the night, I saw several meteors, and in fact could not be in a better position to observe them than lying on my back in a small boat in the middle of the Atlantic.”

  Nowadays a meteor shower would probably go unnoticed in the Belchers.

  In an email he sent me a year or so ago, Taliriktuk wrote, “Everyone here in Sanikiluaq, they’re all going digital now, and they don’t look at nothing else. Me, too! Haha, I am how you say it screened-in.…”

  The subtext of Taliriktuk’s email: the Belcher Islands, extremely remote only a hundred years ago, had become part of Cyberia and are now no more remote than Paris, London, Moscow, New York, Capetown, Tashkent, Albuquerque, or Peoria, Illinois.

  Of what value is a digital device without a blank spot on the map?

  Taliriktuq ended his email with the Inuktitut word ajurnamaat, which means something like “That’s the way it is” or “Nothing can be done about it.”

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  There remains Mina. Who, like the missionaries, wanted to help.…

  A final google: “Mina + help.” One of my first hits welcomed me to the Apache Mina site. Since Mina wasn’t an Apache, I tried again, and my next hit brought me to the “Mina 2.0 User Guide.”

  I closed my laptop and opened Johnny Inukpuk. When I visited him in Inukjuak, I asked him if he remembered a woman from the Belcher Islands named Mina. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then said: “I heard she liked qallunaat better than her own people.”

  A mail plane flew to Port Harrison four times a year, and each time it landed, Mina would rush over to the runway and greet it, “waiting for the white peoples’ eyes to be turned towards her,” wrote Margery Hinds in an article in the Canadian magazine The Beaver.

  Margery, the Port Harrison schoolteacher, knew Mina reasonably well. “She was a very good housekeeper—clean, punctual, and thorough,” she wrote.

  But perhaps too good a housekeeper?

  Nicknamed “Blitzkrieg Bessie,” Mina would descend on the nurse’s quarters, the local weather station, the RCMP barracks, or any other qallunaat house, and whether or not the occupants wanted their facility cleaned, she would scrub, scrub, scrub away.…

  She lived in a tent in the middle of Port Harr
ison, and her only possessions were items that scrubbed, washed, and cleaned.

  One of the photos of Mina shows her poised with a vacuum cleaner, a big glimmering smile on her face.

  At the time most Inuit wouldn’t have used vacuum cleaners, maybe wouldn’t have even known what they were, so Mina’s use of one was probably an example of her newfound joy in all things qallunaat.

  Mina would ask the qallunaat residents of Port Harrison to take off their clothes not because she felt they should meet their Savior naked, but because she wanted to wash their garments.

  Did she believe that cleanliness is next to godliness, or did she instead think cleanliness would wipe away the type of godliness that she’d displayed several years earlier on the ice of Camsell Island?

  Mina did not clean the church in Port Harrison, probably because she thought it was by definition clean … in spite of the fact that Hudson’s Bay Company employees often played poker inside it.

  The “poker church” was replaced by a new church in 1965. I paid a visit to this new church in 2005 and, to my delight, I heard the whistling of snow buntings in its rafters.

  Opinion: I can’t think of a better congregation for any church than a group of snow buntings.

  Of course, snow buntings prefer the wild to churches. In 1895, explorer Fridtjof Nansen encountered a snow bunting within five degrees of the North Pole. It flitted cheerfully around him for a while, then flew north.…

  Another photograph shows Mina dancing happily with a cocker spaniel puppy named Pingua. “Her best friend,” a former Hudson’s Bay Company man told me, adding: “Maybe her only friend.”

  But Mina was just as happy to dance without a canine partner. At a party in Port Harrison, she continued to dance by herself long after the music stopped, “like an automaton,” reported Margery Hinds.

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  Mina kept on dancing by herself, day after day, month after month, and year after year, until she danced right into the present.…