Rhythm of the Tides: my arctic experience

The Mysterious Arctic

Our first winter in Toronto, when my family moved from southern Italy some sixty years ago, seemed like we had moved to the arctic in comparison to the mild Mediterranean winter. We weren't used to minus 20C weather that felt even colder on windy days. On those particularly cold ones our neighbour would say, "The arctic winds are blowing."

Have you ever thought about how the Inuit could live in the arctic, where those frigid air masses that cause our noses to freeze in Toronto come from? How did they survive those dark, long and cold winters? When it's so cold that everything is frozen, what did they drink and eat; how did they dress; where did they sleep? To most of us, it's still a mystery. How could they possibly live there, when the polar bears hibernate during the winter and not much else stirs?

For a southerner, it's hard to imagine living in the arctic, especially in the winter when the nights appear to be endless and the wind blows hard and cold, and blizzards can cover entire villages under a blanket of snow. But when summer comes and the snow disappears, and the sun shines almost all day long, the arctic cotton and saxifrage and many other alpine flowers stick their lovely heads above the frozen tundra, transforming it from a white blanket into a colourful carpet woven with patterns that only nature is capable of.

One has to experience this land to know why the Inuit have been living here for thousands of years under the harshest conditions that nature can unleash anywhere on the planet.

"Would you like to go to the arctic?"

Well, that's the question I was asked at the beginning of 2017 – a special year for us. Throughout the year we celebrated Canada's sesquicentennial birthday by doing special things, and for my friend Don and I going to the arctic was one of them.

I'm a septuagenarian now, so my memory of what we learned about the arctic in elementary school is not very good. Nevertheless, I searched the depths of my memory to see what could be recalled and found very little: the arctic is the land of the Eskimo; they traveled on sleds pulled by big teams of white huskies; and they lived in igloos. That's it! There was nothing else there.

Everything else I remembered was trivial, such as the European explorers who were looking for the Northwest Passage to India, people like Baffin, Hudson and Frobisher. But that was pretty well it.

Who were the Eskimo?

Where did they come from?

I simply didn't know. School boards in those days relegated them to the fringes of our studies. Rather than teaching us about these hardy, courageous and ingenious people, we were taught about the arctic explorers and their discoveries.

The explorers were clearly more important. They had big ships and lots of guns and ammunition and they knew how to navigate the ocean. And more importantly, they were Europeans, like most Canadians at that time. The Eskimo were different and had no technology; they were primitive people – savages. What could they possibly teach us? And so we learned about famous explorers and their voyages, rather than how these indigenous people survived under the harshest living conditions on the globe.

Of course, the question we didn't ask way back then is, how did the primitive people survive the arctic when Henry Hudson and his men perished there, even though they had sophisticated technology and supposedly superior brainpower?

Now that I think about it, what we learned in school about the arctic dwellers was wrong. Firstly, they were Inuit, not Eskimo. Secondly, they didn't live in igloos, which were temporary shelters for when they traveled on hunting and fishing trips, but in houses called qarmaq or in tents called tupiq, which were made from animal skins such as seal and caribou, and were not unlike those of the indigenous inhabitants of the land below the tree line. Even the name sounds similar to the Indian tipi or tepee. And thirdly, they were smarter than the explorers. They didn't have European technology, but they had their own that allowed them to live where the explorers perished.

Don't you find it bizarre that, even after knowing that North America was not India, we still call our indigenous people Indians? They were here for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived, and even though they were Algonquians, Mohawks, Iroquois and many others, we called them Indians. Only recently have we started using more appropriate collective names such as First Peoples or First Nations people. 

The Inuit made their own clothes and shelters, their own sewing needles, their own sleds and their own hunting and fishing tools. Everything they had and used in their daily lives came from the same animals they ate. Nothing was wasted. They were the true environmentalists! They didn't disturb the environment one iota more than was necessary to survive.

Moreover, they were their own doctors and pharmacists. They knew what ailed them and how to cure it. Yet, the explorers thought they were savages, and our educators thought we shouldn't waste our time learning about them because they had nothing to teach us. How wrong they were!

The Inuit had a unique culture that could have enriched ours if we had taken the time to learn from them. But we were all victims of our government's master plan. While the rest of us were kept in the dark, the government executed its mission to obliterate the Inuit's way of life. Only recently we learned about the culture-destroying residential schools, the abuses Inuit children suffered in them and the heartaches they caused to the entire family. Considering that this was a family-centred culture, the government hit them right where it hurt the most.

So, when Don called me up at the beginning of the year and asked if I wanted to go to Nunavut, I could have easily said, where the hell is that? But I didn't because I knew that in 1999, Nunavut became Canada's newest and largest territory, after separating from the Northwest Territory. Even though this historic event caused our geography books to be revised, the Inuit people and their culture still lie below the radar screen of the average Canadian: where's Nunavut?

In fact, just before leaving for Iqaluit, I had some medical tests done and when I told the technician I was going to Iqaluit, she thought I was going somewhere in Asia!

It has always been a dream to visit the land of the midnight sun and enjoy the fabulous celestial spectacle known as the aurora borealis, but of course, you can't see the midnight sun and the light show at the same time! The spectacular auroras will have to wait.

"Sounds interesting," I said to Don. "We might be able to see some caribou and polar bears, the latter hopefully from a distance, and maybe even a lemming or two."

That phone call started the wheels in motion. "What do I know about Nunavut?" I asked myself. "If I'm going to go there, then I have to learn something about it and the Inuit who enjoy living in the cold." The time had finally come for me to see the arctic and to learn about its people.

The cold is unquestionably the biggest factor that turns people off about going north. The other is the long dark winter days: it's as though a day lasts six months. And the other is the wind; it always blows cold. So, the time to go is during the brief summer period, when it feels like early spring in Toronto. It's a narrow window of opportunity to make the trip of a lifetime.

"Imagine how enjoyable the hiking will be without having to worry about insects," I said to Don. "Surely, there can't be insects in the arctic, can there?" Our dreams were shattered very quickly when we learned that mosquitoes are everywhere, even in the arctic. Damn those explorers! They must have brought them from Europe.

The ancient Inuit lived on tundra where the soil below the surface is permanently frozen – permafrost – and agriculture was not part of their tradition, other than harvesting what grew wild. What did they eat?

When the outside temperature is –40C even drinking water is solid ice, what did they drink?

How did they start a fire when it's so cold? What did they burn when they had no trees and everything around them was covered in snow?

Pondering these questions made me realize the tenacity of these people. They succeeded in overcoming everything that nature could throw at them.

Were they happy?

Why put up with all the hardships of living in the arctic, where for at least nine months of the year everything is covered in snow, and for six months of the year there's no sun, or very little of it? After all, there's an abundance of land just south of the tree line.

One doesn't find the answer to these questions in history books; one has to go up there, as Don and I have done, and find out first hand.