The Long Exile (5 page)

Word spread and soon people from all over the city were flocking to the Capitol Theatre. Path hastily expanded its distribution and, before long,
Nanook
was playing in theatres as far away as Tennessee and Nebraska. By September 1922, three months after its first release, Flaherty's “adventure picture” had crossed the Pond and was playing to sellout audiences at the new Gallery Kinema in London and at the Gaumont Theatre in Paris. From there it went on to Bangkok, Peking and Moscow, picking up ecstatic audiences everywhere.
Nanook
was fast becoming a huge, global hit. Confectionery manufacturers began turning out ice creams with Alakariallak's face printed on the wrappers and, before long, he was unwittingly advertising everything from chocolate bars to cleaning fluid. In Los Angeles, a three-man team of songwriters whipped up a popular song about him, with a chorus which began “Ever-loving Nanook/Though you don't read a book/But oh, how you can love/And thrill me like the twinkling northern lights above…” Thousands of miles away, in Malaysia, Nanook entered the language. Even now
nanuk
in Malayan means a strong man.

And so Alakariallak and Maggie gradually became famous. But it was an odd kind of fame because neither Alakariallak nor Maggie knew anything about it. What little mail reached Inukjuak came once a year on the annual visit of the Hudson Bay Company supply ship and almost all of that was for the post trader. The Inukjuamiut rarely received any news from outside Cape Dufferin, and when they did, it was often so garbled that it made little sense to them. Eventually they heard that
Nanook of the North
had opened in New York City and that it had gone on to England, France, Malaya, Russia, Siam and China, but all these were places they knew nothing about and had a hard time imagining. Even their own country, Canada, seemed so remote to them as to be the stuff of dreams, or, rather, of nightmares, since they knew it principally as the place
in the south to where Inuit people were sometimes transported when they were ill and from where, generally speaking, they never returned.

Four years after the film's first showing, Robert Flaherty's charming, violent depiction of the lives of Alakariallak and Maggie Nujarluktuk in the Barrenlands had grossed US$251,000, five times its initial cost, and Robert Flaherty had become a household name. He was taken out to fancy dinners and asked to speak at meetings and conventions. Louis B. Mayer called, as did Irving Thalberg and an assortment of other producers, agents and managers. Everyone wanted the same thing. Another
Nanook.

Flaherty took his new-found fame in his stride. He was already thirty-eight years old and from a very early age he had marked himself out as having some special place in the world. Now others were simply confirming his opinion. After ten years in the Arctic he felt he had earned his reputation.

Of the legacy he had left there, he knew very little. News of Inuk-juak reached him only rarely. When he left, Maggie Nujarluktuk had been five months pregnant so Robert could not have been in any doubt about her condition, but sex was different up on Cape Duf-ferin and it was custom, sometimes, for a woman to sleep with more than one man. Flaherty may well have told himself that the child was not his. And if it was his, well, then, he may have thought that his wilderness baby was best left up in the Barrenlands.

If he did think of his bright-eyed, smiling Inuit girl from time to time, if his heart occasionally hollowed for her, then he kept the feeling to himself. In any case, he was not given to introspection. The plain fact of the matter was that he already had a wife and daughters back home and they were where his heart ultimately lay.

Alakariallak continued to hunt and Maggie Nujarluktuk took care of her baby. The winter of 1923 was brutal. Sea currents broke the ice into floes and the prevailing westerlies turned to the north, roaring across Hudson Bay and pushing the floes together into monstrous pressure ridges which rose like great walls from the sea.
For a time, hunting seals became impossible and Alakariallak was forced to take his dog team inland in the hope of finding caribou, but after days of sledging he failed to come across a single animal. He turned back west towards the coast and began to make his way home but he and his dog team were caught in a blizzard. They carried on as best they could but at some point the dogs must have grown hungry and exhausted. Although they were now only a few days' travel from the coast, they stumbled and began to die, until there were no longer enough dogs left alive to pull the sled. Alakariallak, too, was spent. As the blizzards blew up again, the great hunter andthough he didn't know itinternational movie star set about making himself a snowhouse for a shelter, then spreading his sleeping skins inside he lay down to die.

A few miles to the southwest of Alakariallak's lonely grave, on the coast at Inukjuak, Maggie Nujarluktuk pulled a little half-breed boy from her
amiut
and set him down on a pile of caribou skins beside her.

I
N
1902 the geologist A. P. Low had wintered at the mouth of the Innuksuak River and named his campsite Port Harrison after the director of the mining company he was working for at the time. To the Inuit the place had always been Inukjuak, which means “many people” or “great people” or, sometimes, “giant.” The elders could remember a time before the whalers came when beluga whales had congregated in the little bays around the river estuary to breed and Inuit had come in from their camps all along the eastern shoreline of Hudson Bay to hunt them. They still spoke of that time with a longing and sometimes with a dread born of the memories, which had never quite left them, of bad seasons which had pushed their families so near starvation they had had no choice but to brick their babies into tiny snowhouses and leave them there to die.

No one knows exactly when the first Inuit arrived on Cape Duf-ferin. The earliest occupation is marked by rock circles and, here and there, by the crumbling remnants of ancient huts. The men and women who built them, people the anthropologists now call the Dorset Culture, arrived from the northwest some two or three thousand years ago, having made the long, bleak trek across the Canadian Barrenlands from Asia by foot and by sled. The Dorset people were nomadic hunters, moving with the herds of caribou which then populated the tundra. They lived in small houses half buried in the shale and kept no dogs and although they spread through the
Arctic their culture was, relatively speaking, short-lived. When the climate began cooling, around 500
B.C.E.
, their populations dwindled. They were followed, or pushed out, no one knows which, by the Thule people, named after the site in northern Greenland where, in the early 1920s, Therkel Mathiassen first unearthed their remains. The Thule arrived from the west around 400
C.E.
, when the Arctic climate became drier. They lived semi-nomadically, settling for short periods near the coast, erecting huts from mud or slabs of sod and living off the great whales they hunted from their
kayaks. A
single forty-ton bowhead whale could feed five families, between twenty-five and fifty individuals, for a year. The Thule were one of the great early human cultures, as wondrous in their way as the Aztecs or the Babylonians, their technologies so beautifully adapted to the terrain that they were able to survive and to prosper in a place no other people had been able to settle. Where they encountered Dorset people, there were sometimes skirmishes, which the Thule, with their superior technologies of tailored skin clothing and bow and arrow, the metal arrowheads fashioned from scavenged meteorites, usually won. In the eastern Arctic, the Thule reached as far north as Ellesmere Island at the 80th parallel and as far south as Labrador at the 50th, a distance of some 1,800 miles. The Inuk-juamiut are their descendants. They were, and remain, the Arctic's most successful colonisers.

At the southern fringes of their world, where the Barrens met the ragged northern tree line of white spruce and alder, the Thule clashed ferociously with Indians, who had taken occupation of the northern boreal forests many thousands of years before, venturing out on to the Barrens only during the short Arctic summers. Eventually, the forest dwellers and the Barrenlanders reached a kind of uneasy truce, the Indians remaining in the forest, the Inuit in the tundra, their mutual hostility confined to a band of stunted conifers where one world met another. On the eastern shoreline of Hudson Bay, the line is drawn at Kuujjuarapik, or Great Whale, at 56° North. South of
there, the world belongs to the Cree. Maggie's ancestors (and Maggie herself) knew them as “head lice.” The disregard was mutual. Everything above Kuujjuarapik was Inuit land. The Inuit became, almost by definition, people of the tundra. Even today, they cannot be understood in any other context. They have lived successfully on the Barrens all these years because the Barrens have lived in them.

The Ungava Peninsula, of which Cape Dufferin and Inukjuak are a part, is a diverse region and, around the time of the birth of Maggie's son, Josephie Flaherty, it had a population of around 1,500 souls, almost entirely Inuit and Indian. In the north, the land is a high relief of acid granite and gneiss, pitted with volcanic rocks, among them the vivid green soapstone the Inuit use for carving. It slopes southwards until, just south of Inukjuak, it stoops and embraces the sea. Everything to the north of Inukjuak as far as Cape Iones is high coast, everything to the south, low, horizontally orientated and blessed with coves and wide beaches. Though Inukjuak lies at approximately the same latitude as, say, Inverness, Scotland, it is, all the same, resolutely Arctic, thanks in part to the uncompromising winter ice which stills the waters of Hudson Bay for eight or nine months of the year. The interior is a plateau of granite overlaid with glacier-scoured limestone which the Inuit call
sekovjak
, a word meaning “resembles landfast sea ice.” What constitutes the Arctic is often disputed, though never by the Inuit, for whom it is simply home. Some non-Inuit commentators define it as the area north of the Arctic Circle at
66°
33', but this merely marks the point where there is midnight sun at summer equinox and no sun at all at winter equinox. Others claim it is most easily characterised by the presence of permafrost, but that, too, is a problematic definition, because at lower latitudes the permafrost is patchy and often incomplete in places which seem to be, in every other way, part of the Arctic region. Surprisingly for a region so often characterised by its coldness, winter temperature is a bad indicator of where the Arctic might begin and end. Nowhere in the Canadian Arctic does the winter
temperature routinely fall below −46°C and, when it does, it rarely stays that way for long, while parts of Siberia regularly experience winter lows of −73°C. The Yukon and other subarctic Canadian regions can sometimes be colder in winter than parts of the country farther north. In the end, low temperature matters less than the persistence of permafrost and ice, or even aridity.

A working definition on which most people agree is to say that the Arctic begins where trees end. The tree line is not really a line at all. It is rather a zone, or an uneven strip, where candelabra spruce gradually give way to ever smaller, simplified specimens until the entire species becomes so stunted and so widely dispersed that it takes on the appearance not of a tree but of a gnarled finger. A little farther north trees of any kind give out altogether. Those trees which do persist in the northernmost reaches of the tree line “zone” are unable to produce seeds, but reproduce by layering, sending a branch to the ground where it roots and grows a clone of the parent tree. In some parts, this strip of dwarfing, scattering and layering is hundreds of miles wide, in others, it narrows to just a mile or two. Nor does it appear at any particular latitude. In the northwest of the continent, near the Mackenzie delta, there are trees as high as 66° North. The tree line drops to lower latitudes as it meanders east, largely as a result of the freezing action of Hudson Bay. The area at the tree line may well be solid permafrost or, as around Kuujjuara-pik, the permafrost may appear in patches, but it will follow a single rule. Above the “line” the temperature on an average luly day will remain below 10°C, the temperature necessary for tree growth. By this reckoning, the Arctic proper begins roughly at the tree line and the subarctic region lies in the northern boreal forests below. Thus the Arctic begins at latitudes as high as 6o° and as low as 55° North. By this reckoning, the Arctic and subarctic regions of Canada together make up 40 per cent of the country. The region is almost mind-bendingly vast.

Barrenland tundra, the region of land above the tree line stretching across the whole of Canada, has many unique characteristics
not found in any other land formation. The Arctic tundra looks the way it does first and foremost because of the action of ancient glaciers, which have for eons ground up rock and dragged it down to the sea. In Ungava, glaciers also carved out a flotilla of basin lakes and channels which now sit stranded on the plateau, giving it, at least from the air, the appearance of an old bath sponge whose pores are baggy with wear. Lakes, rivers, summer run-offs and spills are all extremely common in the Barrenlands, though many of them may either be solid with ice or dry through most of the year. There are more lakes in Arctic and subarctic Canada than in the rest of the world put together.