Day: 76

The Samson Family

Temperature: -41F

Latitude: 64deg 57’ 46’’ N

Longitude: 95deg 42’ 45’’ W

Distance Traveled: 18 Miles

I’m going to continue here with our stories of Baker Lake. When we first got to Baker, the first person we met, out on the ice, was a young man, an Inuit fellow about 30, named Ivan. He had been following our progress on the Internet, and knew we were coming in. And he had been watching that evening with binoculars, and then snowmobiled out, dressed in the usual native caribou clothing. We talked for a while, and he told us that his parents were elders in the community, and we immediately asked him if we could meet his parents, and he immediately said yes.

I found out where he worked, and the next morning looked him up, and we talked for a while and then he invited us over to meet his parents. So Hugh, Jerry and I went over there that evening, and it was a huge get-together. I’m from a large family of 9 kids and 25 grandkids, and it felt just like one of our family get-togethers. There were 40-45 people in this large living room. All the women had dressed in their native dress, and I was really quite impressed that they had done all this for us. And we filmed everything, and had a nice dinner there. Then we sat down with Ivan’s brothers, first of all. His brother Basil did most of the translating for us, and Basil and I became close friends. He is a few years younger than me, but we really hit it off. We came back a number of times to talk with his parents. Their names were Sampson and Elizabeth.

We sat down with Sampson, who is about 80 years old, and Elizabeth, who is a little bit younger. They are both from the Back River country. The Back River is near the Arctic coastline, though it is inland. It is the area, if you’ve ever read the history of Franklin, where he and his men were trying to haul their rowboats to the Back River, and their skeletons and bones were found near the Arctic Ocean. Franklin Lake, just near the coast, is where they found the last remains. All of Sampson and Elizabeth’s relatives - parents, grandparents, great grandparents - came from this region. They flourished in this area during the good times, a place where Franklin and his men did not adapt at all, in the Inuit way, and as a result they perished.

This is a very harsh looking area, I’ve traveled through the Back River country before, and it is difficult to conceive that people actually lived there at one time, and flourished. Sampson and Elizabeth and their relatives lived of course in igloos from October until May, and would otherwise live in tents made from caribou hides. They were nomadic people, for the most part, and they would travel from one area to another depending on the hunting and the fishing and the seasons. I talked with them a lot about their childhood and some of the stories they were told.

They loved moving. Packing up camp was always exciting. The children played outside of course in the wintertime. And this in area that is totally dark in winter, it is above the Arctic Circle. But the kids adapted to the 40-50 below, they would play outside, and they told me all sorts of stories about playing outside under the northern lights. I asked them about stories of the northern lights, and their parents told them that when the northern lights were really bright and flashing across the sky you had to be really quiet and hushed. This is one of the stories you tell little kids just to have them quiet down.

Sampson also said one of the scariest stories he heard when he was young was about someone sneaking up on an igloo and peeking in, and somehow got his eyes poked out. And this really scared the daylights out of Sampson, and as a result you didn’t have kids sneaking around and poking into other people’s igloos.

The grandmothers of both Sampson and Elizabeth were tattooed when they were very young, which was very common then. Tattooing was usually done at around 5-7 years of age, but if the child did not want to be tattooed, they community respected that. They made the tattoos from ashes from sticks and twigs and driftwood, along with needles they made. I saw some pictures of Elizabeth’s mother with tattoos on her face. The face was usually one of the areas tattooed, and the women often had their arms and their upper thighs tattooed.

The babies were always carried in a pouch, like the hood of a jacket. The Inuit still to this day have a pouch in the back of their parka, called a mookie, where the child is placed. The children are always in this, even in Baker Lake, and it is a very practical way of carrying children. The child is kept out of the wind, and rides really well, right next to the mother’s back, so there is plenty of warmth. And diapers were made out of caribou skin, mostly from the neck area of the caribou. When the child soiled the diaper, they would take it out and let it freeze, and then use a special stick to scrape the residue off, or just bang it a few times, and the caribou skin would be just as clean as ever.

I’ll continue tomorrow with more stories of Sampson and Elizabeth, particularly about the northern lights and how they kept track of time.