Day: 78

Heavy sleds, happy memories.

Temperature: Mild

Location: Canadian Barrens

Latitude: 65deg 7' 25

Longitude: 94deg 54' 46

Distance Traveled:Not reported

A really perfect day of travel today, actually it was our first spring-like day. Very mild, and we traveled in light clothing. We got to our cache, which was filled while we were in Baker Lake. Many thanks to the folks in Baker Lake, who are listening to our dispatches. Philip drove out to the cache in his Bombardier about a week ago, and we got to the cache about 4 o’clock this afternoon. It consisted of 15 boxes of dog food and 15 gallons of fuel. This enabled us to travel reasonable light up to this point, and once we loaded everything up the sleds were much heavier.

I want to talk a little bit more about some of the elders I met in Baker Lake, in particular Samson and Elizabeth. I talked about them a couple of nights ago [see Day 76]. Their son Basil translated for us, and we were at their house often, usually with a whole housefull of others as well - kids and other family members. We had a number of really long sessions with them. Both Samson and Elizabeth are from the Back River country, which is just a little south of the Arctic Ocean, which is north of Baker Lake by about 200 miles.

I talked with them a lot about marriage in their culture. All the marriages were arranged, right after the birth of the child. According to all the elders I talked with, it seemed like it was always a good arrangement. When the children were born, they were given names usually of past family members, they were not named after animals as you sometimes have in the native cultures of North America. There was no such thing as divorce, all the couples always stayed together. They had very large families, and the child mortality rate was quite high. Elizabeth had lost a number of children, not just at birth but also later in childhood. It was a rough life, with zero medical attention.

There were also a lot of adoptions, which is still very common in the Inuit community. Children are always in big demand, and are adopted out to couples who cannot conceive. The families were always large, Samson and Elizabeth had something like 12-15 kids that they raised at various times.

I asked a lot of questions about what winter was like, like in the igloo. The essentially lived under the snow from October right through May. And it is totally dark in this region from November to February. They would use fat from caribou and moss, mixed in shallow rocks, as their lighting. Other times they would go out and hunt seal, which was quite a distance away on the coast. They did this not just for the meat, but also the seal fat, which they would also use for light.

I also asked about their concept of time, how did they keep track of time. They used the stars primarily. They could go outside and tell the time by the position of the stars, I think it was the Big Dipper. Samson mentioned six or seven stars they always watched, and I imagine that was the Big Dipper going around. They always had a habit with each rotation, not just in winter but also in summer, of using a piece of string and putting a knot it is, thus keeping track of the days. I asked what it was like as a child, being raised in an igloo in the wintertime. It was a very happy time, they spent a lot of time outside playing, even in 40 below temperature. They both have very good childhood memories, playing under the northern lights.

I asked Samson and Elizabeth when they got their Christian names, and when Basil translated that Samson got a big smile on his face and made the sign of the cross three times, and said 1948, when they were both baptized. When I asked him which name he prefers, his Inuit name or his Christian name, he had a big smile and said, “Both.” They are very proud to be Christian and baptized, and 1948 is when their life changed.

Samson got his first watch in 1942, and he was totally fascinated by it. He would watch it go around and around, and time things like the stars, the movement of the clouds, the sun, the moon, it was really a brand new thing. Also in the early 40s, they got their first plywood. And they used the plywood for the door of the igloo, which was a huge advancement, rather than having a piece of snow.