Anthropology ANTH 200 Please respond to one of the questions below. I do not care about your word count, but please have a fully developed response. I care about what you say (examples and perspectiv

Along the way, I have received great intellectual and moral support from Anthony Barnct, Glenn Bowman, Mike Brcarley, Arnold Cragg, Heather Jarman, Olivia Harris, Patrick de Maré, Felix Padel and Leslie Pinder.

And I thank Juliet Stevenson the immense contribution she has madc to every aspec t of writing this book. This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca to 13 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca This page intentionally left blank to 15 This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca OPENING Imagine the crystal darkness of an Arctic night. A canopy of stars and a glowing arc of aurora, the northern lights. A vast astral flickering and dancing; yet a sense of eternal, unmoving space. Under the moonlight, the surface of the world shines and fades into the distance. The sky is cloudless, open , With clearness that is like a sound, a crackling of frozen silence that many Arct ic travellers claim to be able to hear. And there is a wind, strong enough to blow the snow across the ice. I was travelling by dogteam with Paulussie Inukuluk. He was taking me to hunt seals at their breathing holes, in a favoured area beyond a headland t hat shapes the southeast corner of Bylot Island. We crossed the sound in front of Pond Inlet and followed the coast of Bylot Island, moving on bumpy sea ice. I was half running, half stumbling beside the sledge, while Paulussie ran alongside the dogs, urgi ng them on. I remember a particular moment, close to the shore, when I lost my footing, almost fell, and stopped. The entire surface of the world was flowing along at knee height. There were no features to the earth; the dogteam was half immersed in this s trange current of snow. I stood long enough for the sledge and Paulussie to be no more than a blurred, grey movement at the edge of the light. I was encased in caribou skin clothing — parka, trousers, socks and boots. If I faced away from the wind, I felt no thing on my skin but the mix of my breath with the cold air. The world before me was as a vision, an unbelievable magnificence that filled me with awe, THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca disbelief and, at the edge of my mind, real fear. I began to run, as fast as I could, on the uneven surface of the sea ice, my feet invisible in the layer of blowing sn ow, to catch up with Paulussie and his dogs. This moment is held in my memory like a film clip — vivid, available for recall, but distanced by time and strangeness. There is a sense in me of a mystery. It comes to mind now, as I begin to write again about th e words and people of the North. In 1969 1 spent five months living on the skid row of a Canadian city.

Most of the people I met there had lived, or identified themselves and their ancestors, as members of "Indian" communities. I put quotcs around "Indian" because it is a word Europeans brought to the Americas and used to categorise a huge range of peoples none of whom, of course, had any connections with India. What the people I met had in common was that most of them had grown up in societies that were, o r had been, dependent on hunting and gathering. Two years later, in 197 1 , I first went to the Arctic. I lived and worked in several regions, encountering many people who had lived much of their lives as hunter -gatherers. From then until now, I have conti nued to work with hunter -gatherer communities, as anthropologist, land -claims researcher, filmmaker and, twice, as expert witness in land -rights court cases. For all that I had written about hunter -gatherer societies , I was left with a deep conviction tha t I had yet to write about that which is most important, Something lay there that eluded not just me, but many who have experienced another way of life. We write about some facets of it, some surfaces, that we make our business. But the gold we find is tra nsformed by the reverse alchemy of our journey, from there to here, into lead. Not into nothing, not into worthlessness, but into a substance that has more weight than light, more utility than beauty, is malleable rather than of great value. What is this r eality that gets left behind? It is not simply some kind of otherness. In fact, anthropologists are often skillful at crossing divides between peoples in 4 to Opening THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms their field work, but clumsy when it comes to writing up the "findings." perhaps the desire for the esteem of peers and critics leads to a tendency to make things unduly complicated or scholarly or heroic — depending on the audience we most need to impress. This book draws on all parts of my work; it is rooted in my experience of hunter -gath erer ways of being in and knowing about the world. In many ways it is a personal account, with memories Of people and places that influenced my life. The influence has been on how I see and understand both history and society, so this book is also about id eas. Several important points need to be made at the outset. There are virtually no people in the world today who live purely as hunter -gathcrcrs. Many kinds Of colonial process have transformed peoples' economic lives, even in the remotest areas.

Those wh o sec themselves as hunter -gatherers, and arc scen as such by their neighbours, may also be part -time labourers, do bits of farming, have domestic animals or rely on welfare payments and state pensions. Nonetheless, there are many individuals, families and societies for whom their way of raising children, using land and speaking of their culture is rooted in hunter -gatherer heritage. This is something about which people are often proud, and they do what they can to secure it against the incursions and criti cisms of others, including the insistence by some anthropologists that hunter - gatherers themselves are a kind of myth. My book takes its inspiration from the courage and determination these people have brought to their struggle for survival, as well as fro m their skills and wisdom. It must also be said that I have lived and worked in huntergatherer societies as a man; this places a limitation on what I have experienced. I learned far less about gathering than about hunting. I saw far less in the domestic sp here than I did on the land. In reality, the economic, social and political lives of the peoples I knew were as dependent on women as on men. Despite this imbalance in how I spent my time, I hope to pass on what hunter - gatherers can teach us not only about their own particular human genius but also about human history. I invite readers who are not experts in anthropology, archaeology or linguistics to come on an exploration that leads to wild places, harsh climates and concepts that may seem to lie beyond m ost people's actual and intellectual geography, but are, in reality, central to the history of all societies. My work relies on that of many others. I have found information and inspiration in a wide variety of sources. There are also Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca passages here that ne ed some degree of qualification or explanation. TO avoid burdening the text with too many references and refinements of argument, I have created a set of endnotes.

They are — like much of the knowledge they refer to — a sort of shadow text. It is not easy to w rite about other peoples without falling prey to conceptual and political misconceptions. The stereotypes that capture and tend to diminish tribal peoples in general, and hunter - gatherers in particular, are pervasive and powerful. I attempt to combat some of these stereotypes here. But I would like to establish, as a way of introducing these stories of exploration, three pivotal ideas. First, hunter -gatherers live at what have become the margins of the "developed" world. Development means profitable farming and towns that exist thanks to the farms that feed them. Where farming is judged not to be possible or profitable, hunter -gatherers can sometimes continue to use and occupy their lands. At these margins, two ways Of life meet and sometimes overlap. Yet there is a profound difference between these two ways of life, and an equally profound difference between the peoples who practise them. That difference is at the heart of what I have set out to explore. Second, the difference betwee n hunter -gatherers and farmers, or between hunter -gatherers and all other peoples, has nothing to do with evolution or with supposed levels of civilisation or development. Hunter -gatherers live at the margins of the farmer's world; farmers live at the marg ins of the hunter -gatherer's world. Each way of life is the centre of its own universe. This book places the sophistication of hunter -gatherers alongside t.hc achicvcmcnts of farmers. 6 by desLibris subject to the licensing found at www.deslibris.ca 1 Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé au www.deslibris.ca Opening Hunter -gatherers, like other peoples, use whatever technologies are available to them, i ncluding guns, engines and manufactured food, and they participate. in national economic life insofar as they are able. We are all contemporaries, whatever lands we live on and whatever heritage we rely on to do so. All human beings have been evolving for the same length of time. Third, a crucial difference between hunter -gatherers and farmers is that one society is highly mobile, with a strong tendency to both small - and large -scale nomadism, whereas the other is highly settled, tending to stay firmly in o nc particular area or territory. This difference is established in stereotypes of "nomadic" hunters and "settled" farmers. However, the stereotype has it the wrong way round. It is agricultural societies that tend to be on the move; hunting peoples are far more firmly settled. This fact is evident when we look at these two ways of being in the world over a long time span — when we screen the movie of human history, as it were, rather than relying on a photograph. In one important way, hunters and farme rs are not equals. Agricultural peoples, especially in the world's rich nation -states, are numerous, immensely rich, well armed and domineering.

Huntergatherers are few in number, poor, self -effacing and possessed of little military strength. The farmers h ave it in their power to overwhelm hunter -gatherers, and they continue to do so in the few regions of the world where this domination is not already complete. Yet hunter -gatherers have experience and knowledge that must bc recognised. Their genius is integ ral to human potential, their skills are appropriate to their lands, and their rights are no less because their numbers are small. Political inequality, hostile and racist stereotypes, and conflicts of interest over land have created incomprehension and su spicion of hunter - gatherers. The powerful find it difficult to listen. But listening is what must happen, somehow, on every frontier, for only if the powerful listen will the needs and rights of the vulnerable be respected. 1 Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés I, as narrator, am in many of the episodes I use here to reveal peoples' needs and rights. At the same time, I reach for underlying ideas , linking societies across great distances and over immense span s of time. I therefore take a double risk: of being both too personal and too theoretical. I take this risk because I believe there are lessons to be learned from the hunter -gatherer world that go to the core of who wc arc as human beings. Thcsc arc lesson s about the nature of history, the way in which those who dominate the world have achieved their ends, and the extent to which language is inseparable from the identity and well -being of any people. There may also be lessons and explanations , of a kind, f or some of the malaise and sense of inadequacy that afflict so many of us. The journey from personal memories of the Arctic to these speculations is dependent on many trails. These trails come from places where I have worked as an anthropologist and filmmaker but lead into the meaning of myth, into issues of language. and archaeo logy, into the history of many aspects of the human condition. The trails cross one another often, and are never far apart. When ideas and experience are set side by side, each makes more sense of the other. But the truth is that I begin with memories of t he North, and move from there to what I have learned. The Other Side of Eden explores an original and fundamental frontier, and therefore it is about the history that has shaped us. It is a search for what it has meant, and can mean, to be a human being. T he book's title is intended to evoke somewhere not within the usual divides, somewhere not heaven or hell, not modern or ancient, not civilised or primitive, but a place where all human beings can be more fully themselves. 8 by desLibris subject to the li censing found at www.deslibris.ca ONE: INUKTITUT This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms This page intentionally left blank by desLibris subject to the licensing found at www.deslibris.ca Imagine the darkness of the far north. Not as something in which the adventurous traveller moves in awe. But as a beginning, for those for whom the Arctic is home. Imagine the inside of a ski n tent, or a snowhouse, or a government -regulation low -rental prefab. In this 1 Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e home, an Inuit baby girl wakes in the night. She is held, fed, cuddled — and talked to. What words does she hear? The sounds of whoever is talking the same space. The voice of h er mother, encouraging her to eat.Words that tell the baby, over and over, that she can decide when to feed, when to stop feeding. Words of endorsement. After feeding, the baby girl dozes. With words ofwelcome, she is lifted into the amautik, the pouch sha ped into the hood of her mother's parka, where she can lic curved against her mother's back. After a while, the baby begins to defecate. The mother, sensing the movements , lifts her out and holds her over the ground, murmuring encouragement. Unakuluk, ann atiakulugit. "This sweet little one, have a lovely little shit." The mother wipes her baby's bottom, saying "Kuinijuannu saluitutinnai." "Gorgeous and plump, aren't you nice and clean." The mother's father comes over to watch his granddaughter being wiped. He leans forward, his face close to the baby's, and talks to her softly:

"Nuliakuluga. Nuliagauvit? li, nuliaga una. ""Sweet little wife. Are you my wife ?Yes, this is my wife nhe baby's mother smiles, holding her daughter for her father to adore, and say s, "Anaanangai. h, anaanagauvutit." "Mother? Yes, you're my mother." In these words, the child is given the sounds of love, and can know that she is safe.

Not safe just to feed, to sleep, but safe to do these things as and when she wants. For she is a baby who carries the atiq, the spirit and name, of her late grandmother. She is the adored baby; she is also her mother's mother, her grandfather's wife. Her grandmother is alive again in the baby. This means the baby is doubly and trebly loved.

And she must b e treated with respect. She can no more be denied food or refused the choicest morsels, be told to sleep when she wants to be awake or told to wake when she wants to be asleep, or be chided for being dirty than could her grandmother, were she still alive. But her grandmother is alive — in diis baby who is also someone else. To her grandfather she will be "wife," and with this word, as well as all the pet names he used for his dead wife, he will call out to her. And the baby's mother will address her child as both "daughter" and "mother." THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca Imagine this little girl a year or so later, as she learns to speak. Like children in all societies, after making all possible human sounds, she learns to use the special consonants and vowels of her own language.

Then some si mple words. She begins to name things. Here, in the corner of her home where food is stored, is the body of iqaluk, an arctic char; the flipper of qairulik, a harp seal; the skin of natia, a juvenile ringed seal. Outside are the skins of nanuq, a polar bea r, and several tiriganiat, arctic foxes. But there is no "fish," "seal" or "bear." In the Inuktitut the child learns, there are no such categories. It is the specifics of the natural world that are named. As the child gets older, she will learn to speak of puijit, the "breathers" that are the sea mammals; and of uksuk or tunuk, the fat of sea creatures or land creatures; and of sijjarsiutit, the "shoreline seekers," wading birds.

But she will not hear generic words for mammal, fat or bird. From the beginnin g of her life, the little girl will listen to stories. No one censors or limits that which is told. Her ability to make sense of what she hears is the only constraint. Her grandfather may give the details of the creation of sea mammals, at the earliest tim e of the 1 2 desLibris Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e world in which Inuit now hunt, with all its sexual and bloody details. He may tell a comic story about jealousy and fear. The small child listens for as long as she wishes — she is, after all, also her own grandmother. And she discovers that stories are always a mystery, for they have much that cannot be underst ood, and much that comes from knowledge and experience beyond understanding.

There are words she knows, things she can make sense of; and these are both the border and the small gateways to an immense edifice of facts that she may not understand in any ful l way, but that creates questions, wonder and puzzlement. As she gets older, the child recognises stories. Stories that are told many times. Details vary, but the same characters and principal events recur. This repetition is both the lessening and the ma intaining of mystery. For the stories tell of events that are inexplicable and use words that are incomprehensible. No one would claim to understand every part of these stories, or to have a ready explanation for people, events or processes that are confus ing and strange. These are stories that defy any complete understanding. To tell and to listen to them is to experience the delight and enigma of incomprehension. Mysteries are repeated, not explained. The ultimate wonder about the world remains. As the li ttle girl learns to be with her friends, in the community of children who roam on the tundra, play on the sea ice, share chores in one another's homes, or sit listening to the talk of adults, she hears the ways in which people deal with one another. She Wi ll notice the way in which individual choices are respected. More and more she discovers that she is embedded in a web of relationships that link her, through her atjq, to so many others. Her uncle calls her "mother" and she can call him "son." Some of her playmates are both cousin and nephew or niece. Others are her in -laws because they are her grandfather's siblings, or her sisters and brothers because they have the atiq of one or other of her grandmother's brothers and sisters. THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca 13 The words with which th e girl is addressed place her in a group of families, in a community. They also show that she is an individual — child and adult. She has a large, strong, unquestionable family, but she is expected to make her own judgements, take her own initiatives, be cle ar about her own needs and preferences. She is given a place in a system that is both communal and individualistic. She hears men and women talk about where they have hunted, gathered and travelled, and she begins to learn the names of the land around her. She learns that many animals have to be given water when they are killed to ensure that some of their number will be willing to die again when she and her family need food. She discov ers that animals and humans must be at peace with one another. Inuktit ut has no words for "vermin" or "weed." There is no demar cation between the life of an animal and that of a human — no word for "it." There is no hierarchy of classes of people or, within her community, of rights to use land. Bit by bit, she will come to u nderstand that the world around her is shared both among people themselves and between people and the other creatures that belong there. She hears individuals referred to as the miut of particular places. They are "of" this or that hunting area, or a parti cular camp, or even of a country. She learns that she is a miutaq of both where she now lives and the place her family thinks of as home, an area where they lived when they were young. In these places nunaqarpuq: "she has land." Not land that she can buy a nd sell. Dealing of this kind is only in relation to whites and their trading posts or shops. Money, brought to the North by newcomers, is called kiinaujaq, "resembles a face"; its archetype is coins that showed the faces of monarchs and presidents. Beyond kiinaujaq there is no medium of exchange. Inuit did not have title deeds or contracts, prices or measurements of equivalent value. Inuktitut is without the categories and mathematiCS on which these depend. There are numbers for one to five, and words for ten and twenty, but no arithmetic system beyond these. The ways in which the girl's elders talk of belonging to or living in desLibris Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e In the places they have always known show her that the land all around her is irreducible, indivisible and inalienable. This land to which she belongs is the subject of many kinds of stories. Stories about its creation, or the first appearance of various creatures. Stories about travelling on it and living from it. She listens to her elders describe ancient ti mes and recent times, passing on their knowledge about what this place is, what inner meanings it may hold, how best to make use of its creatures. From stories of creation and the hunt the girl builds an image, or a set of images, of her world. As in all g reat narratives, history, geography, personal adventure and mysteries intertwine. There are misadventures, murder and starvation, to be sure, but spiritual powers and every kind of humour mean that even the worst is part of being in the best possible place , in one'S own land. Inuit nunangat, "the people's expression Inuit use for referring to their part of the world — is an ideal. To change or abandon such a place, according to this world view, would be dangerous and foolish. Thus is it possible to imagine this girl growing into the mind and land of Inuit culture, which is the northernmost example of huntergatherer societies. go to the far north is to visit the most recent frontier between the languages of hunters and the languages of farmers — a place where i t is possible to experience the divide between these two ways of being in the world. It is also the place where those who wish to describe this frontier, and the encounter between hunters and farmers, can experience some of the deepest difficulties with la nguage that of the hunters as well as their own. The first Inuit village I ever saw was Rankin Inlet, about halfway up the west Side Of Hudson Bay. I flew there in 197 1 via Fort Churchill, a supply post and military base at the northeast end of a Manitoba railway line. Churchill lies below the treeline, not yet in the Arctic.

But a few minutes' flying time from the Churchill airport brought THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca o tD/389 0 1 e shock waves of amazement as the plane flew low over the land. It was March, early spring. I looked down on thousands and thousands of frozen lakes divided by endless, low ridges stretching across an infinity of tundra, and the spread of frozen sea with its long, long shoreline of heaved and broken ice. I had read enough about the Arcti c and the Inuit to be able to superimpose some elements of a way of life on the surface of this huge, white place. Hunting areas, fishing lakes, trails, groups of homes. Movements of families from one region to another. Camps at the ice edge, and places to intercept migrating herds of caribou. I knew a good deal about material culture, artifacts and clothing styles. I had learned something of the biology of the region, in particular about animals that northern hunter -gatherers hunted, fished for and trapped . And I knew a little about the plants people used. I had some sense of human links to this immense landscape, and did not see the North as intolerably cold or barren. In my mind's cyc, I could picture societies and economic systems reaching across the ent ire, endless vista. I imagined people there, but in a form that was massively overwhelmed by nature. I arrived in Rankin Inlet to take the Inuktitut language course offered by the Canadian government to teachers and other government employees who wanted to make a long -term commitment to working in the North. The course had been designed, and was run, by Mick Mallon, an expatriate Irishman with a genius for both Inuktitut grammar and teaching techniques.

Mick met the plane at the Rankin Inlet runway, bade me a cheery greeting and took me to the trailer that served as classroom and residence. For the next six weeks, five of us would live and take lessons here, separated by thin walls of insulated aluminium from Rankin Inlet itself. My fellow students were a te acher working in an Inuit community about three hundred miles to the west, an administrator from a settlement in south Hudson Bay, a social worker from Churchill and a young man who, like me, had come to the North Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e for reasons that were a little unclear to him, Despite our varying experience of the Arctic, all of us struggled with the deep unfamiliarity of the language while living a life shaped and provisioned according to the habits and norms of the distant south.

We existed in a cocoon — as, I was later to discover, did almost all white people who went to the North to do government jobs. A cocoon that protected us from discomforts of climate and isolation, but one that cut us off from most of the people for whom this was home. Breakfast, lunch and supper pu nctuated our days. Lessons were divided into precise units. Fifteen minutes to grasp a new piece of grammar; fifteen minutes of practising this and other such bits; fifteen minutes of private study ; fifteen minutes' break; then another new piccc of gramma r. And so on through the day. In the evening Mick often gave a sort Of lecture: "Here, let me tell you in good old English about what you are learning." The pace was relentless as we struggled to understand, learn, remember. Meanwhile, we lived with a para dox, albeit one of which we were never conscious enough to speak: we occupied thc institutions of onc kind of world in order to learn the language of another. The teaching programme, based on interpreters' courses, was designed to force the structures of the language into students' minds. At the centre of the method were drills. The students sat around a table with one or two Inuit participants from Rankin Inlet.

An Inuk teacher or Mick Mallon or both stood at the front. The teacher asked a q uestion, and one of the Inuit in the classroom answered. The question demonstrated some aspect of grammar. I remember one of the first: Q: Nanik nunaqarpit? A: (&nallinirmik nunaqarpunga. Qgnallinirq was the Inuktitut name for Rankin Inlet. The Inuk in the class then asked Mick Mallon: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca o tD/389 0 1 e 17 Q: Nanik nunaqarpit? A: Ottawamik nunaqarpunga. And Mick asked each of us southern students in turn: Q: Nanik nunaqarpit? A: Englandmik nunaqarpunga. Or: Belcher Islandsmik nunaqarpunga. Or: Churchillmik nunaqarpunga. Get it? Well, you do after a while. In the brain, in the strange way that translation is registered without anyone having to tell you, nanik becomes "where," and nunaqarpit becomes "do you live." This is a simple example. More complex items, built from many preceding bits and pieces, were presented in a sort of round -the - table game, which went like this: Teacher, picking up a red brick: "Aupaluktumik tigusigama, ilinnut tun iniarpara. He hands the brick to an Inuk helper. The helper, taking t he red brick: "Aupaluktumik tigusigavit, uvannut tunivait. No translations. Eventually we would grasp the meaning and grammar of the game. It translates as: Teacher: "If I pick up red, I give it to you." Respondent: "If you pick up red, you give it to me," "lhs goes on to: "If he [or she — Inuktitut does not have genders] picks up red [or blue or black], he will give it to him." And: "If he gives him black, then he'll give it to you [or me or someone else, depending]." Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e Inuktitut is more precise than English when it comes to the objects of verbs, making use of a fourth person. It is a language where the sentence "If he is not in a good mood, he will kiss his wife" THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms www.deslibris.ca is without ambiguity: the "his" signifies whether the wife is his own or someone else's. The course moved at a predetermined rate, and concessions were not made (as far as I could tell) to those who were not keeping up. assumption seemed to be that everyone, at som e point, would fall by the wayside; it was a question of how long each of us could keep going. I like grammar and find a deep pleasurc in the way it takes shape and becomes firm, predictable, usable in the brain. Mick's clarity made progress seem straightf orward, even easy. He did not rely on a crude transforming of Inuktitut into the grammatical tables and lists of Latin or German that are part of so many schoolchildren's educational fare. Everything was alive, worked through dialogues and conversation in what educational theory dcfincs as the direct method. But the underlying strategy did have something important in common with the grammar learning I knew from my school days. At the heart of Mick Mallon 's skill in making the language somehow familiar and manageable was an inevitable denial of subtlety and strangeness. An insistence on language as a set of rules, a system applicable by anyone to anything — the essential basis for teaching — obscures the difference between one kind of language and another.

This is not to say that Mick himself was unaware of or unresponsive to Inuktitut poetry and mystery. Rather, his job was to get us students to acquire some Inuktitut basics. And we were, it must be said, a mixed bag of motives and abilities. For some of us, any kind of language learning lay somewhere between terrifying and unfathomable (we were deep in North America); for one student, absorbing Inuktitut appeared to be no more difficult than memorizing the lines of a rather odd play. I have no doubt that Mick Ma llon's method was the only way I could have grooved Inuktitut grammar into my adult brain in a six - week period. By the end of the course I could make myself understood in elementary but grammatical Inuktitut. I am still not sure what the alternative might have been, apart from attempting that which all small children achieve and few adults can bear — a total and random immersion into the flow Of everyday talk, so that the language takes residence as both architect and worker. My guess is that I would never ha ve managed it. But the life we students led had consequences. When we were not engaged in the teaching sessions, we played cards or listened, I Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca remember, to Hockey Night in Canada. I suppose the struggle with the language was, in its way, an encounter with the other world, but the mind -sct and society beyond the aluminium walls and double - glazed windows of the trailer stayed out there, beyond the reach of what we doing. There were odd moments in the classroom when an Inuk helper brought the outside in. One morning, an elderly woman, Tautungnik, arrived with a story; something about the water supply and the taste of' the water that a settlement tanker delivered to people's houses each day. With some difficulty, we were able to piece together what Taut ungnik was saying. For a while, people had been noticing that the water tasted rather strange. Today, they had found the cause: a dead dog had been discovered in the lake, close to the pumping point. Very decomposed. It had been flavouring the water. No wo nder she and others had noticed an odd taste. Retelling this story, making sure that we understood, she burst into fits of laughter. All these years later, I can see Tautungnik, as she stood in front of a large window in the trailer, describing the dead do g; I remember the light gleaming on a bank of snow through the glass behind her. And the laughter — that Inuit laughter, one hand to the face and the other to the midriff, tears running down and gestures of helplessness as the body becomes weak and bends at the middle. The endeavour in the trailer, and in Mick Mallon's home, where he gave his evening talks, was to teach us the skeleton of a language, nothing more. There were no forays into ethnography, no discussion about the changes in the North that were bearing so hard, at that time, on every aspect of Inuit life. We did not think about the ways 20 by desLibris subject to the licensing found at in which Inuktitut itself was being transformed, even displaced, by English. There was chat, of course, with its subtexts of expatriate gossip — an informal and rather subliminal recognition of the colonial setup. About halfway through the course, I moved into the house Of an Inuit family. This was the home of Karlik and Elisapik and their two 1 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms www.deslibris.ca young children, a two -bedroom government prefab with basic modern services that they infused with warmth, generosity and a great sense of peace. Karlik was a wonderful carver. He worked many hours every day shaping soapstone, the soft rock that the Inuit call kullissak or kullissijak, which translates as "material for lamps." As Karlik worked the stone, its dust filled the air around him, and he would cough over and over, deep in his chest — he had had a long struggle with tuberculosis. Yet he was always friendly, helpful, r eady to answer my innumerable questions. Elisapik was shy and loving, They did everything to make me welcome, and in their house I learnt something of the ease of Inuit family life — and something of the confusion of life in a settlement that was designed an d, in those days, run by southern officials. We students at the Inuktitut course did get the occasional day off. One afternoon, two of us decided to go on a short ptarmigan hunt. In early spring, ptarmigan (the grouse of the far north) move in large flocks , white birds that stand out on the land but are invisible against snow. For a few hours we roamed on spring tundra, part snow, part slush, part explosion of grasses and ground squirrels. We came across one large group of ptarmigan, sitting on the side of a low ridge, and managed to shoot three. It was a small outing that made us eager to make a longer, more exciting expedition. So we were delighted when Mick arranged a two -day school camp, a miniature field trip, with all of us spending time on the tundra. We were to go out "onto the land." Nothing too alarming: we would be able to chat to one another in English, and would be sure to take with us an abundance of supplies. 2 1 Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé au www.deslibris.ca This first journey bevond the settlement was startling. One of the men who helped Mick do classroom drills guided us, taking the easiest routes. W e were encased in bulky quilted clothing, well defended by our outsider selves. But even a minimal escape from the trailer and safety of Rankin Inlet was an adventure. And knowing even a few phrases of Inuktitut created a small, perhaps inappropriate, sens e of familiarity. Although I had never ridden a sledge, never been towed into the Barren Lands behind Rankin, never been among that great maze of frozen lakes and rivers, I could give names to things.

As we bumped and lurched, the sharp chill of the Arctic on our faces, I recited Inuktitut words and phrases. In a small way I transformed the awesome, silent and immense "wilderness" into bits of language and culture, things I knew or could imagine getting to know. The ride from Rankin to our campsite took no more than two or three hours, and I had some difficulty learning to stay on the sledge, but I arrived elated. My claim to knowledge was hubris; nemesis soon followed. Once we had pitched our tent and had a first mug of tea, I longed to be alone in the tundra. While everyone else was busy at the campsite, I set off once again to hunt ptarmigan. I had borrowed a .22 rifle from Karlik.

It was a still, overcast day. The faster rivers were breaking through the winter ice. There were small areas of bare tundr a. But the landscape as a whole spread into the distance as a white -andblue patchwork. I walked over a low hill behind our tent and soon found a few ptarmigan. I shot one, picked it up and put it in my parka pocket; walked a little farther, and shot anothe r. Seeing a small group of birds on another ridge, I made my way carefully towards them, skirting some rough ground, and shot a third. Then, for the first time, I looked beyond this preoccupied little hunt to see where I was. The campsite was no longer vis ible. I was surrounded by a landscape that repeated itself in every direction: flat, white, broken by many low ridges. I walked to the highest ridge I could find, no more than a quarter of a mile away, and climbed to the top expecting to 2 2 by desLibris subject to the licensing found at THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms www.deslib ris.ca see our tent. I saw more lakes, more wide expanses of snow -covered Barrens, and more ridges. No sign of a tent. I was lost. I had read books about the North in which explorers stressed the importance. of staying calm. Panic and haste causc thc body to sweat; sweat makes clothing damp; wet clothes fail to insulate. I knew that I could not be more than a mile. from the others. All I had to do was check each direction until I saw the camp. Or I would find my own trac ks, then follow these back to our camp. I set off down the slope of the ridge and began to walk fast, then to jogtrot. This was crazy; I would get tired as well as hot. I was moving too fast, with too much anxiety, to be able to look for tracks. t struggle d to slow down, to have some sense. But panic rose into every part of me; I began to shout, to scream, I dashed in one direction, then another. Everything looked the same — infinite, undifferentiated. I got very hot and became damp with sweat. I must have zi gzagged at random for an hour, hurrying without any reason, before I managed to gain some self -control. I knew that I must climb the ridges. I noticed one that was higher than the others, and I set off towards it. Some part of me was in the grip of a conviction that this was the end. I experienced waves of dismay: I had not even begun this journey, had learned so little. I was ashamed and angry. What conceit had made me think I could set off on my own across this huge and unfamiliar land? On my way to the high ridge, I saw many more birds; they sat motionless, relying on camouflage, allowing me to walk within a few metres of their black, staring eyes. I saw in those ptarmigan eyes a revenge. I said over and over again to myself: Your first walk in the North and you die. HOW absurd this may sound now, and overwrought. Yet in those few hours I struggled against many demons. At length I came to the high point of the ridge. J could now see far into the distance. All around me were the Barrens. Mile upon mil e of frozen lakes and tundra. No sign of a tent, and no clue as to which direction I should choose. I stood atnong some boulders, staring 23 par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés about me in disbelief. Then, as a quick flash in the distance , I saw a snowmobile appear and disappear between two ridges. It was moving along a lake. If I could get to its trail, I would have something to 1 Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé au www.deslibris.ca follow. With luck, it would lead to a camp. I saw that I could get to the lake the snowmobile had passed by fol lowing the ridge I was on, then walking along a small valley. Keeping my eyes fixed on the direction, I set off. I came to the lake, found the snowmobile trail and followed the direction I thought it had been travelling — guessing that it was likely, at the end of a day, to be moving towards home. In fact, it was moving towards our camp, and I soon came to the tent where the others were sitting around eating. I had not been gone long enough for anyone to wonder if I were lost; and I was too ashamed to speak o f what had happened. I handed over the three ptarmigan, then went and lay down.

I was filled with a mixture of relief and shame. I had everything to learn. A week or so after this chastening experience, Karlik took me out on a seal hunt. Then he suggested I come with his family for a long day's fishing through the ice at a lake. Watching, I felt like the youngest of the children. It was a wonderful time of year. Thousands upon thousands of birds were returning to their nesting grounds or arriving as migrant s, waiting to fly farther north. Great flocks of ducks, geese and waders were feeding and resting on shallow water on the tundra. I learned as many of their Inuktitut names as I could, finding great joy when I was able to call out the words. Ivugak, referr ing to both mallards and pintails. Kujjuit, the swans. Nirlik and qanguk, Canada and snow goose. Qgdlulik and tudlik, the black - throated diver and common loon. Savvat, the phalaropes. Isungat, the jaegers. And tatigat, the sandhill cranes that flew in slow loops, filling the air with their deep, rattling cries, Labelling what was around me connected me to where I was. The spring thaw came to the land around Rankin Inlet. Grasses and flowers appeared everywhere on the tundra; the sea ice began to 24 by desLibris subject to the licensing found at THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms change colours. At the end of my course, Karlik and Elisapik told me that they would be going out onto the land for the summer, living in a tent, fishing, berry picking, looking for caribou. Would I like to come with them? The question filled me with unease. Here was an opportunity to spend time in the Inuit world. I would be moving far outside the confines and cate gories of the language school, far beyond the adventure of day -trips to fish or look for seals or hunt for ptarmigan. Karlik could not even say how long we would be gone — a few weeks, maybe more But I was not ready to take the plunge into so many unknowns. I had a plan to go to Ottawa, spend a bit of time there, then travel to Pond Inlet in the High Arctic. I needed these plans. The Inuktitut course had made it possible for an Inuit family to invite me out onto the tundra for the summer and for me to be abl e to say "no, thank you" in more or less coherent Inuktitut. But the school had not prepared me for living with the Inuit, in their world. I was not ready to live without my language. 3 Back in Ottawa, I learned that my contract with the Northern Science R esearch Group, a division of the Canadian Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, could be converted into a full -time position. So I became a civil servant. It was a position with unusual terms of reference: I was to continue learning Inuktitut and livi ng in the North long enough to be able to give informed advice to Canadian policy makers. As planned, I would go to Pond Inlet, an Inuit community at the northern tip of Baffin Island. I flew from Montreal to Frobisher Bay, on south Baffin Island, and from there to Resolute Bay, a government and military base on Strathcona Island, five hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. In those days there were no scheduled flights to the settlements of the far north; passengers hung around Resolute waiting for a rid e with one of the charter companies that carried in government officials, mail and supplies. For two days I was stuck at Resolute, confined in buildings that were part hotel, part military barracks, in a landscape that was bleak and bitter. Then I hitched a ride in an Atlas Aviation Twin Otter taking the post to Pond. Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca I was the only passenger, The sky was clear, and I sat by a window at the front of the plane, staring with a mixture of fear and incredulity at immense fjords, ranges of mountains and the edge s of the sea ice. We covered about 350 air miles, a tiny fraction of the region, but a step into the most awesome of landscapes. It was the. middle. of June; spring in the High Arctic was at its most magnificent, most intoxicating. When I landed at Pond I had no school to go to, no work plan that was anyone else's responsibility, nowhere to turn for the security of southern schedules. I had arrived only in order to be there. pond Inlet, like all of Canada's Arctic communities, is a "scttlcment," a pla ce where "native people" are expected to settle — that is, to come in from their hunting "camps" and begin to receive modern housing and services. Settlements were designed by government to offer something between aboriginal simplicity and modern complexity, providing what planners believed would be a halfway stage along the development road. By the early 1970s almost all Inuit in Canada lived in such settlements, with rows of prefabricated lowrental housing, basic amenities, a day school and a nursing statio n. Each settlement had a "settlement manager," the governmentappointed person who acted as general overseer of life.

The Inuktitut name for this role was revealing: inulirijik, the onc who fixes up the Inuit. The Pond Inlet settlement manager was John Scullion, a friendly man who came to the airstrip to meet my plane.

He showed me to the Pond Inlet Transient Centre, something between a hotel and a bunkhouse. It was one of two identical buildings that sat side by side on the edge of a steep slope leading down to the shore. The buildings had pointed roofs, from which they got their Inuktitut name, nuvulik, a peak. They had been designed for children brought in from hunting camps to go to the new school. The transient centre 26 by desLibris subject to the licensing found at www.deslibris.ca had been a dormitory; its neighbour had been a mixture of dormitory and schoolroom. Now that all of their parents had begun 1 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms to live more or less full -time in Pond, the children went to day school. The building I was in had become the place where migrant workers (important far house construction) and other visitors were given a place to sleep, shower and cook for themselves. The other of the two buildings became the "adult education centre," where the settlement manager a rranged for cooking, sewing and English language lessons. The nuvulik sitting area looked out, through a large plate -glass window, onto the sound between Baffn Island and Bylot Island.

Daylight lasted twenty -four hours, and most Of the time the sun shone o n a twelve -mile width of sea ice, meltwater and tidal cracks. Beyond this rose the immense mountains of Bylot, with snowcapped peaks and many glaciers. On the shoreline below the buildings and out onto the edge of the. sea ice spread a muddlc of skidoos, s ledges, fuel drums, boxes of camping gear and small sheds where families could store equipment and seal carcasses. At that time thcrc were only two or three dogteams left in Pond Inlet, but the animals were tied up in lines on the shore; periodic howls rem inded everyone of their dismal conditions. For the first few days I spent much of my time in the transient centre, staring out at the panorama, watching people come and go on the ice, listening to those dogs. I was holed up. A sense of being incompetent an d foreign created a rather absurd but paralysing shyness. I had no defined role, nothing with which to disguise my awkwardness. When I did venture out, the few southerners I met were friendly and helpful; traditions of frontier or northern hospitality were strong. 'Ibere were several teachers, two missionaries, two nurses and the manager of the Hudson's Bay Company store, as well as the settlement manager and his wife. I began to settle into the compromise between being there and avoiding being there that c omes from accepting the generosity of these homes. Good southern food and easy conversation were on offer; and several of the community's 27 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca white men and women had much to say about their experiences of the North, in some cases reaching back decades and across many Arctic communities. Here was an alterna tive to my nervous, incompetent attempts to get to know the Inuit of that time and place. Yet I knew I needed to be more at a loss, not less. 4 One of the few Pond Inlet men who spoke confident English was Elijah Irkloo. Elijah agreed to work for a part of each day as my social guide and interpreter, making sure that I got to know as many people as possible and heard as much oral history as I could. He took me into many homes, where we sat and listened to whatever people wanted to tell us. I heard again and again about the extent to which life on the land had given way to life in the settlement. Policemen had come in the 1930s, then missionaries and Hudson's Bay Company traders, white men with many powers and purposes. Somc were fun, others were frightening. Under their supervision, the "old days" changed. A mix began to take shape, with life on the land yielding to various forms of modern poverty. Inuit women became servants in the white officials' homes; men had opportunities for occasional wage labour.

Thi s was work that yielded small amounts of money or credit at the store. It also meant a shift towards store -bought food and clothes, and some degree of dependence on newcomers who were anything but generous. Inuit families began to spend far more time in se ttlements, making do in shacks built with whatever materials came to hand, from packing cases to sheets of plywood. The balance of this mix shifted and changed, as it has continued to do. The effect is a blend of wage labour and hunter -gatherer resources. I saw the broken -down look of so many of the houses and the paucity of everyday goods and services. Many people told me about the confinement and inactivity that came with living in a settlement.

They could not hunt or fish or trap without making a journey that was almost from town to country, from one way of life to another. In 28 desLibris house after house I saw the results Of modern northern planning — low -cost housing, economies of administrative scale, reliance THE OTHER SIDE OF This material is copyright by the origi nal publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca upon wage employment (and therefore the creation of unemployment), schooling, illnesses that come with settlement life, bottle -feeding of babies, a nursing station to meet the medical problems — and from person after person I heard quiet, understated dismay. At the same time, there w ere also signs of a life that was independent of, or at least not obscured by, southern plans and administration or the everyday customs of southerners. No one expected Elijah and me to make an appointment, and no visit ended before it had run its course: since there was no right time for beginning, there was no time by which we could expect to finish.

We would sit at kitchen tables as life in the houses went on around us. Children came and went, toddlers often clambering onto mothers' and fathers' shoulder s as their parents talked. These children were never chided but, instead, were helped on whatever journey they had chosen, from back to shoulder or down again.

This gentle and automatic support for the child left parents free to talk at great length and wi th intense concentration. The conversations were in Inuktitut. Every adult spoke and lived in the language. Yet English was the language of the school, and many adults sald how much they wanted to be able to speak and understand it. Their desire was animat ed by a belief that jobs in the future would go to those who spoke English, and by a sense that, Without English, social or political effectiveness was limited. At the same time, many parents complained that their children spoke too much English at home an d were not gaining a rich enough fluency in their own language. People were proud of their heritage and they delighted in their language; yet they had been persuaded, by both intangible historical forces and the activities of southerners, of the need for C hristianity, Canadian law, compulsory schooling, southern -style political organisation and even Canadian cooking — all of which were tied to the power of English. 29 FDFN Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca The tension between an Inuit sense of culture and the colonial enterprise was demonstra ted by a curious argument between Pond Inlet parents and the southern educational project. The long season of continual daylight had begun; and as the sun warms the land and the Arctic bursts forth in full brilliance, the Inuit day shifts towards night.

pe ople stay up late, often until morning, using the midnight in preference to the midday sun. Children play games until breakfast time, then go home to bed. School, which had not changed its timetable from day to night, was something of a problem. For the pa st month, children had been falling asleep in the classroom; others were failing to get to school at all. It happened each spring. Teachers asked to meet with a group of parents to explain the nature of the problem. Something must be done. Ah yes, replied the parents, they quite agreed. The children must go to bed at night and be able to go to school, and stay awake there, in the morning. It was very important that they not miss this chance for an education; above all, they needed to learn English. So, what was to be done? Well, said the parents, it was obvious enough: the children must go to bed. You parents, said the teachers, will you make sure the children go to bed? No, no, said the parents, you teachers must do that. You are the ones who run the sc hool. And how can we do that? You must come round to our houses, said the parents, and make sure our children go to bed. The teachers were dismayed and bewildered. They could not see themselves going from house to house in the middle of the night, even under the blaze of the midnight sun, persuading children to stop playing their baseball games, to come off the ice, to put down their bicycles and go home to bed. This was absurd. It all amounted, in the teachers' minds, to a failure of parenting. So nothi ng was done. desLibris In THE OTHER SIDE OF This material is copyright by the origi nal publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca The Inuit way is without authoritarianism; parents are inclined to trust children to know what they need. Individuals have to be left to make decisions for themselves; and children are individuals just as adults are, since they carry the names — for which we may say souls — -of their late and much admired relatives. This belief is fundamental to the Inuit way of being in the world, to their culture, and to hunter -gatherer cultures more generally. School might be important, but its di sciplines, its theories of need, had to make concessions to Inuit customs. The needs that school was supposed to meet might be a matter of agreement, with Inuit and teachers of one mind about the importance of southern kinds of education; but the impositio n of the routines and authority of school was still alien. To suggest that parents should impose authority, should defy the respected elder who lives in the core ofthe child, was not acceptable to the parents in Pond Inlet. If there was a clash of schedule s, let the Qallunaat, the southerners, in whom these clashes originated and in whose role was their orchestration, do the job. Qallunaat had designed, built and even furnished Inuit homes, so why should they not go there and organise bedtime too? The tenacity with which Inuit held on to the core Of their culture was both startling and delicious. It offset the troubling look of the place, so much a southern plan for a settlement, so little an Inuit village in design. It showed what it means for a people to insist upon that which defines them. Refusing to force bedtime on their children in an Arctic June sustained a heartland of Inuit life, 5 I longed to get out of Pond, onto the land, into the places where people hunted, trapped, fished and said that the y lived most fully as themselves. Through the windows of the transient centre, I watched skidoos setting off onto the ice, towing families and supplies out into the distance, and others returning to shore, loaded with the bodies of seals. Occasionally I sa w a dogteam, harnessed in a fan with a figure THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN 32 This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca o tD/ 406 0 1 e running alongside waving an immense whip. I became convinced that I must make a journey out there, and that it should be by dogteam. With the help of one of the settlement's schoolteachers, I met Inugu, a man of seventy -five who still h unted. He was going fishing with one of his children; they would be travelling by dogteam. He sent a message that he would be happy to take mc along. We should meet in the Hudson's Bay Company store, he said, where we could buy whatever we, needed for the trip. I found Inugu in one of the aisles of the store, surrounded by shelves loaded with tinned meat and fruit and many kinds of biscuit.

He was old, but every part Of him seemed strong and clear. HC stood upright and walked with definite movements. Although he hesitated before he spoke, he was decisive and clear in all hc said. There was no doubt about what took place in the store, among all those supplies.

I would point to something I thought we might want, and he would pause for a moment , consider, and say no. No, we did not need bread, or butter, or jam, or packaged meat, or coffee, or beans. Nor did we need fishing line or lures. Nor would we take tinned fruit. He conveyed to me that these things were not part of his way of being on the land. He led me to the pilot biscuits — packets of cheap, hard, round, desiccated, more or less indestructible things. This was the carbohydrate staple of Inuit hunting trips. We bought several packets.

Inugu did agree that we should take a bag of sugar and a packet of tea bags. He also suggested that I buy some naphtha, the fuel that Coleman stoves depend on. And a box of .303 rifle ammunition. As we left the store, carrying our small load of supplies, I asked Inugu how long we would be away. He said he did not know. Maybe one week, maybe more. I asked if it might be a good idea to bring a fishing rod, since I liked spinning for trout and char. He looked confused. perhaps he did not understand the word I used for rod. I tried to explain what I meant. He made the movement of plunging a harpoon and said kakivak, a word I knew to mean fish spear. I Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca deduced from all this that Inugu wanted our trip to be, as it were, traditional. I was thrilled. After he left, I slipped back into the store and bought a supply of c hocolate bars and a few spinners. I decided that I would hide them, along with my spinning rod and reel, in my sleeping bag. We set off late the next day. Inugu brought his youngest son, Willie, aged fourteen. The two of them loaded the sledge while I stoo d and watched. The box of supplies included no more than the few things we had bought at the store. But Inugu had brought a tent, tent posts, a rifle in a sealskin gun cover, and his kakivak. The three of us and fourteen dogs set out across the sea ice. It took almost three days to reach the fishing place. Amazing, beautiful, alarming days — or nights. The sun circled above us, with no cloud in the sky for all the time Of our journey. A drop in temperature separated day from night. By moving when it was colde st, Inugu explained, we would suffer least from thawing ice and excessive meltwater. So we travelled through the Arctic night and camped in the daytime. I was wonderfully disoriented. We had no watch, and I did not yet know which angle of the sun meant wha t time of day. For me, time was seamless. We would arrive at a camping site, pitch the tent, find fresh water, roam about on the land nearby, go to sleep, wake up, set off again. My ignorance allowed me to be lost, at last, in just the right way. An hour o r two after leaving Pond, we had come across some seals basking on the ice. Inugu stopped the sledge and set off to stalk them.

With immense care he made his way towards the animals. When they had their heads down, he moved with quick little steps, crouchi ng low; when one or another of the seals raised its head to peer and listen for danger, he stopped moving and crouched even lower; once the seals appeared to doze off, Inugu stepped forward again. Taking all the time he needed to move unnoticed, he came to within range of the seals. He squatted, raised his rifle, took aim, fired, and missed. With a quick lurch, the seals were gone from the ice. Inugu stood up, walked to the breathing hole of the seal he had hoped to kill, looked at the surrounding ice, and made his way back to us, This was repeated two THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN 34 This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca o tD/ 406 0 1 e 33 or three times before we made our first camp. After the second miss, Inugu told me that the sights of his gun were faulty. We had our pilot biscuits to eat and my few bars of chocolate. We also had some gla ucous gulls' eggs, which Willie had collected from a small cliff face not far from our campsite. We ate them boiled. They were delicious — as, indeed, were the pilot biscuits and sweet tea that went With them. By putting the eggs in a pan Of cold water, I ha d sorted out the ones that were fresh -laid, marking them with a pencilled cross. (Fresh -laid eggs sink and lie on their sides at the bottom of the pan, whereas those with a developing embryo half -float, and those about to hatch float high up on the surface .) Inugu and Willie enjoyed the mixture of unhatched chick and egg white. Thus we travelled for two more days, stopping for Inugu or Willie to stalk seals, all of which they missed, and living off pilot biscuits, sugary tea, bits of chocolate and a few gu lls' eggs. The dogs had no food at all. We crossed a wide sound to reach the entry to long fiords that cut deep into the broken shores of Baffin Island. We headed down one of these fjords, sometimes in its shade, with cliffs towering above us, but often un der full sun. We circumnavigated cracks in the ice that were too wide for the sledge. Hour upon hour we sat on the sledge or jogged alongside. Inugu taught me vocabulary, pointed out landmarks, but for the most part we moved in a quiet and perfect peace. A t one place, Inugu took me with him for a walk up a small hillside that sloped to the shore of the fjord. As we came to its peak, J noticed many bones scattered there. "Tuttu," I said. "Caribou." "Aakka, Inuit," said Inugu."No, people." He was showing me a place where some of his relatives and ancestors had been buried under cairns of rock. Later he pointed out Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca a grave that was only partially scattered: a pile of rocks among which it was possible to see the long bones and skull of a human body. On the third night of our journey, Inugu chose to pitch our tent at the mouth of a tiny stream that flowed down the steep side of the Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e fjord. The valley was narrow and the campsite an area of tussocky grass no larger than a tennis court. The slopes were steep and thick with boulders and rock. After our usual meal of tea and bi scuits, I climbed the slope behind and reached the peak of a ridge. In front of me, in an immense panorama of peaks and valleys, range upon range, the mountains of north Baffin Island stretched to a far horizon. Behind me was the long fjord down which we h ad come. We had seen no other travellers or hunters since we set off and expected no one else to be at the fishing place. In one sense, this whole landscape was "empty," a "wilderness." But all of it had been given a set of complete human shapes — names and purposcs and meanings by Inuktitut. Inugu and Willie knew this land. They could navigate, select routes that took them over hundreds of square miles of sea ice.

As we travelled, they named each bluff and headland, identified bays and fjords. They gave the names of every river, and told me the names of many inland lakes. Again and again Inugu took me to places where we could see far into the distance, and there he would point and name and take delight. To move around with safety, to hunt uith success, to ma ke the land's resources available and nourishing, the hunter works with a mass of details and the names of many, many places. Nothing could be better, for there could be no alternative: to know this particular territory is to prosper; neither the land nor the knowledge of the land can bc replaced. A territory is madc perfect by knowledge. Inugu was revealing his profound conviction that this was his only imaginable home. 6 At last we arrived at Iqaluit, the river where Inugu wanted to fish.

Iqaluit, the plu ral of iqaluq, means arctic char, the species of fish that spends part of each year in lakes, migrating to the sea to feed when the ice breaks in the spring. I was to discover that great fishing places are often named for the species caught there. We had arrived at the mouth of the Iqaluit River, where it widened in a small estuary at the end of a long fjord. Inugu was worried, he Inuktitut 37 Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca said, by the lack of snow on the land. Everywhere around the estuary the tundra was bare, and the river itself ran more or less free of ice, spreading out into an open bay. At first I did not understand the problem. Then I realized: to use a kakivak, the fisherman had to be able to stand on ice, looking down into clear water. If the ice was gone, then there were shelving ba nks with either no ice at all, or ice that was too broken or rotten to stand on. Inugu chose a campsite near the shore. He took his kakivak and set off to look for a place where it might be possible to spear fish. I took my fishing rod, reel and bag of sp inners from inside my sleeping bag. Willie and I walked to the last stretch of river before it widened into its estuary and joined the fjord. In the distance, far from our campsite, Inugu had pointed out that the river was full of fish we could see swirls and small splashes on the surface. As soon as we reached the river, I rigged up the rod and cast into the water. A char grabbed the lure. We landed it and I cast again. Another char was hooked. And another. Every cast produced a fish, After a while, I pull ed some line off the spool and gave the rod and reel toWillie. I think it was the first time he had used one, and he was keen to have a go. I took my line, knotted a lure to it, waded knee -deep into the river and flung the line out into the current, using myself as rod and reel. Every few times I cast, I pulled out a char. They varied in size from two to seven or eight pounds. Inugu came back from the estuary ice. The ice nearby was too broken, he said; the fish could not be lured to the spear. He would hav e to move farther around the shore, out into the estuary where the ice was solid, to find a place where the kakivak method would work.

But Willie and I, with our rod and line, or line without rod, could fish here, Inugu laughed at this newfangled way of ca tching arctic char, but he welcomed its success. After all, we could now avoid moving camp. Squatting on the ground, Jnugu killed and cleaned the fish as we caught them, sorting them into those we could feed to the hungry dogs and those we would load onto the sledge and take back to Pond. THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN 38 This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca o tD/ 406 0 1 e We spent two days fishing, cleaning fish, and taking time to roam on the tundra. Inugu taught me the names of the birds there — greater snow geese, semipalmated plovers, northern phalaropes and two species of jaeger that di ve -bombed us for getting too close to their eggs or chicks. Willie and I spent hours searching for nests. As we walked, he showed me the saxifrages, tundra flowers, grasses and lichens that burst into life and colour once the snow has gone. The abundance O f life in the High Arctic is the region's deepest surprise of all. To be able to speak of it, even a little, in Inuktitut gave me in some essential way both the glory and the detail of the land. Three days after arriving at the river, Inugu decided we had enough fish and should begin the journey back to Pond Inlet. He laid the fish along the cross -slats of the sledge; there were enough to cover its full length. Then he arranged our bedding and gear on top. We traveled back with a sledge that was piled high and heavy with char. The journey was slow, the dogs struggling to pull the sledge's weight through ice that was more brittle, fragmented and watery than ever.

Whenever we stopped, we ate boiled fish. A year or two later, when Inugu and I were reminiscing a bout the trip to Iqaluit, he laughed at the time and effort he and Willie had taken to cook our chunks of char. They had feared I would be shocked if they did otherwise: they knew that many Qallunaat were disgusted by raw fish. Had I not been there, or had they known me better, they would have boiled the char only when we camped. Maybe not even then. We were all engaged, in our own ways, with the cultural divide between us. Once we got back to Pond, my life there changed. Simon Anaviapik, a man of sixty who had always wanted to teach Inuktitut to a Inuktitut 39 Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca Qallunaak, offered to give me lessons. He arranged for m e to live in the house of one of his nieces, Inuja, along with her husband, Inuk, her two sons and her daughter -in -law. Most of my Inuktitut lessons took place in Anaviapik's house, which was two or three doors up the street from Inuk and Inuja's and, like theirs, was built according to government -regulation northern housing design. Prefab sections made a largish living room/ kitchen and three small bedrooms. There was a bathroom, with toilet and bath but no running water. Cooking and heating were done with the help of an oil -fired stove and space heater that kept the inside temperature at about 80 0 Fahrenheit. In all but the warmest weather, meat was stored either on the roof or in an unheated porch, along with skin clothing and hunting gear. Pieces Of cari bou, seal and fish ready to be eaten were laid on a piece of cardboard or plywood to the side of the stove, where the family and guests could squat and eat when they felt like it. In many ways, these houses were as much campsites as modern homes. The Inuit made them their own with an ease of manner and a quiet indifference to the images of everyday life firmly fixed in the minds of those who had designed them. Anaviapik's household included his wife, [Ilajuk, their daughter Rebecca and their son Jake. There were visits for much of every day from his daughter Daniki, her children, and many other relatives. Anaviapik's close companion and cousin Arnatsiak also spent part of each day there. The younger children spoke good English, and sometimes preferred t o use it with their friends, thereby causing some distress to their parents and elders. But the language of the home was Inuktitut. Nobody in the family over the age of twenty spoke anything else. Anaviapik was eager to teach me. As we sat for the first ti me at his kitchen table, he told me he had always wanted to teach the language to a southerner. But he wanted to do it well. Was I willing to do it well? I did not understand. Of course I hoped to be able to speak as 38 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca desLibris clearly as possible, and to understand anything people said to me. I asked if he meant something other than this. Yes, said Anaviapik, he meant learning Inummarittitut, the "real" Inuktitut. I told him I would be very happy to try to learn Inummarittitut, though I wa s not sure what it was. He explained to me: White people come to the North. They say they like it, and seem to have a good time. Some of them do good work, and the Inuit get to like them. Some are not so good. But just about all of them, after a while, go south again. Whatever they say, they do not come to the Arctic to live. He was very happy to teach Inuktitut to a southerner. But it must be the real Inuktitut, not the bits and pieces that traders or policemen learn. It must be the Inuktitut of the older people. It was important that their Inuktitut be learned. Many young people were not interested in learning. So that was what he would teach. But to do that would take a lot of time. We would have to spend a lot of time together. Every day. I would have to come to him every day, and maybe we would go out hunting too. We would get to know each other well. More than that: we would get to like one another. Then the time would come when I went back to the south. The way all southerners do. That would be very sa d. So we must be able to write to one another. In order to write, I would also have to learn the Inuit way of writing. Thus Anaviapik set out the conditions for his becoming my teacher. In the coming months, he stuck by them with great determination. I did go to his house every day, usually for several hours. He would have the lessons prepared in advance. Exercises, questions, and small outings onto the tundra or along the shoreline.

'There was much laughter, often on the part of those members of the family who sat and listened or joined in. Learning the writing system was not difficult. It used a set of syllabic symbols that missionaries had developed in the nineteenth century to create a written form of a northern Cree language. Inuit, whose territories in southern Hudson Bay bordered those of the Cree, picked up syllabic writing and used it for Inuktitut. It worked well and soon spread throughout the eastern Arctic. By the early part of the twentieth century, it had become part of the region's traditional culture, something elders were proud of and used often. Inuktitut 41 Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca Mick Mallon taught all his students by syllabic symbols. They are quite easy to write. Each represents one syllable: A (pi), < (pa), > (pu); r(mi), L (ma), J (mu); n (ti), C (ta), (tu), and so on. The se are only approximations of some sounds, and they fail to make some important distinctions. As you write, you do not have to be surc whether a consonant is single or double, or whether a sound is made in the throat or at the, back of the mouth. But when it comes to reading, critical meanings come from context rather than the actual symbols on the page. Soon I could write letters to Anaviapik; it was quite some timc before I could read most of what he wrote to me. usually our lessons began with a very simple written question that introduced new words and new ways of using them. Anaviapik, like many Inuit I knew over extended periods of time, worked within the vocabulary and language skills that he knew I could manage. Even after a year of working togeth er, he would notice if he used a word or some piece of grammar that was new to me. This was an aspect of Inuit thoughtfulness and hospitality; it also showed a remarkable awareness of, and extensive memory for, language use, which may well be a feature of a primarily oral culture. So our lessons were very precise, at least as they began. We focussed on language, but I was also instructed when to be quiet and how to wait for others to ask questions. Anaviapik showed me how to come into my house when returnin g from a hunt. How to ask for tea and some food but to say nothing of success or failure, waiting for those in the house to ask me about what had happened. How to answer these questions with the right kind of modesty, with precision, leaving it to others t o ask more questions before I gave more detail. Sometime in July, when the ice had gone and Pond looked out on a wide stretch of open water, Anaviapik began a lesson with the writ - 40 desLibris THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca ten question "Do you know how to hunt seals from the shorelin e?" This exercise led, first, to my learning how to say that, since it was summer and I had no boat, I was going to hunt seals from the land.

Much carc was taken to ensure that I did not claim I was going to be successful (I had to keep an infix in place t hat showed I would be making an attempt) and to ensure that I convcycd a suitable degree of uncertainty (I had to use an that indicated shoreline seal hunting was probably, but not dcfinitely, what I was going to be doing). Then Anaviapik said we must now go and look for seals. He gave me a gun from the porch and a few shells, and we walked down from his house to the edge of the sea, then along the shore to a place where he knew seals often fed close by. As we sat and waited (unsuccessfully) for a scal to s urfacc within range, I had lessons in how to sit and look out at the water, as well as in how to name different sea mammals. When we got back to Anaviapik's house, there was a concluding session in which I was told how to talk about the hunting I had just done. This daily reporting of events included a somewhat alarming learning game : Anaviapik liked to send me to visit someone who could be relied upon to ask me what I had been doing. Since I had been instructed in what might be called the classical forms, my mixture of very proper manners and what may well have been archaic vocabulary caused great hilarity. I suspect I was taught to behave in imitation of the most correct elder and to use words that matched, rather as a butler might be schooled to ask an e mployer ifhe would care to imbibe a glass of a particularly delectable Sauterne, or a pompous schoolteacher tell a pupil that his homework had, atypically, been without its habitual blunders. These comparisons rely on social inequalities and may therefore be misleading. Even though Inuktitut is a language that makes little, if any, use of terms to show status, it docs have levels of sophistication, including especially elegant and polite ways of saying things. My use of these must often have seemed ludicrou s. My attempts to describe events caused much laughter. So did my failures to get words right. Inuktitut is full of possibilities for Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca embarrassment or comical nonsense: uttuq is a seal sleeping on the ice, utsuk a vagina; ujjuk is a bearded seal , ujuk is soup; uksuq is the fat of sea mammals, usuk is a penis. Anaviapik did his best to make surc the mirth was not always at my expense. He also made a point of showing me how to tease others in Inuit fashion. For the most part, this teasing was directed at the one or two older men who were Anaviapik's best friends and former hunting partners. The jokes were bold. One lesson was spent teaching me how to tease men who had wives much younger than them selves. This lesson led to my being urged to s ay to one of Anaviapik's friends: "Well, things must be very tiring for you sincc your wife is so youthful." Everyone thought this immensely funny, though I do not believe I ever agrccd to try it out as required. But one day wc wcrc talking about another e lder with whom I had spent some time, and who had a wife some thirty years younger than himself. I said, by way of continuing the joke of that earlier lesson, that next time I visited this elder I would of course ask him if things were tiring for him, sinc e his wife was so young. Anaviapik was aghast. No, no, I must do no such thing. My potential foolhardiness led to a lesson about ilira. 8 Inuktitut has several words for fear. Each is a root, to which the infix suk - is added to show a feeling or -na - to show a circumstance. Many words for danger are based on the root kappia. Hence fear of danger, kappiasuk -, and something being frightening, kappiana -. Another, less common word for fear is based on the root irksi, which denotes a source of terror. Polar bears are sometimes said to be irksina -, terrifying. During one of our lessons, Anaviapik talked about white people who came from the south an d bossed Inuit around. He gave the example of a policeman who was especially domineering, who gave orders that resulted in men working intolerable hours, and who had sexual liaisons with women who did not like him. This example. led to our talking about wh y Inuit had, at times, done things that were 42 1 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms by desLibris subject to the licensing found at www.deslibris.ca not in their own interest. "Ilirasulaurpugut," Anaviapik said. "We felt ilira." I did not know the word. He began to explain it to me. were i lira causing." So 'lira is to do with being afraid? I *eked. Like kappia? NO, not that kind of fear. And not the irksi kind of fear either. Anaviapik gave examples of what might make you feel ilira: ghosts, domineering and unkind fathers, people who are st rong but unreasonable, whites from the south. What is it that these have in common? They are people or things that have power over you and can be neither controlled nor predicted. People or things that make you feel vulnerable, and to which you are vulnera ble. Anaviapik explained further: when southerners told Inuit to do things that were against Inuit tradition, or related to the things that Qallunaat wanted from the North, the Inuit felt that they had to say yes. They felt too much ilira to say no. There was danger — not of a kind that was easy to describe, but real enough. A possibility of dan ger. White people had things that Inuit needed: guns, ammunition, tobacco, tea, flour, cloth. They also were quick to lose their tempers, and seemed to have feelings that went out of control for no evident reason. They had power, and there was no equality.

These circumstances inspired ilira. I asked if this still held true, in the Arctic of the 1970s. Yes, Anaviapik said, for the most part; there was some ilira — not w ith every southerner, but with most. They had the power, and they were not like Inuit, The word iJira goes to the heart of colonial relationships, and it helps to explain the many times that Inuit, and so many other peoples, say yes when they want to say n o, or say yes and then reveal, later, that they never meant it at all. Ilira is a word that speaks to the subtle but pervasive results of inequality. Through the inequality it reveals, the word shapes the whole tenor of interpersonal behaviour, creating ma ny forms of misunderstanding, mistrust and bad faith. It is the fear that colonialism instils and evokes, which then distorts meanings, social life and politics. The power of colonial masters is indeed like that of ghosts — appearing from nowhere, seemingly supernatural and non -negotiable. In our lesson about ihra and the limits to jokes about young wives, Anaviapik explained to me, with great care, that not all Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca people could be talked to in the same way. Inuit elders who inspired ihra, though obviou sly not part of the colonial system, were often men and women of immense importance, with power that was beyond the norm. Anaviapik hinted that this may have been to do with shamanic skills or qualities that evoked equivalent kinds of awe. But it was Qallu naat who gave rise to the greatest and most troubling degree Of ilira. The core of the lesson was: you cannot talk with freedom and humour to those who inspire ilira, whereas it is possible to say anything at all to those who do not. In this way, to be tal ked about as someone who docs not cause ihra is to be paid a deep compliment. 9 Anaviapik never spoke a word of English, not even "yes" and "no." He did not use everyday Anglicisms that were, common in Pond, things like 'hello," "bye -bye," "good morn ing" and "thank you." In our lessons, he conveyed new meanings through examples, relying on vocabulary and grammar I did know to get me to understand bits that I did not. He acted things out, clowned and, in desperation, sometimes called on Rebecca or Jake , who went to school, to translate for me. He and [llajuk insisted that they (lid not understand a word of Qallunaatitut, the language of the southerners. But one must be careful about judging language skills. Shyness, modesty and cultural pride can cause many older men and women to hide their English skills. Some Inuit had close and long -term dealings with traders, policemen and missionaries, going back to the and '40s. Those who had worked and lived most closely with outsiders heard, and no doubt learned , at least bits of the newcomers' language. Contact between Inuit and Europeans in the Pond Inlet area reached even further back. On our fishing trip, Inugu had 44 by desLibris subject to the licensing found at www.deslibris.ca explained to me that he was part Qallunaak, for his grandfather had been the captain Of a whaling ship. Inugu, however, had never 1 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms learned any English, for he had always lived far away from trading posts, in an area some two days by dogteam from Pond Inlet. I did once get a surprise from Anaviapik. It was February, seven months after I had first stayed in Inuja's house. Anaviapik and I were returning from a caribou hunt. He was driving a skidoo, while I rode on the sledge. We had encountered hard weather. The temperature for the two or three days we were out could not have risen above — 40 0 (at which number Celsius and Fahrenheit coincide). The day before there had been a fierce storm, and as we headed back to Pond, the wind still bit into our faces. "lhis was the occasion on which I first experienced my eyes freezing shut: as they watered in the wind, the tears turned to frost that was firm enough to stick upper and lower eyelashes together. Although this was alarming when it first happened, I found that it was easy to fix wit h a brush of the back of a glove against the closed eyes. In fact, if you are dressed in caribou clothes, extreme cold is more startling than uncomfortable: the fur creates almost complete insulation. The skidoo , however, could not keep warm ,The engine k ept cutting out. This had been happening throughout our return journey.

Fuel would not keep flowing, perhaps as a result of minuscule droplets of water in the gasoline that were freezing in the carburettor jets. Each time, with a little difficulty, we got the engine going again. But about thirty miles from Pond, the engine stopped and would not restart. We were far from any other hunters. Anaviapik was no mechanic; nor was I. We were eager to be home. The weather was getting worse, and I think that Anaviapi k was physically tired. (A thing he would never acknowledge, speaking instead of being sleepy; lack of sleep is admissible, but failure of the body's muscles is not.) He climbed off his dead machine. I walked to it from the sledge. We stood there, side by side, peering at the engine. Then Anaviapik said, in a quiet voice that was firm but without real anger: "Shit, bastard, fuck." THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at I stared at him in exaggerated amazement. And made a joke: "Ah, so you speak English after all." "Yes," he said in Inuktitut, "I speak the English my father learned when he worked for the cook on a ship. He knew the words for being angry. Shit, bastard. There were others, but I have forgotten them." Inuktitut is a language without swearing or cursing. Words for sexual actions, genitals, or excrement and urine are not used to express dismay or insult. Nor is there an invoking of the supernatural to express surprise o r hope. Inuktitut is also remarkable for being free of the language that expresses social difference — the "please," "thank you" and "by your leave" that, along with cursing, can indicate so much about status. The equality and forthrightness of Inuit everyda y life are well marked by this absence of words of polite obeisance. Seventeenth -century Quakers would have been at ease with the Inuit non -use of language forms that speak to bad faith, obsequiousness or hierarchy. In the course of colonial changes to the North, however, Inuit adopted or created words for "hello," "good - bye," "thank you," you're welcome" and many others. These were needed to satisfy the newcomers' demand for verbal politeness and the Inuit wish to appear, at least, to be cooperative. Where the Qallunaat inspired feelings of ilira, they elicited a new vocabulary of deference and respect. Anaviapik told me he did not know what those anger words he had learnt as a child referred to. With much laughter, we translated them into Inuktitut. Anaviapik wondered why Qallunaat would want to shout about shit or sex when they were angry. My attempt to translate the words and the ensuing conversation led to a lesson, a few days later, in which we explored the difference between Qallunaat and Inuit expressions of feeling. In the course of this, Anaviapik told me, as other Inuit elders had do ne before, that the strong must conceal bad feelings, must be angry without anger.

To make the sounds that disclose inner rage is, he pointed out, to be like a small child. It indicates a failure of isuma — that capacity for sense and reason which grows as p art of becoming an adult. Anaviapik had THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at o tD/389 0 1 e 46 desLibris www.deslibris.ca often seen Qallunaat reveal their anger, not only in words but through the changing colour of their faces and their aggressive gestures. He had felt sorry for them, he said, and suppose d that this want of isuma, this childishness, was a result of their being so far from home, in a strange place, and frustrated by the Inuit. 10 As time went by, Anaviapik and I did more and more things together on the land. When it came to travelling in h ard conditions, he sometimes preferred to hand me over to younger hunters. But he took me for day -trips to check fox traps and on at least one caribou hunt in extreme weather. And in late April of my first year in the North, a chance came for us to make a long journey. A doctor who did occasional clinics in Pond asked if I could arrange for him to travel by dogteam. The doctor was based in Frobisher Bay, the region's centre far to the south. Before returning there, he was scheduled to go to Arctic Bay, the nearest community to Pond Inlet, so miles away across the north tip of Baffn Island. He wondered if it would be posSible to use this as his chance for a dogteam adventure. When I asked Anaviapik who he thought might like to take up the request, he said he would go. He would take his son Inukuluk's dogs and get Muckpah, a younger hunter with a good team, to go as well. Our doctor friend could ride with Muckpah; I could go with Anaviapik. When the idea was put to Muckpah, he was eager to join in. Everything w as soon arranged. Caribou clothes were found for the doctor, and there was much talk of what supplies we would need. There was also much talk about the route to be followed. Anaviapik proposed that we go there across land and come back on the sea ice.

He t hought it would take six or seven days in each direction, and we would build snowhouses for shelter. The overland journey was Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e through mountain passes and, in late April, would not create chances for hunting. Going out, we would carry all our food with us. The return, however, was round the northern point of Baffin, an 47 area known to be good for seals and polar bears. We would hunt our way home. The Inuit of the eastern Arctic are supreme builders of illuvigat, snowhouses. The root illu means an interior or home of any kind, and is the origin for the English word "igloo." Before the use of modern houses, the largc family snowhousc was built in late autumn and designed to last several months. When Inuit travel, they still make small, overnight snow houses. A single hunter will do this by building on a snowbank, cutting blocks out of the snow where he stands and using these to form walls and a roof around him. On sea ice, where snow is relatively shallow, the blocks have to be cut first and then moved to the site chosen for the house. This is slower work, and best done by two or three hunters who share the tasks. One person cuts blocks, using a medium -sized carpenter's saw, another carries the blocks to the building site, and the third builds the house around him. Once a layer of good, wind -packed snow is found, three people can build a shelter large enough for them all in as little as twenty minutes. Expertise in building a snowhouse depends on close observation and knowledge of snow, in all its many manifestations. This knowledge is evident in the detailed ways in which Inuit categorise different kinds of snow — which brings us to the famous stereotype surrounding Inuit words for snow. The question about snow is, or has become, one of phenomenol09' rath er than ethnography. An ethnographer can explain the ways in which a particular person or group of people describes and responds THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at o tD/389 0 1 e to and manipulates the world. A broad humanistic assumption stands behind such work, namely that all people are using the same kind of brain to achieve their particular version of the human task, albeit in varying circumstances. Pastoralists in the Arabian desert, farmers in the west of Ireland, and Inuit in the High Arctic live in very different circumstances. They have very diff erent ways of 48 www.deslibris.ca talking about the world. But according to the ethnographer, if they make the necessary effort, people in each of these societies can learn the language of the others. In this view, all languages are intertranslatable, and the meanings that specific circumstances give to words are also communicable. So we can say that the Inuktitut word for the sea bird qaqudluk translates into English as "fulmar"; and we can explain that the Inuit have built into their word the sound a fulm ar makes (qaqu) and an infix that signifies wrongness or unpleasantness (dlu), since the fulmar has an unpleasant -smelling gland at the base of its bill that makes it a bird one eats, if at all, only after some careful preparation. This is a simple example , but a difficult one would be a matter of degree, not kind. Many words may be necessary to achieve a good translation, but it usually can be done. Those who challenge this belief in the intertranslatability of languages and cultures often look to the Inuktitut words for snow to argue that the way the world is known in language determines the speaker's reality. According to this view, the words of the Inuit create the world as well as describe it. That is to say, those who are not Inuit (or have not bee n brought up in the language and environment of the Inuit) are unable to know or actually "see" the world that the Inuit know and see. Another way that this point has been made (by Wittgenstein, for example) is in relation to the nature of language itself: a person can explain how a word is used Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e and what it refers to, but the word's meaning depends on knowing a web of contexts and concealed related meanings. A good example is the word "worship" — how can anyone who has not lived in a society that practises so me form of religious worship understand what the word really implies? Therefore, it is held, the language of the Inuit cannot be translated into the language of the Qallunaat.

The multiplicity of Inuktitut words for snow gets cited so often that it has bec ome an everyday dictum about both the Inuit and the connection between language and reality. There are indeed many Inuktitut words or terms for different 49 forms and conditions of snow. These include snow that is falling, fine snow in good weather, freshl y fallen snow, snow cover, soft snow that makes walking difficult, soft snowbank, hard and crystalline snow, snow that has thawed and refrozen, snow that has been rained on, powdery snow, windblown snow, fine snow with which the wind has covered an object, hard snow that yields to the weight of footsteps, snow that is being melted to make drinking water, a mix of snow and watcr for glazing sledge runners, wet snow that is falling, snow that is drifting and snow that is right for snowhouse building.

Also, In uktitut has a number of verbs that have snow as their root, including picking up snow on one's clothes, working snow with an implement of any kind, bringing snow to someone, covering with snow, living on snow -covered ground, and putting snow in a hot drink to cool it down. Thc linguistic roots of these terms arc varied. Some are specific terms, as in the case of blowing snow (pirqsirq), or soft snow that is hard to travel on (mau), or freshly falling snow (apu). These words are very different from one ano ther. 'lhere is no root term, no category that is equivalent to the English "snow," which then repeats with modifications to refer to all the different kinds and conditions of this THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at o tD/389 0 1 e one thing, snow. Some of the Inuktitut roots do not relate to snow at all, as, for example, snow that is right for snowhouse building (illuvigassak), the root of which is illu, to which is added an infix to signal that it is a home made from snow, and then an affix that refers to it being good material. Similarly, snow that has b een rained on (kavisirdlak ) is based on a word for fish scales (kavisiq), referring to the hard and crystalline look to the rain when it blends with snow and freezes. The word for snow that is hard as a result of powdery snow being compressed into a drift , sitidluqaaq, is based on the word for hard (sitik). Snow that yields underfoot (kataktanaq) is based on the root katak, used for many words that refer to falling. In the course of an Arctic spring there are many kinds of snow and ice. The weather can be wintry, with temperatures staying be ow www.deslibris.ca Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca — 10 0 Fahrenheit for days on end and the chance of some of the year's most fierce snowstorms. Yet by late April, the days in north Baffin are twenty -four hours long, and if the sky is not darkened by snow clouds and the air pallid with blizzards, there can be hour upon hour of warm sun. Snow and ice shift from hard to soft to hard again. This variety of temperatures means that spring is also the time of year when the sea ice begins to show its greatest beau ty, for there are areas of both liquid and frozen meltwater, patches of old and new snow. Leads in the ice — long fractures where icefields join in winter and nowbegin to separate open and widen, creating dark lines of sea. At the same time, seals' breathing holes widen under thc sun, and the tides push salt water up onto the ice. Each kind of snow and water is a different colour, and when the sun shines, the sea ice can gleam with a mixture of blues and greens and whites that must be one Of the great aesthet ic wonders of the natural world. These varieties ofsnow and ice are things that Inuit differentiate and talk about. People must choose sledge routes, find water or snow for drinking, select places where they can make a house, consider which surfaces are sa fe to walk or sledge across, decide where to stand beside a breathing hole without making sounds that will reach the sensitive hearing of seals, and cut holes through snow and ice to fish. They also must predict the weather, then acwommodatc to its vagarie s. The language for snow is integra to making decisions that will determine the success or failure of hunting, and has vital importance in assessing the probable degree ofcomfort and discomfort, as well as the dangers, of even a short journey.There is noth ing surprising about the richness of Inuktitut when it comes to snow. Yet the attempt to translate all the Inuktitut words for snow reveals just how many terms there are in English for types of rain or snow, or for winter and spring conditions to which Inu it also refer. Many of the English phrases or sentences that explain what a specialized Inuktitut word is demarcating are straightforward. Once Anaviapik had pointed out and explained a particular type of snow or ice to me, and had told me the words for it , I had no more than the (considerable) diffculty of remembering them. I could see or feel or make sense Of all the things he named. There are grammatical forms in Athabaskan languages, notably to do with motion and time, or in Algonquian, to do with the animate and the inanimate, that are indeed difflcult for a speaker of THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca Indo -European languages to grasp. Grammatical categories in these other hunter -gatherer languages of the North are deeply unfamiliar to most other peoples in the world. Yet even in these cases, the diffculty of translation relates to unfamiliarity, not to any seeming intrinsic incomprehensibility. I can explain the grammatical principle at issue, even though I may have immense diffculty when it comes to using and applying this principle in the new language. I can set out what a grammatical distinction is doing, even though I may not be able to reproduce that distinction in ordinary English grammar. Learning to use words and grammar presents one kind of problem; learning the meanings of word s and the intentions of grammatical devices presents another. Insofar as one can learn the latter, the ethnographic as.sumption about the intertranslatability of all languages would appear to me to be sound. No one is surprised that experts of all kinds differentiate the things they know, use and work with. Doctors have many words for illnesses; carpenters identify a wide range of tools and types of wood; gardeners discriminate between many kinds and qualities of soil; and so on, Differentiation of this sort is integral to human skills in all societies. It does not follow from differentiation that there will be a problem of translation. But by the same token, intertranslatability does not mean that language does not reflect profound differences in ho w people live and see the world. My speculation is that the persistence of the stereotype regarding the "mysterious" Inuit range Of words for snow, overstated or misrepresented as it is, symbolises a divide, and therefore a sense of this divide, between ag riculturalists and hunter -gatherers. In this debate about whether language creates reality or reality 52 desLibris creates language, I am inclined to seek to have my cake and eat it too.

'Ihere are profound differences between hunter -gatherers and other p eoples, and these differences are going to be evidenced in language. On the other hand, languages are for the most part intertranslatable.

Wittgenstein and Anaviapik are much in agreement: it is possible to Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé au www.deslibris.ca learn another language, but there are limits to w hat translation can achieve. The Inuktitut words for snow, however, are not a good example of these limits. The route from Pond Inlet to Arctic Bay took us from sea ice that was sometimes bare and crystalline, sometimes covered with a layer of hard s now, to wind -packed drifts along the slopes and valleys of mountain passes. The journey was a joy. We made our way up narrow gulleys, reaching high passes , then hurtled down the other side, often onto gleaming lakes. At the end of each night's travel, Ana viapik and Muckpah checked for the right quality of snow, cut building blocks, and made our snowhouses. We slept through the warmest part of the day. We ate our way through our supplies — tea, sugar, biscuits, soups, caribou and seal for us, frozen seal for the dogs. On the third day, high in the mountain range that divides the hinterlands of the two communities, we stopped in a wide pass. In every direction the mountains were huge and jagged; it was hard to believe that we had found such an easy way into the ir very peaks. But Anaviapik and Muckpah seemed unsure about the next part of the route. They stood and looked around them, peering as if to see some road, some feature that would act as a signpost or beacon. "Naukkut?" said Anaviapik, turning towards diff erent possible passes in the mountains. "Which way?" Then he took a knife from the box on our sledge and began to draw a map in the snow. I could not understand what the lines referred to, but they seemed to lead to a decision.

Anaviapik pointed to the sno w map, then pointed out the route we should take. We set off again par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés Two days later we arrived at a steep coastline with a round and sheltered bay that gives Arctic Bay its Inuktitut name, Ikpiarjuk, apocket." Anaviapik and I were some way in front of Muckpah and the doctor. As we stopped to wait for them, we untangled the dogs' traces, tidied our sledge and spruced ourselves up. We wanted to 1 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca arrive in Arctic Bay looking our best. Anaviapik was full of excitement. I knew that he had many close relatives there. "When do you think I last came here?" he asked. I guessed. Three or four years? "No," he said. "Not three or four years ago. I was last here in 1938." "So how did you know your way through the mountains?" I asked. "Because Inuit cannot get lost in our own land. If we have done a journey once, then we can always do it a gain." In Arctic Bay, Anaviapik arranged for me to stay with his wife's cousin 's family. He took me around to visit many households, encouraging me to speak in the ways I had been instructed. During these visits we met two men from Igloolik, the first Inu it community to the southwest ofArctic Bay, though the distance between the two settlements is about three hundred miles. These men planned to leave Arctic Bay soon. They would begin their journey back to Igloolik by following the sea ice around the headla nd, in the Pond Inlet direction, before turning west again towards Igloolik. They were going to hunt for bears. Anaviapik proposed that the five of us should travel in a group for the first two days. Our doctor friend had already taken his plane south. The Igloolik hunters welcomed the idea. A few days later the five of us set out, the four Inuit each with a team of between twelve and fifteen dogs and a minimum of supplies. IglOOlik dogteams are famous for their strength and speed, and remarkable for their use of northern rather than imported materials.

One of the sledges had long whalebone runners, and both used only sealskin lashings and lines. All toggles for fixing lines to the sledge or the dogs' harncsscs were carved from walrus ivory. The harnesses 54 desLibris themselves were cut from skins. And the Igloolik men's sleeping bags were made from caribou hides. We, on the other hand, were using nylon ropes, canvas harness es, metal toggles and down -filled sleeping Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé au www.deslibris.ca bags. Whatever the Pond Inlet hunters' reliance on trade goods, though, I was very aware that none of the men I was with spoke English. They took pleasure and pride in their language, as well as in being deep in t heir land. I was a visitor in a world celebrated, puzzled over and given shape by words, anecdotes and jokes in Inuktitut. We were going to find a cache of seal meat that would serve as dog food for a day or two, and then we would be hunting. The cac he was soon discovered, and three seals were loaded onto the sledges. We travelled fast through that night and stopped, full of joyous confidence, in the morning. The Igloolik men built a snowhouse for us and, alongside, another smaller one for our supplie s. Then one of the men cut a seal into chunks with an axe, while another kept the fiftyfive dogs at bay by cracking his whip into the noses of those that pressed too close. They scattered the chunks among the dogs, making sure that each of them got somethi ng to eat. As we drifted off to sleep, I can remember thinking that this was the first time on our journey that the dogs had been left untethered. When we woke, we found that the dogs had broken into the supply house. Everything was eaten or destroyed. Bit s of packaging, cigarettes, chocolate and biscuits were scattered all over the ice.

Nothing could be salvaged of either the dogs' or our own food. We had with us, in the snowhouse, a large piece Of seal meat and packCts Of tea, Sugar and biscuits — enough to keep us going for a day or so. We divided it among us. No one seemed to be worried. We would be hunting later that day, and we had enough tea and sugar to go with the seals we would kill. I felt a flutter of excitement: now we were living as hunters must often have lived, reliant on judgernents about place, weather, animals, with minimal margins of safety. Our decisions about where to hunt would have to bc madc with great care and accuracy. par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés 1 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms Towards the end of the first night's shared travel, the Igloolik men, seeing no sign of bears, decided to turn farther to the north and see if they might do better closer to the floe edge. Anaviapik and Muckpah thought wc should keep to a route that followed the shoreline; this was the direction, they said, in which we woul d find the best seal hunting places. They based this on a knowledge Of leads in the icefields that spread out from the tip of the headland in front of us. These leads formed each year in the same places and created concentrations of seals At this time of y ear the leads would still bc frozen and covered with some snow. But there would be many breathing holes; we would spread out and have a good chance of making some kills. But in this direction the ice was rough. The force of tides and currents around the headland, along autumn storms, had broken the sea ice as it formed. Huge slabs and fractured ice boulders had then been heaped onto one another, to be frozen solid, as winter came, into a vast obstacle course. For as far as we could sec, the sur fåce of the ice was a litter ofjagged hillocks of ice. Many of these rose ten or fifteen feet into the air; in places they created miniature mountain ranges with steep, sharp peaks. We climbed and fell and lurched, the sledges again and again becoming trap ped, and often capsizing, as the dogs tugged sideways around some tight corner.

Traces snagged on jagged ice, causing the sledges to skew and then to stop. We struggled up steep places and jarred shockingly down the other side. Progress was slow and hard. Within a few hours, only a few miles into this crazy field of ice, we were exhausted.

Several slats on one of the sledges were broken and had to be repaired. Anaviapik found a stretch of snow that would be good for a snowhouse; he decided that we should st op. We ate the last of our seal meat, tied the dogs in a circle around the snowhouse to ensure that any approach by bears would be barred by snarls and howls, and went to sleep. We woke to thc sounds of a storm. ()utsidc, the snow swirled by desLibris sub ject to the licensing found at www.deslibris.ca 1 Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca around us, and the dogs were already partially covered by small individual drifts. We could see that the weather was going to get worse. We set off, continuing to push our way through the pressure ice. As th e combination of wind and icefield made our journey harder and harder, Anaviapik and Muckpah agreed that we should change direction and head towards land. From there, we would be able to use the ice when it was passable and travel on the snow along the sho reline when it was not. By the time we reached the shore, the wind was howling, and we stopped as soon as we found a drift that would providc blocks for another snowhousc. Wc built in haste: the weather was becoming ferocious. Inside, we were warmed by the Coleman stove and sugary tea. There. was no meat. The storm continued for another day. We stayed inside the snowhouse. Muckpah scraped all the bits and pieces of spilled soups and grease from around the burners of the Coleman stove and made them into a st ew. We were surprised by its sweetness; no doubt many pans of tea had bccn sugared without much care. We ate the last biscuits. The next day the storm subsided enough for us to continue the journey. There was still a wind that moved the surface of the snow . The Inuktitut word for this is pirqsirtuq, from pirqsirq, the powdery snow that carries in the wind. When pirqsirqs a great dear — the result is maujualuq, a thick deposit of mau, soft snow that makes it difficult to travel. The storm had caused a layer o f snow some six or seven inches deep to be spread everywhere. Our first task was to find the dogs. Anaviapik and Muckpah walked around thwacking each high undulation in the snow with their whips.

The dogs did not seem eager to resume hauling our sledges, but one by one they were discovered and harnessed; the sledges were loaded, and we set off, The softness and depth of the windblown snow was a sort of torture. The s edges tended to stick, and every footstep was an effort.

For the first few hours, the sticking of the runners and the effort of walking were relatively small problems. The dogs had energy enough to keep us moving, and we had strength enough to walk or jogtrot alongside. But as the night wore on, and the wind continued, we slowed and th en began to stop altogether. '1%e dogs would give up pulling, and then the inertia of the sledges, sunk deep in the soft snow, had to be overcome. The trick was for one of us to catch hold of all THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca the dogs' traces and then haul as hard as possible, dragging the dogs backwards. In their intense resistance to this pulling, the dogs Strained forwards. As the man holding the traces felt this energy building to a peak, he would Ict go of the traces and jump out of the way. Thus the dogs found themselves rushing a head with enough momentum to get the sledge moving. The job then was to keep it moving with urging, use of the whip, and even a glove thrown ahead of the dogs, leading them to believe that they could, if they hurried, grab an illicit mouthful of caribou sk in. Their dismay when the glove was snatched away from in front of their noses no doubt gave them some further impetus. At the beginning of that night's travel, we headed out from the shore and across the sea ice again. We had now travelled beyond the wors t of the pressure ice and could find routes along a level, if snowcovered, surface. Anaviapik and Muckpah often ran out to the sides of our route, searching for breathing holes, looking for signs of one of the predicted leads. But the depth of the blowing snow frustrated them: no breathing holes were found. From time to time we paused to brew tea. After moving in this way for eight or nine hours, we stopped and built another snowhouse. The dogs were again tied in a ring around us. Muckpah took all the carib ou skins we had with us as floorcovers and mattresses and proceeded to dig small pieces of fat from the ears.

We ate these, with much laughter. There were jokes about whose clothes we would boil up first. When we woke, the wind had dropped, and Muckpah pro posed that we change direction and head out towards some islands to the north. We would be heading away from Pond Inlet, but it was an area that could be relied on for its seal hunting. Anaviapik agreed.

so we swung left, moving towards a horizon that was without mountains. We were looking out to the open sea, which must have been some fifteen or twenty miles ahead of us. The going was hard — the snow soft, the dogs weary. We moved for a mile or so, then stopped. The dogs had to be tricked and forced to move again. Three of them collapsed in their traces, no longer able to pull. They were set loose and left behind, lying in the snow. We found no breathing holes, no seals. We made another snowhouse, had another sleep, then turned back towards Pond Inlet. Anaviapik said that we must ration our sugar. We were careful to have only one spoon each per cup of tea, instead of the usual two or Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca three. During one pause for a drink and a rest, Anaviapik, standing very close to me, looked into my face and said, in a t one of slight surprise: so thin." I looked at him and noticed that his face had become all cheekbones and jawline. His eyes seemed very large. Then he said: "But our companion [meaning Muckpahl not thin at all. He must be eating something we don't know about." And he laughed. This was a joke Anaviapik had made to me before, comparing his own strength teasingly with the strength of young Inuit men. We passed a difflcult few hours. By now the dogs were weak, and conditions did not improve. The new cover Of snow had not been wind -packed enough to make a firm surface on which we could travel well. We struggled on, making our way across the fjord. We kept going for seventeen hours, covering what must have been no more than twenty miles. (By comparison, on a go od day, we were able to travel thirty or forty miles in ten hours.) During onc of many tea breaks, Anaviapik turned to me and said, in a matter -of -fact way: "Mitimatalingmut tikijjajunirpugutqai." "Probably we'll never make it back to Pond Inlet." I have a vivid memory of the shock of fear that went through me. Although I had known this was a journey full Of diffculty, and while some of the dogs were starving and wc wcrc very hungry, I had never for a moment supposed that we were at risk. 59 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN 62 This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibr is.ca How could I have felt so little apprehension? We had gone for five days with little or no food, and had seen the chances of killing a seal fade to hopelessness; several of the dogs were too weak to be harnessed, and the distance to Pond Inlet stretched far away ahead of us. Yet until that startling remark about not making it home, neither Anavi apik nor Muckpah had given a hint Of worry. Despite exhaustion, hunger and disappointments, they had expressed neither disingenuous optimism nor disgruntled pessimism. 'The mood never changed. The same balance of quiet conversation, jokes and friendly sile nce had continued each day. Inuit elders are remarkable for their equanimity. Smiles and laugh ter are used to deal with many forms of disquiet, and a judicious withdrawal is the proper way of responding to conflict. Anger was understandable in children but quite unacceptable in adults. In my language lessons, the question "Ningngarpit?" — "Are you angry?" — was somewhere between a tease and a reproach. If I was a little withdrawn on a particular day, or chose to go for a walk on my own on the tundr a, my lessons would be sure to include words for "depressed" or "unhappy," often with an affectionate or consoling set of infixes: some such question as "Numasuktukulungulitainnarpit?" "Are you at last a wee unhappy one To laugh, to be happy, to feel welc ome or welcoming, to experience shyness, to be nervous about dangers in the world or society, and to feel ilira, the mix of apprehension and fear that causes a suppression of opinion and voice: all these states of mind are spoken of and exhibited with real freedom. They have helped to shape the stereotype of the Inuit as a people of unfailing goodwill, good humour and generosity. Yet the intensity of feeling that can exist within this restraint and dignified self -control, breaking through at times of extrem e difficulty, is also remarkable. When one of Anaviapik's grandchildren was killed in a fire, the family's grief was fierce. The boy's father spoke to me of having been insane with grief — meaning that he had not been able to check outbursts of crying or per iods of open despair. By European standards, this would appear to be moderate; by Inuit standards, it was extreme. Similarly, expressions of real anger have a smouldering, sharp quality that gives them more menace than mere shouting and yelling would conve y. Our hardships on the journey from Arctic Bay to Pond Inlet would not have warranted any extremes of emotion. I am sure that neither Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca Anaviapik nor Muckpah anticipated catastrophe. Also, no one was blamed for things that had gone wrong. The real source of problems was ice and weather, not the break -in by the dogs. So there was no reason, in their terms, for expressions of fear or dismay or anger. Yet we had gone for a long time without adequate food, walking and pushing and working in cold weather for many , many hours each day. And it was not at all clear how we would escape without worse problems. In which other societies would circumstances of this sort have been met with such equanimity? As we continued to struggle towards Pond, Muckpah suggested that we make a detour to the south and head for a campsite where he and others had spent part of the previous summer. He knew that a bearded seal had been cached there, in a stone -covered depression on the beach. It could well still be there, if no one else had n eeded it and bears had not managed to pull away the stones of the cache. We turned towards the shore again. As we came, at last, to the beach, the dogs got the scent of something they could eat, and for the first time in several days they rushed ahead of t heir own accord. We hurtled into a line Of rough ice, where the traces tangled and the sledge runners jammed. The dogs were held there, straining forwards. We left them and walked up onto the land. And there, sure enough, lying on top of an empty forty - gal lon oil drum, was a large piece of muttuk: the skin, with a thin layer of subcutaneous fat, of a narwhal. The muttuk must have been there for several months, probably since the open -water hunting of the previous fall, and it was no doubt all that remained of a much larger pile of narwhal skin and meat that would have been devoured by passing F foxes, gulls and ravens. This muttuk was now what is categorised in Inuktitut as igunaaq, meaning meat that has been transformed by slow decomposition. This is the s trong cheese of the Inuit diet, and a great delicacy. Anaviapik and Muckpah pulled out knives, cut off chunks, offered some to me, and ate. I had not had a solid meal of any kind for five days. Yet when I took a bite Of the igunaaq I was instantly without appetite. I swallowed a tiny amount, then pinned my hopes on the cached seal, which was in due course discovered. Its meat carried the Strong THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN 64 This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibr is.ca flavour of several months in cold storage under rocks on the beach.

Cut into small chunks and boiled, however, it was tasty and meant an end to being hungry. This was not the last of our troubles. After twenty -four hours at the camp and cache site, Anaviapik announced that he wanted to begin the last leg of our journey back to Pond Inlet. Muckpah demurred, saying that the dogs needed time to recover their strength, and that they would be gorged with overeating (they had been devouring large amounts of the cached bearded seal). But Anaviapik insisted. There was adamance on both sides, resolved in Inuit fashion by each d oing what he thought best. so Anaviapik and I set off alone, to cross the fjord yet again. We planned to reach Bylot Island, where there was an old cabin we had stayed in before, and which marked an approximate halfway point between us and Pond. But Muckpa h had been right about the dogs. Once again we had to take turns to catch the traces in our hands, haul backwards, and wait for the dogs to pull with some real energy in the direction we wanted to move. We spent much time throwing gloves or pieces of seal meat in front of them to cause some bursts of determination. There was still a cover of soft snow — no longer so deep, but enough to cause the sledge runners to sink and stick. As we came to the Bylot Island shore, Anaviapik declared that we could go no fart her. It had takcn us twelve hours to get to where we were. I was relicved. "So we'll build a snowhouse," I said. "No," said Anaviapik. "There is no good snow. We can sleep here, out in the open. I was alarmed. The temperature was no more than — 100 Fahrenh eit. We would have been able to lie side by side, in our sleeping bags, on some caribou hides. But I urged a final effort to get onto Bylot and then push our way along those last few miles to the hut. Anaviapik indulged me and agreed It must have taken us two hours to cover those last six or seven miles. The snow was deep and soft. We struggled to keep going.

Chunk after chunk of bearded seal meat was thrown over the dogs' heads, causing them to dash forward as Anaviapik and I pushed and tugged the sledge. It was the one time on the long journey from Arctic Bay that exhaustion felt like a threat, a dangerous obscuring and distorting of the world. I remember that Anaviapik did not talk at all Inuktitut Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca for the last stretch; no sharing of words for things we sa w around us, no teaching, no banter. Yet there was nothing of what English speakers refer to as bad mood or strain, no sense of hostility or explosive frustration. Just silence. We walked and worked with our eyes always fixed on the snow into which we sank , or on the traces that we clutched and tugged, or on the ridge just ahead of us. At last, of course, we arrived. We came over — in part through — a bank of snow that lay alongside one wall of the hut. We stopped. For a moment it looked as though the entrance were buried. We walked around the rim of a huge drift and found that there was a space between the snow and the door. We clambered down and let ourselves in. We were quick to unload evervthing from the sledge, unharness the dogs, spread caribou skins and sleeping bags onto the sleeping areas inside the hut, and get a pot of meat onto the Coleman stove.

Anaviapik found a checkers set some hunters had left in the hut and suggested I set it up for a game. We sat down opposite each other, about to play. He arr anged the pieces, then looked at me. I waited for the usual series of jokes about who was sure to win, about why 63 he was so nervous of playing when he knew he'd lose, or perhaps about how I would be very sad if I lost — the ritual joking that acknowledged we were going to compete and defused with laughter any inappropriate competitiveness. Instead of making these jokes and teases, however, Anaviapik was rather serious. He said: "l am going to write to Ottawa, to the government, to the man there who sent you to the North. I want to tell him that now you have learned Inuktitut. You have seen how we lived, in the old days. Journeys were often hard." I had learned some Inuktitut. But these past few days had not been about words and language. I had not been makin g vocabulary lists and working out new pieces of grammar. I could see now that there had been a misunderstanding, something I had sensed but never named.

Again and again a lesson that I had expected to be about language had also been, or become, a lesson a bout other things — how to hunt, how to behave when talking, how to use the telephone, how to walk, how THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN 66 This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibr is.ca to sit, how to make jokes, how not to make jokes, how to play checkers. When I had asked Anaviapik to teach me Inuktitut, and when he had said he was eage r to do so, I had thought we were talking about words and grammar, about speaking, while he had supposed we were talking about a way of being. He had embarked upon the task of teaching me how to do and to be Inuk -titut, "in the manner of an Inuk." Anaviapi k had always known what it would mean to learn his language. Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca TWO:

CREATION This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca This page intentionally left blank Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e I first discovered wild landscapes in the north of England, on the Pennine hills between Yorkshire and Derbyshire. My parents took my brother and me for walks, then left us free to roam among brackencovered slopes, on crags of granite boulders, beside peaty streams. I learned to recognise. the birds of these high places — curlews and go lden plover, ouzels and snipe. Even as a small child I found some kind of escape into large spaces and cold, strong air. As I grew older and heard about Lapland, the Russian steppe, Canada, I realised that the vast, wild Pennines just beyond the suburbs of Sheffield were neither very large nor very wild. I began to associate freedom, and the future, with travel much farther north. Later still, I learned about some of the peoples who lived as hunters, fishermen and trappers in those northern expanses; and I began to associate their lives with my own imagined freedom — an escape, perhaps, from this England that was turning out to be so much smaller than it had once seemed. My journeys to the Arctic, at least to this extent, may have been a form of personal desti ny. Childhood in Sheffield, however, was more than long walks or searches for birds' eggs. My parents were Jewish. My father came from an Orthodox and rather inward -looking family, with roots in Russia and the Polish Ukraine. My mother had been born in Vie nna and brought up in the aftermath of the Austro -Hungarian Empire; her mother spoke Polish and French as well as German, and belonged to 67 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at o tD/389 0 1 e the intellectual, emancipated elite of Central European Jews who, as they have said with such retrospective anguish, thought they were Austrians. My mother and her mother arrived in England as refugees after the Nazi occupation ofAustria, escaping the Holocaust by only a few months. Many of the family did not escape. The concerns of our home were shaped by a father for whom where he had been born and educate d, was the only possible place to live, and a mother for whom it was a refuge. Both my parents hoped that their children would be able to find a life in England, become members of this new and old society, taking advantage of Englishness in ways that were never available to them. It was the late 1940s, the early 1950s. We were sent to private Church of England schools. We were also sent, three times each week, to cheder, the classroom, to learn Hebrew.The teachers of these lessons would have said they were making sure we learned the stories and rituals of the Jewish people. In fact, we were schooled in a mixture of elementary Talmudic scholarship and the rudiments of Zionism. We were not far from the events of the Second World War: as well as Hebrew and Ta lmud, we were learning how to take our places in the community of puzzled immigrants. Many of our parents had had to re -create themselves as English, as professionals, as human beings with a right to life. And a part of this was to make sure that their chi ldren, speaking English and going to English schools, achieved every kind of Englishness, from a taste for fried breakfasts to an appreciation of cricket to a reverence for Shakespeare. The cheder was a jumble of buildings and rooms that included a hall large enough to hold the Saturday morning children's service and, on other days, a ping -pong table. There was a tiny corridor with a hatch where we bought a pink, fizzy drink called Tizer and small, homemade buns. There were two or three classrooms where we learned Hebrew letters and recited, in Hebrew and English, sections of the Old Testament. The teachers were volunteers, members of the community ready Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e 68 www.deslibris.ca to give their spare time to this work; but they were dour and pedantic, requiring the children to repeat and learn by the poorest forms of rote. We were given lines of Hebrew, then the translations into lines Of English. We recited them, one after the other, over and over. Our teachers did their best to explain words, and I remember them explaining, with as much weary repetition as we brought to our recitations, the significance of sacred texts.Yet the meanings escaped me. The Hebrew seemed to have so little to do with the English: I failed to grasp that each bit of the one language had a translation in the other. Hebrew, unlike English grammar or the Latin and French we learned at ordinary school, did not appear to me to have verbs or nouns, did not tell me anythi ng that I could report or write down. But when I think back now to those classes, I remember with surprising intensity the Hebrew letters and words. They had their own magic, as images and sounds rather than as mere meaning. They caught something deep insi de me — a set of moods, a kind of feeling, perhaps a new relationship to the outside world. Even in that drab classroom with those tired teachers , I came to love the letters , both the sounds they stood for and their shapes.The strangeness ofthe script, wit h vowels that could be left out, like a secret code; the possibility of writing the same sound with quite different letters; the mystery of letters that made no sound; and the symbols that were used only when they came at the end of a word. As I prepared m y bar mitzvah recital and learned to sing those lines of the Torah, I was fascinated by the tiny diacriticals that encoded the changes of pitch and length, making words into something between incantation and song. Hebrew seemed to be full Of magic. As a te enager, I discovered the paintings of Ben Shahn, many of which celebrate letters as images. Here were the shapes of Hebrew, with obvious literal significance, yet with the power of what? When I THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at o tD/389 0 1 e first looked at those paintings, I could no more have asked th an answered this kind of question about the impact of text. But now, thinking back, I suspect that the magic of Hebrew, in both my lessons and Shahn's paintings, had to do with an origin of meaning: which is to say no more than is said by many Orthodox Heb rew theologians and scholars. They have asserted — indeed, have depended upon the belief — that the aleph -beis, the alphabet of Hebrew, is "the protoplasm of the universe," the very origin of divine authority and human spiri -tual experience. The theological vi ew insists that the importance of' Hebrew is something other and deeper than what its letters and words might mean as items of mere communication. This is a puzzling idea, yet it does reflect, if not explain, how I first experienced Hebrew. And the Jewish sages were no doubt conscious of what they were doing when they decided that the mystery of Hebrew should be sustained by retaining the complexity of its written form. As one modern rabbi has said: "Manufacturers can jugglc model names based on market rese arch and they can shift standard and optional equipment for the. sake of commercial viability, but the Aleph -Beis was not manufactured by man, so it may not be manipulated by man." Hebrcw madc a claim, for thc children who sat in the cheder, to be the lan guage o! our original selves. Its shapes and sounds linked us to a remote past and faraway places; they were also an ccho of the Holocaust, a reminder of death and survival, grief and triumph. With the learning of this language, we were given the story of creation. And we were defined, a little group of children with this undeniable, perp exing and even embarrassing thing in common. We were Jews in a non -Jewish world. I do not recall having any sense that we were a minority. In some strange way, we were the mainstream, an origin, perhaps, of the world as a whole. Here was the value of being chosen by God. ne Children of Israel, with their long and fantastic Story, could not be anything but a majority — not of people, not as a matter of mathematics or demograph y, but as a moral centre, as the launch pad of religion. This was not a matter of evolution or genetics (to use the metaphors of the scholarship we undertook much later in our Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e lives), but of creation itself. In learning the story of ourselves, we were told the story of the origins of humanity. www.deslibris.ca The starting point is set out in the first part of the Bible, in the opening lines of Genesis. Berashit bara et ha -shamayayim v'et haaretz. These words ring out not as pieces of history but as the music of the beginning of a world that spoke of my place in it. n'Ujx -l? In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Talmudic and Kabbalistic ideas insist thc world was created so that the Torah, the Jewish law, could be studied and its laws obeyed. The first line of the first chapter of Genesis, God's first announcement, identifies the creation of the word, This word contains the letters and N, "aleph" an d "tav," signifying the law and the Talmud. Letters with which to create language; language with which to announce the creation of the rest of the world In this way, language and writing are deemed to be at the heart and origin of everything.

The entire wo rld comes from the words of God; these words, caught in the sacred texts of Judaism, are the sum of all knowledge; the world is only that which we say and think and know. With its place at the centre of both knowledge and morality, as the wellspring ofJuda eo - Christian heritage, and with its place at the source of humanity, surely Genesis was a universal story. Not THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at o tD/389 0 1 e a myth but the myth. In European culture — be it theology, art or literature — Genesis is the text that stands, somehow without question, beyond cha llenge, as the myth that carries. It does not tell us about the starting point of human evolution; it is not an essay in biology or any other natural science. Nor does it explain the formation of the earth and the stars, the waters and the firmament; it is a poem, not a scientific treatise. The creation of the first man and woman is redolent with 71 Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e metaphorical suggestion. The flow of the story from Eden to the appearance of Abraham, from the creation of the first people to the live s of their descendants, the first Jewish patriarchs, is a succession Of episodes that has excited countless imaginations. Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the snake and the apple, the trees of knowledge and life, exile from Eden, the curses on humanity, t he killing of Abel by Cain, the flood, Noah 'sArk, the first rainbow, the Tower of Babel:

how many works of art, music and dance have those first eleven chapters of Genesis inspired? The universality of Genesis is assumed and implicit. If a figure is Eve, then she represents all women; if a man is Cain, he evokes all murderers; if a boat is an ark, it stands for the salvation of human and animal life on earth; if a tower is Babel, it shows the essence of human conceit and the puzzle of language itself. The images, ideas and ideals of western civilisation again and again take their inspiration and metaphors from the creation story of the Jews. The great geniuses of European civilisation have drawn on the first eleven chapters of Genesis and given them a c umulative, central power and importance. No one can learn ancient Hebrew as I learned Inuktitut, by being cast into the events and places of which the language speaks. Scholars have spent many lifetimes puzzling over the possible meanings of the Bible 's every word. But simple questions can be as ked about Genesis. Whose way of life does it reflect and endorse? Whose point of view is being sanctified?What version of the human condition is at issue?

This may seem an imposition of secular sociology on the expression of human spirit. Yet if Genesis re veals the essence of human life, then it should be able to accommodate even these prosaic and rather materialist questions. 2 In the beginning there was nothing. Nothing and futility, no form and no light — thcsc arc the meanings of the Hebrew words that spe ak, in the first verses of Genesis, of that which exists before God makes THE OTHER SIDE OF E DEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca 72 desLibris the world. The first and fundamental existence is that of the Creator and his language, as reflected in the famous line of the Gospels, often attributed to Genesis: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Words are the beginning of the end of nothingness. In a series of divine pronouncements, the world as we know it comes into being. Let there be light (first day); the arch of t he heavens above the infinite water, and hence a division of above and below (second day). Then let there be land amid the water, and the water gathers into seas, and grasses and trees grow from seeds on the earth (third day). Next the light is to take the form of stars, moon and sun, in the heaven, making day and night on earth (fourth day). Then come the creatures of the sea and all the birds in the sky; God tells them to breed and multiply (fifth day). Next God proclaims all the creatures of the land, fr om cattle to beetles to wild beasts; and, at last, a man and woman. God tells the humans also to breed and multiply, but they are instructed to go out into this new world, to use, subdue and rule over every living thing. They are to conquer and control the things of Creation (sixth day). And then, on the seventh day, God rests. By the end of the first chapter of Genesis, there are both words and the prospect of restless conquerors who can understand those words.

Language is that which defines humans, giving them dominance over all other parts of creation. Yet even by the end of the first chapter of Genesis, the humans and the world they must master do not speak to the universal. These human beings have cattle; but not all the peoples of the world have been h erders. In the second chapter of Genesis, God begins the Creation all over again. This time he makes things rather than announcing them; the genius ofmanufacture takes over from the power ofthe word. God now shapes a human being from soil (the words Adam, man, and Adamah, earth, have the same root) and creates the human soul by blowing divine breath into the man's nostrils. Then God plants a garden, the Garden of Eden, containing all that a man needs. But God also Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e 13 creates two sources of dangerous p ower: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. And he issues his first instruction to the man in Eden: eat anything you like except the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In this second chapter of Genesis, the man is in paradise, a v egetarian and without his herds. The requirement established in the first chapter, that humans go forth and conquer, is set aside. Ihe words of the second Creation establish technical achievements, abundance and self -denial. But the two trees introduce a p roblem: language has been used to state rules, and rules exist because there is a likelihood of their being broken. The power of words to create has yielded to their potential to cause trouble and conflict. Then God creates once again, this time by working with the earth, the animals and the birds. He gets the man to name them all — both the cattle, marked once more for special mention, and the Other creatures. At the same time, God makes a woman from the man's rib. As Genesis points out at the close of its s econd chapter, this unity of man and woman — the one being made from the bone of the other — means that the couple will bc united, and this will cause them to leave the homes of their parents. They will go forth to make their own way in the world. The power of love is the first origin of exile. God is the master builder, converting one natural material into another: soil into flesh, breath into life, bone into woman. He also establishes both the terms and the challenge of morality: the tree whose fruit must not be touched. The two humans are given a utopia of plenty, but their life in the garden depends on doing right.

The task of the man is to till the ground and watch over all that grows. Add to this the play on Adam and Adamah, and we may have the first clues that the human condition taking shape is that of farmer as well as herder. God has also created the man and then the woman, a couple whose lives are inseparable. THE OTHER SIDE OF E DEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca Chapter 3 begins with the serpent, the first creature to use words to mislead and manipulate. The woman is persuaded by the serpent's desLibris arguments and by the appeal of the fruit: "It was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at." The important Hebrew word in this verse is ta'awah, which connotes intense desire, not the mere "good for food" of the King James version. And the woman persuades the man to eat some too. The power of language has done its worst. God announces the punishments of Adam and his female partner. These are the first of the divine curses that will shape the human condition. • The snake will crawl on its belly and be hated by human beings • The woman will endure intense pain when giving birth to her children. • The woman will yearn for the man, but he will be dominant ("And he shall rule over thee"). This is the d ouble curse of love and subordination. • Ihe soil of the world will be unproductive and full of weeds ("thorn and thistle"). • Human beings must eat "the plants of the field." • In order to get enough plants ("bread") to eat, the man will endure lifelong hardsh ip. • All will end in death: "For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return God prepares the man and the woman, to whom Adam gives the name Eve, for their exile from Eden. Angels armed with burning and whirling swords are posted at the entrance to Eden to ensure that the exiles will never return to harvest the fruit of the tree of life. In exile, Eve gives birth to Cain and Abel. Cain is the farmer tilling the earth; Abel is the shepherd herding domestic animals. But there is Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e strife between the two brothers. Both want to make an offering to God. Cain brings fruit or vegetables of some kind — nothing special, not the finest he can find — but Abel offers the fattest lambs from his flock. God is delighted by Abel's offering and fails to THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca o tD/389 0 1 e notice Cain's. Filled with despair and fury, Cain invites Abel to go into the fields, where he kills him. This first murder results in another curse. God declares that the earth where Cain killed his brother will not yield enough to feed him. Cain and his family must leave for some other land. So Cain goes to Nod, a Hebrew word that denotes wandering, where he sets up his own home. Moreover, he builds the first city, and he has many descendants. These include the first "tent dwellers with livestock," the first musicians, and the firs t copper and iron smiths. Chapter 4 thus ends with Cain's successful and creative lineage. What do these events add to our glimpses of the original human society? The one who supplies meat loves God; the one who grows food does no more than his duty, and is also a murderer who, being cursed, is made to wander off to find new pieces of land. But Cain's lineage triumphs. He does find new lands, and his descendants becomc thc city dwellcrs and the most numerous, creative and successful of people. The one who is forced to roam, in exile, into unknown lands prospers. Genesis tells us nothing Of the he rder's achievements he is overshadowed and overwhelmed by his murderous brother, the farmer. Thus we begin to see the human being as settled and unsettled a person displaced from his home, roaming the harsh earth looking for land to till, for somewhere to live. He can settle in a restless way, building, inventing, shaping, and then, as need be, roam farther afield — repeating the pattern that is the farmer's destiny. Perhaps the curse, or web of curses, lies in God's insistence on both farming and roaming. T he power of God's words, in this regard, is the achievement of apparent contradiction. Chapter 5 of Genesis confirms the success of this contradictory condition, for it is "the book of the generations of Adam." An oratorical formula is at work: the generat ions beget one another with repetitious incantation. But this formula speaks to a particular system of inheritance and property. Family is the core of all activity and secu - Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e 16 rity. For people who are settlers, cursed to leave home and yet working all the ir lives to make homes, ancestry is that which defines. Not land, not an Eden, not a community, but a family line, a lineage.

This lineage or ancestry is patrilineal, recorded through the male line.

The men have sons and daughters; the sons have their sons and daughters. Men go out and secure the land, on which their women then can live, providing the children — the inheriting sons — of the next generation. Genesis has established a social system. It is striking that chapter S ends with a reminder of "the curse upon the ground," which causes life to entail unremitting toil. The social system is that of the farmer. Adam's lineage brings the Genesis story to Noah and his sons. Noah is given special importance at his first mention: he will "comfort" us in some way. Some biblical scholars have suggested that this anticipates Noah being the first person to make wine — another point where Genesis's endorsement of farming systems is revealed. In fact, God's human creation has not turned out well. Dismayed by the evil way s of the people of the world, God decides to drown them. Only Noah and his immediate family — uniquely good — are to be spared. It is Noah's job, therefore, to save the other living creatures of the world. God tells Noah he rnust build a boat, an ark, large en ough for seven pairs of all "clean" animals and seven pairs of all birds, but only one pair of all "unclean" animals. Why does God divide the animal world into these categories? It is a reflection of the systems of agriculture, in which there are animals t hat are domesticated and eaten, and animals that are wild, part of an untamed world. This concern with the clean and the unclean points to the human condition as one in which people, as herders and farmers, depend on the things they directly control. God now ensures that the water subsides and that Noah and his family reach safety. Once they land on Adamah, soil, God says that life should "swarm through the earth," multiplying and being THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca o tD/389 0 1 e fruitful. Noah sacrifices some "clean" animals. In Robert Alter's translation: 77 And the Lord smelled the fragrant odor and the Lord said in his heart, "l will not again damn the soil on humankind's score. For the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth. And I will not again strike down all living things as I d id. As long as all the days of the earth — seedtime and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease." This promise to the agriculturalists continues with God's instruction that Noah and his sons should themselves "Be fr uitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." Later in the chapter God makes this even more emphatic: "Swarm the earth and hold sway over it. Noah and his family are now bcsct by new difficulties. Noah's three sons — Shem, Ham and Japheth — are identified as the fathers of all thc pcoplcs of the earth; thcy are, after all, the only male survivors. Noah, the first grower of vines and maker of wine, gets drunk. As a result, Ham sees his father naked. He tells his brothers, who proceed to cover their father wi th a cloak, walking backwards in order not to see him. When Noah wakes from his drunken stupor, he realizes what has happened and proceeds to Curse Ham, his youngest son. Ham's own Son, Canaan, is also cursed: he and his descendants, the Canaanites, are to be "servants" of the other brothers ' lineages. subsequent subjugation in Jewish history of Canaan and the Canaanites is here given an original justification. What has happened to cause such a curse? All we know is that Ham has "seen the nakedness of" his father. Scholars have pointed out that in Hebrew literary usage, "to see the nakedness of" can mean "to have sex with." This is linked, perhaps, with the way in which Canaan is associated with sexual excess. Another interpretation of Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e 78 the dispute betwee n father and son asserts that Ham has castrated his father to prevent him having more sons, thus ensuring he gets as much land as possible for himself. Ham is caught in the conflict that the curses have created: on the one hand, the land is hard to make pr oductive; on the other hand, fathers must have many children. The exile from Eden, the harshness of the earth, the hardness of life, the subjugation of women, the displacement of Cain, the domination over Canaan. The curses of Genesis do not stand alone; their cumulative power and meaning are augmented by God's repeated instruction that human beings must go forth, increase in number, spread out over all parts of the world, and dominate all Other forms of life. The curse of the pain of childbirth is given its full poignancy by the divine insistence that humans have as many children as possible. The curse of barren earth is made dreadful by God's emphasis on agriculture. Cain is cursed, but it is his story that prevails:

he, the farmer and murderer, es tablishes a lineage that can take glory from its creative achievements. Noah, the farmer and vintner, is the survivor, but his sons are pitted against one another two the masters, one the slave. By the end of the ninth chapter of Genesis, humans are exiles bound to move over the earth, struggling to survive on harsh land, aided by dominance over all other creatures. In their hearts, from first creation, humans rebel against God's laws, are ready to kill one another, brother against brother, harbouring evil. They are farmers, gardeners, city dwellers, metalworkers, music makers, wine drinkers. But they are cursed in these things: they have no sure home and are forever conquerors, making gardens and tending domestic animals in places that are harsh and foreign . Their society is one of restlessness, of male supremacy, of a quest for dominance in which each family knows little trust and seeks always tofather as many children as possible. THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca o tD/389 0 1 e Next come the lineages of Noah, Shem and Japheth the generations, father to son, that fill the world. They are both one people 19 and many peoples; the descendants of a single patriarch, Noah, and the first diaspora of distinct and rival nations. The scene is set for the last great episode in the poem of Creation: the story of the Tower of Babel. learn that all peoples, despite being spread over the world, peak one language. In order to ensure that this continues to be the case, the people decide to build a tower that will reach as far as heaven. They are resolved to make an eff ort to rise above the human condition, "that wc may make us a name lest we bc scattered abroad upon the face of the earth." A name, a monument, some permanence: human beings wish for another version of Eden.

They seek to escape the results of all those cur ses. They want to be in a single place, not nomads of some kind; they aspire to a single civilisation rather than restless conquest. 10 rcalise thcsc hopes, to savc thcmselves from the human condition laid down in the cumulative stories of Genesis, they ba ke bricks and use mortar to elevate themselves towards the heavens, to proximity with the Creator. When God sees Babel, he issues another curse, recounted in verses 6 and 7 of chapter 1 : Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them. / Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca o tE/389 0 1 e And "from thence did the Lord scatter abroad thence upon the face of all the ear th." God is determined that human beings will have neither respite nor permanence; to aspire to these things is to seek divinity. The final, decisive curse is that peoples are henceforth unable to understand one another. They must desist from building the city of Babel, with its tower of human unity. Instead, they are condemned to be farmers and gardeners on a harsh land, to roam and disperse, move and conquer, speaking a babble of languages. 80 Creation Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca The story of Babel ends with an account of the lineage of Shem. The human diaspora continues, with its restless increase and movement of population. At the close of chapter r r , the succession of generations reaches Abraham and Sarah, in a place called ur of the Chald ees. Here is the beginning of the story of the patriarchies of Judaism , where the poem Of the Creation gives way to the family history that is the remainder of Genesis. At the opening of chapter r 2 , God speaks for thc first timc to Abraham, telling him he must leave his father's house and go to another land. The stories of' Genesis bear the signs of having been handed down from narrator to narrator, as oral culture, with all the consequent variety and rhythm that entails. Late in their lives, these stories did, of course, become. a book. A sacred text. And thc words of Gcncsis comc to us as many translations. The famous English version, the King James Bible, was created in the seventeenth century, and its language carries the literary and intellectua l ambition of its day. Twentieth -century evangelists have been determined to render every phrase into the language of evervday suburban America, yielding a series of modern and simplified forms. But most people hear or see depictions of Genesis in literatu re, in painting, in music or in sermons, rather than actually reading the stories themselves. Despite its status as sacred text, there remains an intriguing fluidity to the Bible.

Repeated retellings and re -creations by scholars and preachers, translators and cantors, artists and poets, movie -makers and missionaries keep the stories and text of Genesis alive. This vast array of interpretations and performances seems to insist that in Genesis humans can discover some of the essence of themselves. Yet the peo ples who look to Genesis as the universal creation story do not inquire as to the specificity of this self. They take for granted the loss of Eden, the inevitability of wanderings and con.

quests, and regard them, without quite knowing that they do, as God - given. 81 Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé au www.deslibris.ca 3 The truth of Genesis lies in the profound and disturbing insights it offers into the heart of the society and economy that come with — and descend from — agriculture. Farming has shaped much of the world — its heritage, nations and cultures. Even i n places where people do not farm, it echoes in the meaning to many homes Of their gardens or, for those Without gardens, their window boxes. Imagine a farm family, busy in the countryside. Mother is making bread, churning butter, attending to hens and duc ks that live in the yard and in pens beside the house, preparing food for everyone. Father is in the fields, ploughing the soil, cutting wood, fixing stone walls, providing sustenance. Children explore and play and help and sit at the family table. Grandma and Grandpa, when they are not also hard at work on the land, sit in chairs by the fire.

Every day is long and filled with activities. And these activities are contained, given purpose and comfort, by a piece of land, at the centre of which is home. This family is intensely private, somehow separate from the rest of the world, sufficient unto itself, knowing and meeting each other's needs. Loyalties are as deep and sure as the ground beneath them. There is loyalty, also, to the tasks and expertise and duti es that each member of the family undertakes. Children have the job of being happy to help, and then being happier yet to mature into their adulthood and take their places in either this or another farm family. So many children's books, and much adult lite rature, celebrate this farm family. Many people around the world have grown up in the vicarious glow of its warmth; have shared, at varying distances, in its peace and comfort; have tasted, if only in their imaginations, the fresh -baked bread and home -cure d ham, apple pie and wholesome cheese laid out on the family farmhouse table. These delicious images work a complicated magic on our adult selves: does my family or your family achieve this stability, plenitude, warmth and happi - 82 desLibris THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca ness? The contrast between the lives of the readers of these books and those of this half -known, almost -remembered family makes a poignant contribution to many people's sense of failure. These images of the farm family come close to defining what family is, and what so many families are not; they give a powerful sense of the past, a bittersweet ideal against which it is all too easy to pass sharp judgements upon ourselves. The farm is the beautiful nest within which the perfect family thrives. Each has its own patter n of fields, with their walls or fences and hedges and gates and gateposts; its own mixture of crops and copses, vegetables and wildflowers, domestic animals and creatures of the wild wood, pigs and cows and sheep and horses as well as a few foxes and badg ers and stoats and weasels: the gentlest aspects of material culture and the prettiest, most controllable of nature. The farm may be grand, an estate perhaps, even a park; but its ideal is modest: enough land to provide an abundance of simple foods. A few fields and an array of buildings combine to create the image of a perfect and eternal home. An Eden. The people of the countryside, from the poorest farmworkers to the richest of landholders, share a profound conservatism: they tend to believe that c hange would not be of help to them. They insist, as do those who write about them and celebrate their ways, that innovations are for outsiders, rival claimants to the soil, advocates of an antagonistic mode of life. Yet the family farm is not without its f ierce energy and restlessness. Farmers have moulded the landscape and must continue to do so.

There are fields to be reshaped, walls to be remade, hedges to be laid, woodlands to be coppiced, lines of saplings to be planted, barns to be added, sheds to be rebuilt. Also, there is buying and selling, of everything from a field to a new farm. This persistent but gentle process shapes and keeps reshaping the landscape. cumulative actions of the family farm have created the countryside, by which European nature is defined, par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés 1 Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé au www.deslibris.ca By comparison with the farm family, the town family enjoys very uncertain peace and prosperity. Vulnerable to the cacophonous intrusions of other people, living in a place of no natural meri t and hence no intrinsic worth, the urban dweller has both a freedom and a compulsion to change and relocate. The very conditions of family life exemplified by farmers — peaceful enjoyment of the unquestioned division and unending experience of labour — arc ch allenged by every kind of urban reality. Images of the harmonious farm family set the conditions to which all aspire. This description of town/ country differences may seem anachronistic and fanciful, a product of old ideas and spurious idealisations. It m ay appear to be no more than a sketch of quaint notions found at holiday teatime in England for Enid Blyton's Famous Five, or the domestic background to Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, or the norm inspiring the Swiss Family Robinson or, in America, television series such as I,ittle House on the Prairie. But what of the farm and family that so draw the hero of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, or the life that George Eliot's Dorothea longs for in her depths, or the rather grand version Of country in m uch of Jane Austen? And what does Defoe's Robinson Crusoe emulate?The vast literature that works within this framework includes some of the most powerful of English writing. It is a tradition of rural idealisation also found in stories read or told to chil dren in all the other languages of farming cultures — in Asia and Africa as in Europe and the Americas. The gentle settlements of well -established countryside also have existed in fiercer and more archetypal form. Farmland in God's sole care is forest and savannah. The family farm is a determined, persistent struggle to make sure that God does not get the place to himself: the trees are felled, their roots are hauled from the ground, stones are picked from the earth, invading wild plants and shrubs are root ed out again and again. There is no end to this labour. The soil will grow grass and vegetables and grains only if a great deal else is "kept under control," which means excluded or destroyed.

Not only rival plant 84 desLibris THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca life, but also wild creature s that harm seeds, seedlings, buds or fruits, or eat the domestic animals that are also part of the farm family.

Weeds and vermin. These are the agents of wild nature that have to be walled out, scared off or killed. Otherwise the soil will not yield — more, it will not even exist. The conditions of this archetypal farm are harsh. This is not Eden but the curse of exile: only by the sweat ofhis brow does the man provide food for thc family. Not only the man, of course; the woman, too, must work all and every day. The children are the labourers who will ease the burden of the cursed land. The farm family, island of work and production, is also a worldhistorical centre for reproduction, that Other kind of labour, Agriculturalists want large families. The o rigins of this desire may seem to be instinctive, a matter of basic biology. But the use and purpose of the largc family is clear to all: the children will bc the workers, and as they grow and marry they will take over the running of the farm, securing for their parents the peace of body and mind that depends upon the continuity of home and holdings. This inheritance may, in the long run, be the privilege and duty of one son; but of the others some can stay and work, some can make alliances among neighbours and relatives, and those who neither inherit nor marry well locally may go far away to take advantage of whatever opportunities come from not being tied to this one corner of the world. Labour, consolidation, inheritance and migration comprise a set of fi lial duties. Between them, the children must keep the family farm in its full and rightful place. Agriculturalists are nothing if not fecund: many nations' farmers and pastoralists have succeeded in raising very large families. The average number of childr en for European rural families has varied from four to eight. Many households have had ten and more children live to adulthood. Even high levels of mortality and periodic catastrophes have not prevented the farm families of the world from contributing to a stonishing population growth. If subdivision of land par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés 1 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided terms makes it possible to keep many children at home or in the neighbourhood as adults, as was the case in Ireland in the fifty years before the 846 famine, this process will result in eventual catastrophic causes of emigration (as in Irela nd between 1846 and 1900) or a delay followed by a flood of human movement. When all available land is in use or further subdivision of holdings is impossible, the total number of family farms becomes constant. This means that only one child can expect to marry into a farm family. Others may become farm labourers; and many must go elsewhere. In this way the settled countryside — in which the total number of farm families is more or less stable, and available marginal lands are in the ownership of large estate s or in use by pastoralists or both — exports people. The history of much of the world over the past few hundred years — a history that is well known from records and documents — has included great displacements of country people by the concerted efforts and interests of other agriculturalists. The enclosures and Highland clearances are two notorious examples from British history. The movement of Polish and Russian peasants off their lands are examples from Eastern Europe. These drastic processes g ave rise to some of the most anguished laments about movement from country to town or from one nation to another, and they have made vivid contributions to the myth of the farm family. These processes have different sets of direct causes, including interna l colonialism and ruthless national political measures. But the flow of emigrants I speak of here is intrinsic to agricultural life, one of its continuous and inevitable long -term consequences. Emigrants go to towns as labourers or to new colonial lands as settlers, part of the great farm -family diaspora. Some of those who move to towns retain or develop a longing for a life on the land, as an idealised alternative to the hardships and tyrannies of urban or industrial labour. The Australian, American, Canad ian and southern African frontiers have given the farm opportunity to many millions of European men and women. The settlement of Europeans in the 86 1 THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca by desLibris subject to the licensing found at www.deslibris.ca Canadian West during the late 800s, for example, was among the largest and most rapid movements of human beings in history.

Since the beginnings of agriculture, all over the world, on new - found lands , in the terra nullus of colonial frontiers, migrants have made their family farms. There th ey have many children, who also have many children. These children, in their turn, move on, pushing the frontier outwards until it reaches its limits. Then follows another wave of movement from the frontiers to new towns or to ever wilder regions. Being wi lling to go to unknown and harsh places, in defiance of aboriginal resentment; taking part in colonial wars of conquest and "pacification"; accepting the relentless need to remake, with Herculean efforts, a land of forest or marsh or rocks or sand into a p atchwork of pasture and fields; knowing little comfort and no respite from hard physical work; setting pleasure at thc far end, the distant terminus, of a journey of hardship; making the endurance of this hardship a religious achievement — here are character istics and abilities that have secured the family farm its place in almost every kind of climate and landscape. These are the qualities that define what Europeans (and other expansionist agricultural cultures) see as the signs and successes of civilisation . This success is built on opposites. On the one hand, a passion to setde, on the other, a fierce restlessness; a need to find and have and hold an Eden, alongside a preparedness to go out and roam the world; an attachment to all that is meant by home, and an overriding commitment to a socioeconomic system , to some form of profit rather than to a place. The agricultural system is a form of settlement that depends upon, and gives rise to, the most pervasive form of nomadism. The urge to settle and a readine ss to move on are not antagonists in the sociology of our era; they are, rather, the two characteristics that combine to give the era its geographical and cultural character. Many people are aware, in their own psyches, of these conditions of agriculture. When viewed from this angle, on this macro -historical level, the town and the country are not such different systems. In both Creation Ce document est la propriété de Céditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris terme s de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca 87 suivant les 100 settings a love of place is secondary to the importance Of prosperity. In much of the agricultur al world, loyalty to home or lands is romantic and incomplete. Given the right price, everything is for sale. In both country and town, if a new place can be trusted to be better than the old one, then the urge to move will prevail.

The measure of success in this system of settlement and migration, conservatism and restlessness, is economic power — the ability to control a pool of resources in the interests of the family. Counter -cultural movements — from sannyasin to hippies to newagc shamanism — reject the conv entions of the farm family and embrace the freedom that comes with reduced attachment to farms or houses, with their bourgeois economic imperatives. They celebrate the sensation of being footloose and on the move — on the streets, in their vans and trucks, a s squatters who come and go. Yet these same groups are full of enthusiasm for subsistence vegetablegrowing and self -reliant communes, revealing a deep longing for their particular version of settlement in some new kind of place. With the same tension, whic h is creative as well as contradictory, emigrants create songs and poetry to celebrate the opportunities of new frontiers and to mourn the separation from "the old country." Nostalgia and a sense of loss sit alongside yearning for the perfect garden and dr eams of foreign riches or adventure — companions in the agrarian imagination. The move of country people to another countrysidc or to town, like the move of townspeople to every other kind of place, is intrinsic to the overall system. Newcomers to the countr yside, be they agricultural entrepreneurs or people eager to get away from cities, are part of a continuing flow of life that includes the coming and going of farm families. The city -born family that has lived in the countryside for twenty years has deep a ttachments to the landscape, the home, the garden, the land where it has made a life. THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca These attachments are not different from the attachments that "traditional" rural people have to their homes and farms, except insofar as the garden of the city - 88 Creation Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca born family may have little to do with actual prosperity.

Townspeople and country people live and make their decisions within the same cultural and economic tradition: they move, they settle, they create a home, and they find — or their children or their children's children find — that they must move on. Exile is the deep condition. longing to be settled, the defensive holding of our ground, the continuing endemic nomadism — I suspect that we share them all. Who is this "we"? The argument here pays no attention to class or even to nation. Those who are agriculturalists, humans who live by remodelling the land, are the peoples whose story is some version of Genesis. We live outside any one garden that can meet our needs and growing population, so we must roam the earth looking to create or re -create some place that will provide a more or less adequate source of food and security. We are doomed to defend this place against enemies of all kinds: we know that just as we have conquered, others can displace us. This mixture of agriculture and warfare is the system within which farms and towns and nation -stat es and colonial expansion have an inner and shared coherence. The world view and daily preoccupations of the peasant farmer and the twenty -first — century executive have much in common. The one is able to dominate, exploit and thrive far more effectively tha n the other. But their intellectual devices, their categories of thought and their underlying interests may well be the same. They speak one another's language, as it were; for all the inequalities between them, they can do business together. But Genesis i s not a universal truth about the human condition. Inuit children do not grow up with the curses of exile. Anaviapik would be astonished to think that his descendants were destined to go forth and occupy distant lands. Hunter -gatherers constitute a profoun d challenge to the underlying messages that emerge from the stories of Genesis. They do not make any intensive efforts to reshape their environment. They rely, instead, on knowing how to find, use and sustain that which is already there. Hunter -gatherers d o not conform to the imprecations of Genesis. They do not hope to have large numbers of children; they will not go forth and multiply.

Everything about the hunter -gatherer system is founded on the conviction that home is already Eden, and exile must be avoided. THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca Farmers appear to be settled, and hunters to be wanderers. Yet a look at how ways of life take shape across many generations reveals that it is the agriculturalists, with their commitment to specific farms and large numbers of children, who are fo rced to keep moving, re settling, colonising new lands. Hunter -gatherers, with their reliance on a single area, are profoundly settled. As a system, over time, it is farming, not hunting, that generates "nomadism." Agriculture evokes the Curses of Genesis . In the history of European civilisation, as in the history of agricultural cultures, the combination of settlement, large families and movement has resulted in a more or less relentless colonial frontier. An agricultural people can never rest — as farming families, as a lineage — in one place. Fl%y love home, but they also love the leaving of it. They celebrate stability and security, and yet they are committed to movcment. Thus farmers have two ideals, the one of sweet home, the other of conquest and adventu re. Not two Edens, but no Eden at all. The family farm may indecd bc at the heart of a human and social condition, yet it is not so much an ideal as the cause of that condition's most dynamic element: a readiness to migrate, a nomadism. 4 In 1974, I gave a public lecture at the Commonwealth Institute in London, England. At the time I still had links with the Canadian Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, whose Northern Science Research Group thus far had funded my work in Canada. My mind moved between questions about the nature of hunting systems and the immediate needs of the Inuit in whose communities and territories I had been travelling. I fear that my lecture was an uneasy mix of intellectual speculation and political indignation — a shifting between my naive discovery of the riches of Inuit culture and my urging that the Canadian administration make new moves towards decolonising the North. I suppose the lecture was fuelled by my passion on both issues. I spoke with the enthusiasm that came from havi ng very recently been in field." One of those in the Commonwealth Institute audience was Brian Moser, producer of the Granada Television Disappearing World Creation Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca series. Disappearing World was an inspired attempt to unite anthropologists and filmmakers. The seri es, in 1974, had already resulted in some compelling anthropological films, and had created both the filmmaking skills and the public awareness that gave anthropological documentaries a new place in British television.

Brian's rcsponsc to my lecture was to suggest that Disappearing World do one of its films in the Canadian far north. I immediately thought of Anaviapik. What would he make of this idea? And how could we overcome the word "disappearing" in the series title?

Anaviapik and his people were determ ined not to disappear, and they had no notion that any such fate awaited them. They battled for their rights, demanded fuller recognition from the world — and had not resigned themselves to a tragic disappearance from its stage. I hesitated and equivocated a nd worried. To allay some of my fears, Brian introduced me to the work Of Michael Grigsby, the director with whom he thought I should be partnered for an Inuit film. I watched Grigsby's most recent work, a beautiful exploration of the fishing community of Fleetwood in the north of England. Here was a film that made a journey into a way of life. No narration, no intrusive gimmicks, just the place and the voices of those people strong and clear. Fleetwood was an inspiration. Here, indeed, was a way of making a film that I could imagine bringing delight to Anaviapik. So I went to Pond Inlet and spoke with him and others about the idea. I met with a measured enthusiasm. The Pond Inlet community, through its newly formed Hamlet Council, laid out some conditions. The film idea would be welcome, they said, so long as the people 91 of Pond Inlet had a large say in what was filmed, so long as a Pond Inlet elder could check the film before it was finished to make sure that it did not contain errors, so long as the gove rnment and the people of Canada got a chance to see it, and so long as the Pond Inlet community was the place where the film got its first public screening Anaviapik and others told me that they wanted to use the film as a way of getting more Canadians to understand who the people of the Arctic really were, what they had experienced and what they now THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca needed. The film should be a celebration of their place in the North.

One person, Anaviapik's son Paulussie, who had often taken me hunting, expressed some une asiness about the film. His father was old, he said. So many people loved him. What would it be like to see Anaviapik in the film, after he was dead? "Isumanattuq," he said. "It makes you think. It's worrying." 5 until the 970s, the Canadian Arctic was iso lated, with neither roads nor railways nor scheduled air services. Government mail and supplies came in about once a week on chartered planes or once a year by ship. The only Inuit to have spent much time away from the North tended to be victims of tubercu losis who had been evacuated to hospitals and sanatoriums in the south (many remaining there for years, and some not living to come home).

Many children had been taken to residential schools run by Catholic priests; but these schools were almost all in oth er parts of the North. 'I%ugh they required immersion in English language and southern culture, they did not entail living outside the geography of the Arctic. A corollary of the Arctic's isolation was the Inuit concern, in the 1970s as indeed thereafter, that those in the south who seemed to have so much power over the fortunes of Inuit life and land should learn more about those lives and lands. Again and again, Inuit elders spoke to me of their wish that the Qallunaat, the southerners, should know the fa cts. If southerners knew the real truth, they would never again do anything that was against the interests of the Inuit. Injustice was blamed on ignorance. Anaviapik's wish to educate me had originated in this faith in knowledge. He had told me over and ov er that I must learn well so I could translate his concerns to angajurqaat tavvani, "the bosses down there. For many people in Pond Inlet, therefore, the film made sense as a way of communicating with "down there," the south, the bosses. ne task of the fi lmmakers was to be true to the facts — of what people did, of how they described their history, of their demand that they be left in peace in their lands. Michael Grigsby was as determined as the Inuit that the film be their voice, their story, their facts. Creation Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca people of Pond Inlet took the film crew to hunt seals at their breathing holes and to hunt uttuit, the seals that basked on the spring ice. They took us fishing through the ice at the mouth of a river thick with migrating char. They made sure we were abl e to film at the floe edge, where the migrating narwhal waited for the breaking ice to open enough for them to get into the shallow estuaries where they could gorge on small fish. And they took us, with immense difficulty, through moving ice — first by skido o and sledge, transporting a boat with us, and then by boat, with skidoo and sledge loaded precariously on gunwales — to the edge of Bylot island, where the most daring hunters climbed high and greasy cliffs to gather guillemot eggs. These were all expeditio ns undertaken with the immense knowledge and experience that make the High Arctic into a storehouse of resources for the Inuit. But the journeys and the hunts were not the sum of the film. Anaviapik worked with other elders to ensure that the film also rec orded the most important parts of their modern history. They talked to one another at kitchen tables, as if there were no camera, about the way Qallunaat had sought to dominate Inuit life, and about the kind of fear they felt for policemen, missionaries an d traders. They spoke, also, about the way that southern so -called experts had come and interfered with northern wildlife. Polar bears, narwhal, geese, even fish — outsiders were claiming authority over everything. The Inuit protested about the way in which their hunters had been blamed for declines in animal populations. No, they said, it was the Qallunaat, not they, who were doing damage to the land. Their land.

This was the central statement: this beautiful place that they knew so well, where they had alwa ys lived, was theirs; the Qallunaat had no right to say it was not. "Inuit nunangaumat." "Because it's the people's land." The film took six weeks to shoot. The edit, back in England, lasted much longer. The material was rich; the task of reducing such elo quence of both voice and image to a television hour was painful and daunting. As the edit reached its last stage, the Pond Inlet council chose the elder who would come and check the film's veracity. They chose Anaviapik THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca 6 So in 1976 Anaviapik came to London. He had never before left the Canadian far north. He had not even travelled to subarctic Canada in northern Quebec or Manitoba, the provinces which by then had airports serving the eastern Arctic. As the visit was planned, I was full of apprehension . Surely he would find the journey overwhelming, terrifying. He would be homesick, miserable, lost. He would get sick.

The whole undertaking began to seem foolhardy. Why had we not arranged for the film to be flown to him? Well, we had talked of that possi bility, but we could not fly the whole editing room there, and we would not be able to work on any changes he wanted while he was there. His involvement in the film must be more than a dutiful nod in the direction of the Inuit. For it to be real, he had to come to us. I got to the airport an hour before the plane was due to land. I went to find officials who might make it possible for me to meet Anaviapik straight off the plane, to ensure that he would not have to deal alone with the long journey from plane to immigration, and then to baggage pick -up. A stern woman with the relevant authority showed a mature indifference to my anxious questions. I had hoped to be able to capture her sympathies , if not her imagination, by referring to the Arctic, sketching t he vast distance that Anaviapik had had to travel, telling something of the extreme difference between his language and ours, his world and this one. But she knew better, had the rcal experience, and was unmoved. "You've no need to worry," she said. "We've had Aborigines from Australia arriving here. No harm ever came to any one of them." This left me no argument, no room for appeal. I waited, in an agony of worry, beside the international -arrivals gate, that boundary between individual scrutiny and anonymo us mayhem. I saw neither Australian Aborigines nor, as far as I could tell, any other travellers from distant tribal lands. Just a steady stream of Qallunaat, whose vast numbers and confident haste inflamed my fears. At last Anaviapik arrived, escorted by a British Airways stewardess. HC was wearing sealskin boots, with brown trousers tucked into their patterned tops, and a dark jacket. Over his arm he carried a parka, complete with fox trim on its hood. This was eccentric clothing for a hot summer's day in London. But his Creation Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca face was wreathed in smiles. Not a flicker of worry or discomfort.

We greeted each other with Inuktitut sounds and words of delight.

We walked to my car in the multistorey car park, then drove towards London along the M4. The tramc was den se and moving fast, I had to concentrate hard on the driving. Anaviapik sat beside me, very quiet, watching as we weaved among cars at what must have seemed like crazy speed.

As we were coming through Hammersmith, he broke a long silence, saying: "Now I un derstand why the Qallunaat come to our land to get the oil." These were not the words of an intimidated huntergatherer from the savage wilds. Nor was his comment the next day, when we walked for the first time around the streets of London's Bayswater distr ict: "How amazing that the Qallunaat live in cliffs. I would never be able to find my way here without you." Over the next two weeks, we often played the game of seeing if Anaviapik could guide us from the Bayswater tube stop to my flat — a distance of abou t half a block, with one left turn, a crossing of the road and a climb of half a dozen steps to the building's front door. He never succeeded. He always expressed mock dismay at being lost and •oyed reminding me that, since we lived in cliffs, of course our houses were not easy to tell one from the other. We went to the cutting room and watched the film. Anaviapik had a number of criticisms. A sequence that we had filmed of him showing us the qarmak, the house built of sod and whalebones where he and his family had spent many winters until the 1960s, had been left out. He thought it should be in: how otherwise would Qallunaat understand the way Inuit had lived before the era of the settlement? A scene in the Anglican church, wit h a glimpse of the pond Inlet missionary preaching to the congregation, should be cut.

Everyone knew that the Inuit were Christians; better to use the time for showing other things. An interview that had troubled us, in which three elders say that the Qall unaat care more about polar bears than about Inuit children, was in doubt. We feared that it would be misinterpreted and might express no more than a partial truth. Anaviapik insisted that it Stay in the film: the rules against THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca killing bears were of dispro portionate concern to the officials who made the rules in the new North; the risks to children counted for less than the risks to bears. We worked on the film, making changes and then checking translations, preparing subtitles. In the evenings and on free days Anaviapik and I went on walks in London, tried many kinds of restaurant and visited friends. Anaviapik had said he would like to see white people who were not rich, and had also asked to meet the queen. We spent an afternoon in the East End. But the q ueen's diary was too full for an appointment to be possible, and we said no thanks to an offer from the palace that Anaviapik come to the front door and "make his mark" in the visitors' book. To get some relief from homogenised urban crowds, we took a trip to the Norfolk countryside. I wanted to give Anaviapik some sense of an England that is not all cliffs and cliff dwellers. We set off, driving northeast, across Cambridgeshire and through Suffolk.

I chose a route that was as rural as could be. He looked o ut onto the green landscapes and said, "It's all built." He did not see the difference between town and country except as a matter of degree:

the one had more people and more houses side by side, and the other had more fields and hedgerows. But all of this , hedgerows as much as houses, was made by people; none of it was "nature — at least, not a form Of nature that he would recognise as such. He was always amiable. and interested, but he did not like much of what he saw. Wherever we went, Anaviapik insisted on quizzing people. using me as interpreter, he stopped strangers in the street whose appearance intrigued him. He would say in loud Inuktitut: "Hey, you look just like an Inuk," or "Do you know where I come from?

Have a guess!" This calling out to strangers was sometimes followed by his insisting that I translate what he had said, and then by very curious conversations between the smiling, extrovert Anaviapik and the Japanese or Chinese men and women who expressed, for the most part, as much delight as astonishment. In shops, he would insist on holding long conversations with anybody we bought things from. Everywhere we went, he persuaded me to draw people at adjacent tables into conversation. Where are you Creation Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca from? Whcrc d o you live? DO you have children? Where do they live? DO they have children? Are your parents alive? Do you have brothers and sisters? Where are they? These were the invariable start -up questions. If the alarmed stranger was able to overcome surprise — and m ost did — a long exchange of personal and family stories would follow. In this way Anaviapik conducted a thorough, if not systematic, interrogation of English life. As timc went on, he came to a picture of us as scattered and shiftless. Everyone was on the m ove. Families dispersed. Children lived 97 far away, out of touch. People dreamed of being able to move to some other country. Many said how much they wished they could live in Canada. No, not the Arctic. But Canada. They had relatives or friends there. Th ey would go there too if they could. In London and in the countryside, he met the nomads or the parents of nomads. He did not make judgernents. He was full of admiration for everyone and everything he encountered. But he spoke more and more of the movement from place to place that he sensed and heard about. If any emotion coloured his comments on What he learned, it was apprehension: might this remaking of environment and shiftlessness of people spread to Inuit lands, to his home? Already he knew, and had s poken often to me about, the southerner's readiness to come and live even in the North. This posed a deep threat. Nomads have no real homes, so they cannot be relied upon to stay away from other people's. Once, when we were having coffee in a crowded café, we found ourselves sharing a table with a man of about thirty who was reading an Arabic newspaper. Anaviapik urged me to ask the man what this language was whose writing he had never seen before. For a while I demurred. No, I said, it is not a good idea t o talk to people who are reading by themselves in a café like this. people liked to be left in peace. And anyway, I could tell him that it was Arabic. But Anaviapik was insistent: he wanted to speak with this man, wanted to tell him THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at www.deslibris.ca that he was visiting fr om the Arctic. We are both visitors, he said, so it must be fine for us to talk. I capitulated and leaned across to the stranger. He looked up from his paper, surprised but not hostile. I told him Anaviapik, my friend here, would like to say hello. The man answered in French. So I started again, and soon found myself interpreting a fast and enthusiastic French -Inuktitut conversation. The man said he was from Tunisia and that he was thrilled to meet someone from the Arctic. He had always thought there was a special link between his people and "les Esquimaux." He had seen films of the Arctic, he explained, and 98 had seen the blowing snow. The snow was moved everywhere by the wind. Just like the sand in his country. He had always thought, since then, that the people of the Arctic and the people of North Africa had something very profound in common. Anaviapik was thrilled. Yes, yes. Blowing snow. "Pirqsirqtualuq." "It blows snow very much." They exchanged words for this kind Of snow or sand. Anaviapik glowed wit h pleasure. The Tunisian was moved almost to tears: this was an omen, an indication that good things were to happen in his life, in both their lives. To be so far from their homes, and to find that they shared so much! Anaviapik's visit to London camc to an end. HC had been with us for three weeks. Long enough to do the work, and long enough for him to feel much homesickness. One morning, as we were having our usual late breakfast, sitting in the room where he slept, he said to me: "I have been sleeping here every night now." There was a pause. "I have never before slept in a room by myself." "Never?" I said, my heart sinking as I began to imagine that he had been lying there night after night in dark loneliness. "Only wh en I used to check my fox traps in winter and had no companion. But not often, not often." "And has it been difficult for you, here?" "No," he said. "But I have not changed the time." Creation Ce document est la propriété de réditeur original et est diffusé par desLibris suivant les termes de licence stipulés au www.deslibris.ca I did not know what he meant. "You mean that you have left the time on y our watch as Canadian time?" "No," he said. "I have been thinking about the numbers. Look" — he pointed at his it is eleven at night here, it is six in the evening at home. Now, I do not sleep here until four in the morning That is eleven at night at home . And I sleep seven hours." He pointed to the hands on his watch, showing where they stood after those seven hours. "That is eleven in the morning here.

And that is six in the morning at home. And those are my sleeping times there. Eleven until six. So I a m living here the same as I do there!" And he burst out laughing — perhaps to divert me from any idea that this was a complaint or an expression of unhappiness , and perhaps to point up the comic absurdity of any suggestion that things could be the same in t hese two opposite kinds of place. A few days later I took Anaviapik back to the airport, and we said good -bye at the gate where only travellers can pass. An airline official accompanied him thereafter. He was happy to be going, making jokes.

He wrote to me later to say that the journey had been fine, everyone at home was well, the family were pleased to see him, and he wanted to send his greetings to all of us in London. He also told me that he was going to keep a diary, saying something about every day, an d that he would send it to me in a year, so that I could share a little in what he was doing. He would be going caribou hunting — it was not too late to find animals with prime autumn fur, and his wife was going to make a new set of winter clothes. I never s aw Anaviapik again. We exchanged letters, and he sent me his diary. He left the Arctic on at least one more occasion — in 1977 he was awarded the Order of Canada, honoured for his commitment to his people, for his faith in the salvation of his land. He never ceased to be a hunter. He watched the transformations of his world — the arrival of telephones and television as well as ever more local government and many forms of social and economic development.

But he died in the knowledge that Inuit had the immense ad vantage, in their struggle against the nomads' frontiers, of living beyond the possibility of farms, and in a region where, thus far, the Qallunaat had no cause to build their cities. THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN This material is copyright by the original publisher and provided by desLibris subject to the licensing terms found at