The Long Exile: A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. Melanie McGrath
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like putting his fingers in the qulliq, or teasing the sled dogs. He wouldn't have been scolded. Whenever he had temper tantrums or expressed childish frustration his family would simply have laughed them off until he had grown out of them. This he would have been encouraged and expected to do. Inuit value serenity and self-possession. To them explosions of rage or pique are childish characteristics.
Arctic explorers of the early twentieth century like Robert Peary and even Roald Amundsen often made note in their diaries and other writings of the impassivity or inscrutability of Inuit, little understanding that without great emotional self-restraint, life in Arctic conditions would, for human beings of any kind, be impossible. To be inscrutable, which is to say, restrained and self-contained, is a good thing in the Inuit world. More than that, it is a tool for survival. Almost by definition, the Arctic's white explorers failed to understand this. For the most part they were vainglorious, self-serving men. The Arctic was a very expensive place to explore. Funds would not have flowed to wallflowers. But they were not the kind of men who would readily have understood the Inuit.
In Robert Flaherty's day Inuit beleived that the only fixed part of a person's personality was their atiq, or soul. All the rest was ihuma, the gradual deposition of experience. Even now a bad-tempered or hysterical person is said to be nutaraqpaluktuq or childish, and his ihuma stunted, making him ebullient and oversensitive. A person with too much ihuma, on the other hand, is said to be narrow-minded, overdemanding and analytical. In the Arctic, each condition is a liability. The man with too much ihuma will allow his brooding to take him away from the real world, until he falls through the ice one day, or stumbles into a crevasse. A person with too little is bound, sooner or later, to go crazy. The ideal Inuit type, a man or woman with just enough ihuma, is cheerful, calm and patient in adversity, immune to irritation, sulking or to the hostility of others. He takes his life as it comes, recognises its limits and accept its various outcomes. The most important words in his vocabulary are immaga, perhaps, and ayunqnaq, it can't be helped.
Which is not to say the Inuit value dourness or solemnity. On the contrary, Inuit children are brought up to be happy, or, leastwise, to look it. When a person feels happy, or quiva, people are drawn to him. In this respect we are not so different. As much as life in the temperate zones, or in the tropics, leading a successful life in the Arctic is all about having people on your side.
Displays of rage, frustration or depression are so disapproved of among the Inuit that many grow up without any conscious sense of having these feelings. In every community, of course, there are misfits, men and women whose inner selves grind against their outward expression, men and women, in other words, who live a gentle, or not so gentle, lie. In the past, these more tortured souls might find outlets as shamans or anatoq, and their internal ruffles might become a sign of peculiar power. Unable to find their place in conventional life, they would be honoured and respected as exceptions. This had always been the way Inuit managed the unconventional, the eccentric and the mentally ill, and it remained so until missionaries stamped out shamanism in the late nineteenth century. By the time Josephie was born, the old ways had become shameful and the people who practised them were neither spoken about nor publicly acknowledged. This was no longer a world with any place in it for misfits.
So far as anyone can tell, or cares to recall, Josephie Flaherty was a balanced child with neither excess nor deficit of ihuma. In retrospect, some who knew him talk of having detected a hint of oversensitivity, some nub of excess, but most speak of him as a loving boy, helpful, loyal and a good son to Maggie. He was, they say, self-reliant, quiet, even brooding, someone who got on with what he had to do without a fuss, and with no particular consciousness, at least in his early life, that his mixed blood marked him out as different. He felt himself to be Inuit, with all that being Inuit means. The ties that bound him were the ties of his Arctic family and for the remainder of his life they would be indissoluble.
There was no getting away from the fact that Josephie was different, though. He grew up tall with gangly limbs and softer, less ruly hair than that of full-blood Inuit boys. His lips were fuller, the face longer, his eyelids adopting a compromise position, halfway between Asia and Ireland. His arms were unusually long and his paddle hands lent him a seal-like air, an impression only strengthened as he headed into puberty and sprouted whiskery facial hair.
Josephie Flaherty's early life was measured out in ship years, by the annual arrival and departure of the supply ship, Nascopie.
There was a saying in Inukjuak that the second best day of the year was the day the Nascopie arrived and the best day was the day it left. No one disputed which of these days was the more exciting. The moment news of the ship's imminent arrival reached them from the north, men all along the coast would fire their rifles. The members of the Nujarluktuk family would quickly change into their smart clothes, rush down to the shore and paddle out to meet the ship, moving alongside it for a while to exchange smiles and waves with the crew, the Hudson Bay trader, the policemen moving between posts, the missionary, the medic, the civil servant and the occasional geologist or researcher on board. If young Josephie ever looked for his father's face among the passengers, he would not have found it, but it is perfectly possible that he would not have looked.
The family would make their way south along the coast to the mouth of the river, where the high-summer water, free now from ice, rushed to meet the sea, and they would tie up their boats at the ‘pier’, a strip of sand lined with rocks at the water's edge. By the time the Nascopie was at anchor, the family's tent would be up, its guys secured to rocks, and the women would be arranging skins at the sleeping end and stoking a willow-twig fire on which to make tea. A while later, the ship's whaleboat would begin chugging towards the shore, and the Hudson Bay Company post's boat would head out to meet it. From 1935, when the first police post arrived in Inukjuak, an RCMP Peterhead joined the little flotilla. The police were not a welcome arrival. The Inukjuamiut could not see the point of them, since no one ever broke the law. Their chief role, so far as the Inuit were concerned, seemed to be to busy the settlement flagpole with its Union Jack and Maple Leaf every ship time. The routine was always the same. Shortly after the flags began to billow a priest of some sort would be dropped off at the detachment, along with another man in police uniform and an assortment of other qalunaat, the flags would flutter upwards and the assembled would sing ‘O Canada’ to a circling audience of mildly puzzled loons. From the vantage of their tents the Inuit would shrug and mutter ayunqnaq, it can't be helped.
For the next three days they would all be treated to the bounty of the Hudson Bay Company and the government of Canada combined, which is to say that once the ship was unloaded, the bill of lading checked, the cargo neatly stacked in the Hudson Bay Company store, there would be a ‘mug-up’ and all the sugared tea the Inuit could drink accompanied, perhaps, by some hardtack biscuits and a sardine or two. The mug-up would give way to races, a cat's cradle competition and, perhaps, a football game, the prize for which might be a can of sardines or, perhaps, a tin of hardtack. The following day there would be more tea, a solemn sermon from the visiting priest (Anglican), followed by a photography session during which various qalunaat would snap Inuit stiffly sporting their best ceremonial parkas. These same qalunaat might then buy a few souvenirs, sealskin clothing, ceremonial drums, soapstone carvings and the like, before boarding the ship once more. After that, the Inuit would be sent to the Nascopie's medical rooms for a cursory check-up and a reward of a box lunch of hardtack biscuits and sardines. Finally, there would be a showing in the Hudson Bay Company store of a movie, often something with a sea or sailing theme. Though you might think it an obvious choice, so far as we know, Nanook of the North was never shown.
The Nascopie also brought the annual mail. For the first thirty-three years of his life there was never anything for Josephie, which was okay since he could not read.
The day after the screening, at some point during the night, the Nascopie would weigh anchor and began its 400-mile journey west to Churchill, Manitoba, on the other side of Hudson Bay. Some of the Inuit would paddle with the ship for a while, others would watch from the shore, then they would change back into their workaday clothes and would begin to gather their belongings for the journey back to their camps. Those who had credit at the store would stock up on ammunition, flour, lard, tobacco and