Taissumani, April 30

KENN HARPER

Last week I quoted a number of examples where Arctic explorers had said that Inuit played fast and loose with the truth, that their testimonies of historical events could not be relied on, and that, behind it all, was a misplaced desire to please, to give the questioner the answer that they thought he wanted.

Modern-day Inuit find these comments perplexing, sometimes insulting. But it’s hard to know now what the realities were then.

I would like to put forward a hypothesis on the nature of Inuit memory of historical events.

Inuit folk memory serves well in many instances. Indeed, it is phenomenally accurate over periods of centuries. In Greenland, folk memories of certain events which happened in the days when the ancient Norse inhabited areas of Greenland were preserved accurately until Heinrick Rink wrote them down in the 1800s.

In Baffin Island, Charles Francis Hall discovered in the 1860s that the Inuit of Frobisher Bay preserved accurate memories of the visit of Martin Frobisher to their shores almost three hundred years earlier.

In the Thule District of Greenland, the Polar Eskimos remembered in remarkable detail the events of the great migration led by the shaman Qitdlarssuaq in the 1860s.

The three examples I have given (and there are many more) share one element in common. They all deal with the arrival of, or activities of, a group of outsiders who had come into their midst. In the first two examples, these outsiders were white.

In the last, the outsiders were from another group of Inuit. These, and many other events, were folk memories of events significant to the Inuit who were affected by them. Their memories were preserved and passed down as part of the intellectual culture of the group.

Yet I can provide another list of things that Inuit believe strongly, which are erroneous or impossible.

In 1930, the Krueger expedition, which included an Inuk guide from the Thule District, disappeared on the ice near Axel Heiberg Island. None of the party was ever seen again.

Yet I have had Inuit in Qaanaaq tell me that people from their community, passing through Thule Air Base in the 1970s, saw an aging Aaqioq, Krueger’s guide, working as a wage labourer at the base.

Such a thing is, of course, impossible. Others have said that Aaqioq is living, married and with a family, in the Canadian Arctic. This is equally impossible.

In the 1940s, the entire family of an Iglulik man named Kangualuk disappeared on the shores of Foxe Basin; Inuit who searched for them found their camp, their dogs and their sleds, indeed everything except the people.

In the 1970s a rumour developed in Baffin Island that a descendant of Kangualuk had been discovered as an interpreter at an international conference in Europe and that he had said that the family had been abducted and taken away in a Russian submarine, and that they had continued to live in Russia, Russia being the bogey-man of the 1970s although the enemies of the 1940s were the Germans. Again, such a story is preposterous.

In Qaanaaq, when I began my own research into the life of Minik Wallace, I was told by many elderly Inuit that, after Minik had gone south in 1916, he had become a fighter aircraft pilot and died a hero’s death in a fiery crash, or that he had collected his large inheritance that allegedly awaited him there and lived a long and happy life as a gentleman, or that he had moved to the United States and become a dentist.

One can see where each of these endings had its genesis. From the members of the Crocker Land Expedition, the Inuit knew there was a war in Europe; Minik himself had told them that a large inheritance awaited him; when he had come back to his people in 1909 one of his few possessions had been a set of dentist’s tools.

How does this second set of stories differ from the first?

The stories are riddled with confusion and uncertainty. They have no satisfactory endings. It is human nature to want an ending, and it is also human nature to fabricate one.

In the case of the Krueger expedition, an ending was fabricated to explain the fate of one of their fellow tribesmen, Krueger himself being unimportant to them.

In the case of the mysterious disappearance of the entire Kangualuk family, an external influence was brought in to explain what was inexplicable from within Inuit culture.

In the case of Minik’s departure south, tidbits of non-relevant information were ascribed larger significance. The result is the same in every case — a tale that is preposterous or contradictory.

I would sum up the differences in the two sets of stories in this way. When there is no controversy, when stories are straight-forward, unambiguous, and have a clear and well- defined ending, Inuit folk memory will generally prove accurate.

When there is controversy or confusion, or no clear-cut ending, imagination will take over and folk memory will be more inclined to be inaccurate.

The case of the Inuit memories of Dr. Cook’s journey (discussed last week) fit the latter category well. There was controversy of a type the Inuit were unaccustomed to. There was confusion. Ittukusuk and Aapilak had no way of knowing that two superb Arctic travellers, both known to the Inuit, were locked in invective of a type heretofore unknown to Arctic exploration.

But they did feel that it was incumbent upon them to produce answers to a number of questions posed by a team working for the more powerful of the two explorers. That is why they asked Whitney what Peary’s men were trying to get them to say.

Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.