Nunani: In the bones of the world (Part six)

Imagine that you live in an orphanage, where your only friend is your cousin, who is the same age as yourself. As very young children, you do everything together, and form the only family you know.

But the years roll by, and you are eventually adopted. So is your cousin — but by a different family.

So you are separated. You each move to different areas, grow up with unique ideals and lifestyles. In time, you forget that the other ever existed. Your years together are lost in the fog of infancy.

Soon, you are a grown adult. You are a professional, settled in your ways. You are highly educated, well-groomed, conservative. It’s time to put down roots, and you buy a home in a neighbourhood you like.

Your cousin is also growing — but in a completely different way. He drops out of school and takes up body-building. He becomes a labourer, earning just enough to support his non-stop, party-all-night lifestyle.

By chance, that new home you bought happens to be right next to your long-lost cousin’s house, and you are now neighbours. Cruel years have taken their toll on both of you, and you fail to recognize each other in the slightest. Even worse, your radically different lifestyles result in friction. You are not quite enemies, but you annoy one another intensely. You begin to refer to each other as, “that kind.” He throws garbage onto your property to bother you, and you get him back by calling the police when he parties too loudly.

Eventually, your neighbour’s lack of means catch up with him. Mounting health problems sap his funds, he can’t make his house payments, and the bank forecloses on him. He moves on. The ramshackle house is torn down for use as a lot, and your neighbour fades from memory. In time, he is no more than an amusing story to relate to your friends.

Neither he, nor you, ever realized that you were cousins.

The story above describes the relationship between Inuit and Tunit. It is interesting that Inuit tradition has always referred to the Tunit as a separate people — to be completely honest, a separate species altogether, when in fact there is a great deal of archaeological evidence to demonstrate that Inuit and Tunit derive from the same root culture.

As most things end up going in the Arctic, the story of Inuit and Tunit is one of east versus west. If we go back in time about five millennia, we find a semi-Asiatic culture known as the “Arctic Small Tool tradition,” which had spread itself out over Alaska, Arctic Canada, and Greenland. These people are not well-known, and they are named for the tiny blades they used to make (which, if you look at photos of them, are remarkably well-crafted).

Due to the different environments found in east and west, the small-tool people began to develop along those lines. Within two millennia, the westerners were developing into the so-called “Norton” culture, while the easterners were developing into the “Dorset” culture.

About 2,000 years ago, the westerners — the Norton culture — began to radically change once again. The Arctic, at the time, was undergoing nasty temperature shifts toward a cold extreme, and the westerners began to adapt to the change in their environment by mastering the ability to hunt sea mammals — that very ability that so marks much of Inuit skill today.

The Norton-culture-changed-sea-mammal-hunters are known as the “Thule” culture.

By any standard, the Thule were an astoundingly resourceful people, and some of their innovations included snow houses, drag floats, watercraft both large and small, toggling harpoons, and the use of dogs to pull sleds. They were to northern culture what Albert Einstein was to physics — a revolution in the Arctic way of life.

The success of the Thule allowed them to spread themselves out, travelling great distances by dog or boat to bring in terrific hauls of sea mammal prey. As a result, they moved eastward, settling into lands already occupied by the Dorset people — their forgotten cousins.

And by that time, the Dorset and Thule peoples had developed in such completely different ways that each was barely recognizable as human by the other.

(Continued next week.)