Nunani: Of cabbages and kings: Part One

RACHEL ATTITUQ QITSUALIK

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:”

— from “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll

It was a perfect night for it. The moon hung coldly in the sky, a veil of shifting, charcoal clouds caressing its face. It was perfect for a game of amaruujaq — “playing wolf.”

The wolf awaits at his post, waits for the villagers to meet their hideous fate. He howls menacingly, approaching the innocent victims. Most escape, barely, but some are not so lucky. They’ve been touched by the wolf, and have themselves been transformed, to feed on flesh and bone.

But this game of amaruujaq is not set in the windswept, frozen ice-cove of my childhood. Instead, it takes place at a modern day Army Cadet camp sponsored by the First Hussars, a militia regiment of Ontario. And the faces of those players are not the smiling, bronze, wind-burnt faces of Inuit children. They are the children of non-Inuit cultures — the little descendants of a post-colonial Canada. Only the moon seems one and the same. Well, the moon, and the players’ enthusiasm for the game itself.

The explanation of how I ended up playing amaruujaq with a bunch of Army Cadets begins with my father-in-law, who asked a favour of me. He happens to be the Commanding Officer (“CO”) of the local cadet corps (the whole reason I’m stuck in the South at all is because my husband’s relatives live there). My father-in-law happens — luckily — to be proud of the fact that he has an Inuit daughter-in-law, something special for a southerner, I guess. Consequently, he asked me to lecture about Inuit to his cadets. This was last year, and I guess the cadets got a kick out of it, because I was asked back again, as a volunteer speaker on cold and the Arctic in general.

Well, this next volunteer stint was to take place at a winter camp out in the country-side, over a few days, on the edge of a wooded, semi-wilderness area. The whole thing was like herding cats, as a handful of adult officers tried to organize some 40 cadets of ages ranging from 10 to 16 years old — making sure they were safe, fed, and issued proper “kit.” Such kit included a sleeping bag and useless, self-inflatable mattress — something we all slept upon, on the floor, together, with females on the kitchen floor and males in the main hall. It was lights out at 2200 (10:00 p.m.), and up at 0530 (5:30 a.m.). It was army ration packs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No showers. One bathroom.

In other words, it was fantastic. Here I was camping again!

I was scheduled to do my “Inuit” thing, as all the officers called it, on the evening of the second day, and the cadets would be mine for several hours — a couple of senior cadets keeping the rowdy, smaller ones in line. I admit I was experiencing some anxiety, since no one could tell me exactly what they wanted me to do. So I had to mostly wing it, and hope the cadets were responsive. I gathered that I was expected to talk about extreme cold, to impart some Inuit tricks for getting around it, since this trip was technically called “Winter Indoctrination,” and the theme was winter survival. That wasn’t a problem, but I decided to spice things up a bit — tell some old stories, teach the kids some ajajaaq (string games), and show them how to play amaruujaq.

To me, this was all consistent with the survival theme. I wanted them to understand that Inuit have not simply survived for their millennia in the Arctic because of a few “cold weather tricks,” but because they have shaped their entire culture, the way they relate to one another, to suit such conditions. Inuit culture has not thrived because we can make emergency drinking water by melting snow in skins on our backs; or because we can read natiruviat, snaking snow-drift lines that can determine wind direction and help one get home.

Our culture has thrived because of the way we train the minds of our children. And this begins with the manual dexterity learned from the shapes called forth from a simple string, or with the team work learned from a game such as amaruujaq.

(Continued next week.)