[Marxism] A Canadian trail of tears

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, April 8, 2007
Trail of Tears
By ELIZABETH ROYTE

THE LONG EXILE
A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic.
By Melanie McGrath.
268 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

Throughout human history, seemingly simple turns 
of events have changed the fates of individuals 
and nations. In 1906, Thomas Watt Coslett 
invented a way to keep iron corset stays from 
rusting, and the bottom fell out of the 
whale-bone market. The whalers who remained on 
the eastern shore of Hudson Bay switched to 
trading for the creamy pelts of the Arctic fox, 
which local Inuit, on the Ungava Peninsula, began 
to trap in ever greater numbers. But when prices 
for skins fell in 1950, at a time when fox 
populations had also crashed, trappers ? formerly 
subsistence hunters ? moved to trading posts and 
begged rations from the Canadian police.

Meanwhile the cold war raged, and the Canadian 
government became increasingly concerned about 
its sovereignty in the east Arctic archipelago. 
The United States and Canada jointly ran a 
weather station on Ellesmere Island, but Canadian 
officials wanted permanent residents there. The 
remedy to both the geopolitical and welfare 
problems was simple: uproot the Ungava Inuit and 
plant them 1,200 miles north, on Ellesmere. In 
?The Long Exile,? Melanie McGrath tells the story 
of this forced relocation ? a tale of almost 
unrelenting horror ? with so much moral vigor and 
descriptive verve that one quits reading only 
long enough to shake one?s head in disbelief. And 
then, with a shiver, reads on.

To succeed on Hudson Bay, the Inuit needed to 
know everything about their immediate 
surroundings: the landmarks, the animals? travel 
and migration routes, the location of fresh-water 
springs, berries, bird eggs and willow-worm 
cocoons to dip into seal fat for dinner. 
Describing the land?s natural features with 
lyrical precision, McGrath emphasizes that the 
harsh physical realities of this place shaped not 
only how the Inuit lived but also their 
personalities, making a strong case that 
psychology is destiny. At one time, expressing 
rage, lust or ambition were considered so 
threatening to Inuit group survival that 
persistent offenders were banished. But while 
serenity and self-restraint were adaptive in the 
Inuit?s ancestral environment, their 
unwillingness to speak out, on Ellesmere, would almost kill them.

It was the late summer of 1953 when the Canadian 
government deposited three reluctant Inuit 
families, including a master carver named Paddy 
Aqiatusuk, on a narrow Ellesmere beach. They had 
been promised abundant game and a return ticket 
in one year?s time if they were unhappy. They 
were, in fact, instantly miserable.

At 81 degrees north latitude, Ellesmere is, 
McGrath notes, the harshest terrain that humans 
have ever continuously inhabited. A high arctic 
desert, its interior is ?an impenetrable mass of 
frozen crags and deep fjords.? The Inuit soon 
learned that marine mammals were scarce, as were 
caribou, fox and fresh water. Their clothing 
wasn?t warm enough, and their sleds and harnesses 
were all wrong for the rocky terrain. The rough 
waters made hunting by kayak impossible, and the 
dry wind made their dogs? lungs bleed. Sufficient 
snow for snow houses arrived late, leaving the 
settlers in flimsy canvas tents until late 
winter. There wasn?t enough fuel for fires. The 
air was almost 30 degrees colder than back home, 
and the near constant wind made it feel more than 
50 degrees worse. Four months of darkness ?made 
hunting an almost daily terror,? McGrath writes. 
Ellesmere supported a small musk ox population, 
but the police detachment, 40 miles from the 
Inuit encampment, forbade killing them. The 
starving Inuit ate bird feathers, made broth from 
boot liners. ?The children leaked diarrhea then 
vomit which the women in the camp fed to the dogs 
rather than have it go to waste.?

Too reticent to complain, even when to save her 
family from starvation, Aqiatusuk?s 6-year-old 
granddaughter was forced onto the ice to hunt in 
total darkness, the Inuit persevered. When they 
finally screwed up their courage and asked to go 
home, the police refused. It was logistically 
complicated: the Inuit must cope. Government 
careers were on the line: the colony had to 
succeed. Its inhabitants were the equivalent of 
national flags fluttering in the wind.

McGrath, wickedly talented, brings every bit of 
this to life (helped by her Inuit subjects? 
preternatural memory for details). We hear the 
gnash of the ice (?a terrible, raw, geologic 
sound?), feel the pangs of hunger and thirst. We 
feel, too, the Inuit?s aching sense of 
abandonment and betrayal, their utter 
disorientation in a land where they knew nothing 
of the animal routes, the sea?s eddies and 
currents or the habits of wind and ice. Such 
details are not a matter of comfort, they are a 
matter of survival. McGrath is a meticulous 
researcher ? she took the trouble to learn the 
names and colors of lichens that grow on rocks 
beneath bird colonies and fox lookouts ? and she 
writes as if she?d lived in the Arctic for years. 
The book moves quickly, to a drumbeat of doom. As 
the Inuit approach their new home, ?the frail 
summer had already begun to sicken and the sky 
pressed down on the land like a dead hand.?

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/books/review/Royte.t.html


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