Igloolik June 10^th 1968

The snow is melting fast. It’s 39̊ F out, & to reach our snow gauges out on the sea ice is very hazardous as there cracks along the shore with about 2 feet of slushy snow & water on top! The boys are waiting to go off hunting.

Igloolik village June 10th 1968

            Saturday saw another wild wedding feast in Igloolik & 2 Bombardier loads of people came up from Hall Beach, including the bride’s mother. The service was conducted by the Eskimo Anglican minister & bits of general interest were translated by the Justice of the Peace/ Hudsons Bay Manager. Nasuk, the vicar, doesn’t speak English but when he asked the groom in Eskimo if he took this woman etc – he raised his eyebrows significantly & hissed “I dooo” like a prompter at a school play. The hymn was God Save the Queen, & several Eskimos kept pushing past the bride, vicar etc to take pictures from the altar with noisy Polaroid cameras, then they’d peel off the instant pictures & show them to everyone.

Igloolik shore, boat and telegraph pole June 1968

            After the wedding we gathered once more at the scene of last week’s party and started up where we’d left of! This time there were lots of Eskimos there & they had us all spellbound dancing 8-some reels that the old Scottish whalers had taught them last century. I can’t really describe them, but just imagine 4 smiling couples ambling round like sailors on their sea legs, doing tremendously intricate figures & with their feet tapping away all the time. Each reel lasts about 15 minutes so when the record finishes they put it on again & continue until the dance is finished, & then they all start laughing & clapping.

The super interpreter got up & did a superb solo, skipping from one foot to the other, crossing the room backwards, with lots of whoops & shrieks. When he realized we were all watching & clapping he went terribly shy & stopped, but couldn’t stand still for long, so came up to Jim & challenged him to some sort of contest to see who could outdo the other with fancy steps. Fantastic.

The great thing about the North (although I’ve only been here 2 ½ weeks) is that everyone has the chance to be themselves. Everyone is independent with no superior peering over their shoulder.  I think teaching here would be a tremendous experience. The children are all very eager to learn & when they are given a day off they all groan, then hang round the school.

After the stag party given for the groom last week the school principal had such a bad head he couldn’t teach (he’d drunk some bad home-made beer) & the next day one class in the school wrote in their current affairs book “Mr W was drong last night, Mr R was also drong but he came to school today”

Child travelling on sled wearing caribou fur clothes

            There was a nice big article on us in the Montreal Star the week we left. I’ll send it to you as soon as I can get hold of some more stamps (the P.O. burnt down)

Frank was extremely impressed by [photo of my father’s moustache] as he has a small walrus one. He is now determined to let it grow into handlebars. I told him it’ll take 30 years!!

The children wrote in their current events book “there are 2 scientists, one has white hair, & the other has a mustache, but it isn’t a real one” The white haired one is Dr de Pena an [American] anthropologist. She is Frank’s boss, & the static between her & Foote is something fierce. How sick I am of little lectures on how tea drinking is a psychological thing with me & that coffee is just as thirst quenching. Frank’s cold is psychosomatic, she can put her own milk in her coffee etc.

A woman nutritionist has arrived & insists on poisoning my food by mixing in grated coconut even though I’ve said I can’t stand it. Today we had peaches mixed up with 3 week old raspberries from a smelly can, choked with coconut & when I removed my peaches & washed them she was quite narked. Now de Pena & Carol are having a set-to about who does the cooking.

Amarok skating

Travel out of Igloolik is very dodgy now as the ice is breaking up & they won’t take the Bombardiers out. The mail therefore came by plane which was fortunately dropping some supplies here for 2 geologists who have arrived unexpectedly [Hans Trettin, with his pilot Doug Hemby and radio operator Tom Pollen]. Suspiciously though, I only got your one² letter s & am expecting a lot more mail than that. The warehouse in Hall Beach caught fire this week after an Eskimo used a blow lamp on his skidoo inside. The head teacher is shipping out all his belongings & 3 crates of his stuff caught fire! He’s very depressed about it as they’re all his super records etc – but resigned.

Another helicopter is missing now. There’s still hardly any water as it’s even impossible to get out onto the sea ice to get that now! (sea ice loses its salt after a few months & you just wander out onto the bay & cut your water supply & pop it onto a dog sled) As there are 8 of us here now things like baths & hair washing are out.

It’s embarrassing to be associated with Foote & de Pena. Funny how lecturers like them always talk as if facing 300 students & their voices drone on & on & on all day & night.

Anglican Church Igloolik

            There’s an old Bob Hope movie on in the hut opposite tonight. All the kids come round selling little trinkets for 25c – the admission fee, on movie night.

 

Thurs 11th

Raining steadily. 3.30 walked up to the ridge to take b/w photos of meltwater in rain. Beautiful & soul lifting up there. Wandered by the edge of this desolate lake, I heard the wind cry in the sedge... N wind 15-20 mph, temp 37. Saw eider male on lower NW ridge.

Walked to some big rocks to discover it was a boulder-field - felsenmeer! Large granite boulders concentrated on highest point of ridge. A dog howling in the village wafts down on the wind. Find what look like wolf spoor - contain lemming bones & skins - obviously a 1/2 starving wolf is lurking in the rocks. Decide they must be huge snowy owl pellets - ca. 4" long & 1 1/4" thick.

Amarok has emptied the kitchen garbage bin, the bathroom & my cupboard of all moveables & chewed them on the living room carpet. Also streaked the carpet with bacon fat! He looked vv guilty. Watched a woman run down onto the ice with a pail in the rain. Fill it with drinking water from a pool, then squat & pee, then run home.

Sea ice Turton Bay, Igloolik

The main “street” is now under a foot of water & slush. The children love it & are floating about on boxes & oil drums & paddling in it. The village has been invaded by gulls during the last week & they hop around on the roof sounding like thunder.

Igloolik village from the air, sea still frozen. Hudsons Bay buildings with red roofs, Catholic Mission buildings bottom left with Father Fournier's stone church behind it

Ottawa has shipped up about 200 mattresses for no apparent reason, & they can’t give them away. I wondered why so many sleds were de lux, mattress-padded models! Now the snow is melting all sorts of things are coming to light, including 50 telegraph poles Ottawa was convinced were needed in Igloolik! Actually we already have poles & a telephone system. Only about 25 houses have phones.

A woman mending a tent with a hand sewing machine, a toddler on her back

            An Eskimo man came round here to have a good look at us. Colin told us that when he lived in Hall Beach he appeared one day proudly driving a superb dog team down the road. Everyone knew he had no dogs of his own so they asked him where he’d got them. “Oh, I found them on the rubbish tip” he said. Everyone knows that things on the rubbish tip belong to no-one, so he assumed they’d been thrown away. Actually they belonged to a man who was sorting through the tip for valuable things that may have been discarded from the DEW line base. I looked through my notes & found that the man who did a survey here in 1965 mentions him as “the laziest bum around” Poor man, fancy being blacklisted in Ottawa!

Plan of Igloolik summer 1968

            Hiram filled Frank’s pipe with toilet tissue & tobacco & Frank smoked it all. We’ve just told him about & he says it tasted very good & he couldn’t understand why it drew so well & why people kept asking him how it tasted!

Our loo is the bucket variety & I’m sure I’ll never remember to flush the lavatory when I get back. We have a ventilation pipe which blasts cold air down into the bucket so you don’t sit there very long, despite the fact that we are all reading The Invisible Man which is in the bathroom. Should finish it by Sept.

            Our friendly hunters have just come round for coffee & Enoki has had all his beautiful long hair cut off into a crew cut. He’s getting ragged unmercifully & they’ve put a bobble hat on him now.



Dotted buildings are the shcool and government staff houses, the IBP house is the middle of three on the shore at the bottom

            Hope you like the stamps on this. The narwhal (pronounced whale) is found near Igloolik & its horn is the thing that started the legend of the unicorn. People brought them back & said they were from a one-horned beast etc. They only catch about 1 or 2 a year here, but I’d love to get hold of a horn!

Well [the ‘lazy bum’] came round with his squeeze box & we’ve just had a little musical session with him & Enoki & Kamanerk. Enoki taught 4 of us to do a jig & we were bounding round the room doing a 5-some reel! As [the man] played. He’s very quick & picked up a French Canadian tune Mike plays on the mouth organ. We’ve been recording the concert which is very successful & causes much merriment. Mike has just asked him if he can play any Eskimo songs. After a lot of thought he said yes & started to play Scotland the Brave!! When he left he said that usually white man pay him a dollar for recording his playing!

Mike cutting up a seal behind our house with an audience sitting on the WWII landing craft 'the barge'on the beach,         June 1968

I’ve been up at Kamanerk’s house watching his wife scrape a seal. Also round for coffee with the geologists. The leader is a very civilized & pleasant German, Hans Trettin, & it was so pleasant talking to him. He laughed at my jokes – which no-one’s done for 3 weeks. 

So here’s wishing you all my love & kisses. Jenny xx