Ancestral Lands Next Year, The Inuit People Of Canada Will Regain Control Of A Territory Called Nunavut

You have to be there to feel how a wolf’s howl - beneath a crescent moon in a sky filled with dancing northern lights - forever becomes part of your soul. In early summer, time flows without punctuation as days merge into undark nights north of the Arctic Circle. Wildflowers dot the tundra and trace the edges of flowing waters in what appear to be endless mountain meadows. This place is called Nunavut, “our land” in the Inuktitut language.

On April 1, 1999, the vast region of the Canadian North will become a new territory larger than any province. Of course, Nunavut has been there all along in the netherworld of the Northwest Territories where the continent splatters into myriad islands before dropping off the edge of the Earth into the Arctic Ocean. But on that date, a line will be drawn on the map of Canada, splitting the Territories, and Nunavut will become a reality.

More important, the establishment of the new territory means the 80 percent Inuit majority will regain control of ancestral lands inhabited for thousands of years before Europeans “discovered” and claimed them without even a treaty. Inuit, meaning “the people,” refers to the circumpolar ethnic group outsiders used to call Eskimos, a name still in use by aboriginals in Alaska, but not in Canada.

Mentioning Alaska begs comparison with a Nunavut that will be a third again larger, farther north, with one-tenth the people and far more polar bears.

Before my visit last August, I held a romantic notion that seeing Nunavut before the change would be akin to a pioneer vision of my native California before statehood. I returned with frontier experiences far beyond my imaginings.

After 1999, tourism in Nunavut is destined to become ever more regulated by local people. Businesses will be required to be at least 51 percent Inuit-owned with key decisions made at the community level. Adventure travel will continue to be the tourism mainstay in a land with only 12 miles of roads outside its few scattered towns. These factors make Nunavut unlikely to become just another one of those ecotourism destinations where travelers face each other in suspiciously comfortable lodgings owned by absentee landlords and surrounded by an underclass of seemingly traditional people who worship the dollar.

An Inuit guide on Baffin Island told me, “We live off the land, while white people live off money. That’s why we worry about our land and you about your money.”

The difference cuts to the heart of what visitors experience. Twice during my month’s stay I witnessed an abrupt change in Inuit villages where perhaps a half-dozen other land-based tourists were being inconspicuously guided. The slow-paced ambience would disappear before my eyes as a hundred or so passengers disembarked from a luxury icebreaker for the day.

The creation of Nunavut involves the world’s largest native land-claim settlement plus cash compensation of $1.148 billion Canadian ($840 million U.S.) for the 22,000 Inuit residents.

The stage was set a century ago when Hudson’s Bay Co. sold its huge assumed holdings to the government without consulting the Inuit. In 1993, however, the Canadian parliament rushed to validate long-disputed Inuit land claims when testimony about forced relocations followed by hardship and starvation began to echo around the world. The Inuit were unquestionably treated as second-class citizens on lands morally their own, but recent scrutiny suggests that all relocations were voluntary and government abuse rare. Canada’s northernmost town of Grise Fjord was settled in 1953 by relocated Inuit, who began urging relatives to leave their old homes along Hudson Bay because conditions were so much better up north.

My plan was to arrive in Grise Fjord by sea kayak, the original aboriginal conveyance, after a trip with Inuit guides led by “Tundra Tom” Faess of Great Canadian Ecoventures.

But on the day before my departure, Tundra Tom called from the bush via satellite phone to report a freak polar storm. His guides were unwilling to venture a hundred miles out amid icebergs in unseasonably frozen seas. Having ignored Tom’s earlier advice to buy trip-cancellation insurance, I was pleased I didn’t have the option of bowing out for a cash refund after inviting my 28-year-old son, Tony, to join me for a month’s adventure. We boarded our scheduled flight with trepidation about what we would do.

Our first stop was Iqaluit, the future capital of Nunavut. Formerly called Frobisher Bay, the town sits on glacier-polished shield rock at the southern edge of Baffin, the world’s fifth-largest island. There we saw Inuit camps on a wild Arctic river, an ancient archeological site and a dog team that had recently returned from the North Pole. But most surprising, yet typical of Nunavut, was “The Road to Nowhere,” a dirt street that abruptly ends two miles out of town in open tundra.

From Iqaluit, a scheduled prop flight took us north over wild cliffs and fjords to Pond Inlet on the island’s north coast. The subsistence hunting-and-fishing village sits on a finger of the sea dotted with icebergs, some assuming strange shapes to the imaginative eye. A local native cooperative, Toonoonik Sahoonik Outfitters, arranged for us to explore the wilds with an Inuit guide, Ham Kadloo, 61. Our jaws dropped when he led us to a tiny open boat about as long as my Chevrolet Suburban anchored beside a wildly sculpted iceberg in the harbor. Our deckhand was to be his 7-year-old greatgrandson, Hosia.

After 125 gallons of gas plus a week’s food and camping gear were loaded, we crowded aboard in comfortable survival suits with Hosia, who proved to be amazingly self-reliant, with the focused attention of a people adapted to a most unforgiving environment. On board or around camp, he did chores or played quietly without supervision.

Ham told me some of his life story. “In 1964, the government rented me a house for $2 a month when I was a subsistence hunter living in an igloo covered with seal skins. Now they charge $600 for the same house. I have to work all the time as a guide for hunters and tourists.”

On our first afternoon, I saw three white spots moving below sheer cliffs dropping into the sea. As we neared shore in heavy swells, a polar bear family sprinted up a steep gully, too far away for a decent photograph from the moving boat. We watched the mother lead her two large cubs into a cul-de-sac with vertical walls that she tried in vain to climb.

Contrary to the legend that polar bears aren’t afraid of anything, this mother wanted to flee. She led her cubs back toward us into an alcove above the water, where she hovered by them and glowered down at us. Ham kept his rifle close at hand as Tony and I jumped onto a wave-swept rock to get photographs of the cornered animals with telephoto lenses, our hearts pounding wildly.

The rage in the mother bear’s eyes spoke volumes about Nunavut’s growing conflict between ecotourism, sport hunting and subsistence hunting of the same wild creatures. Wildlife viewing always suffers in areas where animals are regularly hunted. To a mother bear, hunters and photographers all smell the same.

Ham’s ancestors were lured to the Canadian High Arctic by the profusion of marine mammals, including polar bears. For tourists, seeing large creatures is exciting, but for traditional Inuit traveling across the Bering Strait thousands of years ago, these animals were the very embodiment of life and survival. The long winter night of Arctic darkness without enough stored meat meant slow death by starvation. Whales - bowhead, beluga, narwhal - made the difference between life and death in the most extreme inhabited environment on Earth.

We had come to Pond Inlet because we’d heard reports of thousands of narwhals forced south by the storm that had prevented our kayak journey. For three days we searched the seas for these small whales with long, single tusks, camping in tents on beaches and exploring trackless tundra by night, without seeing more than an occasional seal. Then came an Arctic night more memorable than weeks of Antarctic encounters with penguins.

Ham wanted to camp in a wild fjord beneath an Arctic Yosemite of sculpted granite walls, but I persuaded him to set out across Eclipse Sound at 10 p.m. I had noted in my diary that this was the night when the nearly full moon would rise into a sunset sky.

The seas were calm in the orange glow of the clear August night. Halfway across, Tony spotted something big and dark breaking the glassy surface “like the Loch Ness monster.”

“Narwhal,” Ham exclaimed with a grin, raising his arms in a gesture of shooting a rifle. Seemingly mythical creatures began rising up all around us as the sky and water turned ever more crimson. Groups of two, three and four surfaced at a distance in all quadrants for about a half-hour.

Then what looked like a yellow spotlight appeared on top of a peak to the southeast. It was a scene so otherworldly that it took us a while to recognize the tip of the moon rising into twilight. For the next two hours it moved sideways, never higher than its own diameter above a long crest of snowy peaks, through a kaleidoscope of changing sky colors. I felt as if I were on another planet.

We had more space in the boat returning to Pond Inlet because Ham had left a brightly painted yellow and gray fuel drum behind. It would soon match the rusty ones we had seen dotting almost every beach. On our first day out, Tony had commented, “I thought we were coming to a wild place hardly anybody had seen, but these drums take away much of that feeling.”

One person with a boat could clean up all the drums in a month, but much of the massive influx of Nunavut funding from the central government has instead gone into new infrastructure, such as a $4 million museum and visitor center in Pond Inlet. Inuits and whites alike fear that government aid will dry up once Nunavut is on its own, but so will repeat ecotourism unless the visual pollution is cleaned up. Airfares are high, distances are great, and wildlife is skittish. Nunavut can’t compete with the Galapagos Islands or the Antarctic Peninsula for close encounters with animals, but with a little more tender, loving care, it could win hands down for wildness of its vast frontier.

We spent our last days just outside the future Nunavut at a remote fly-in camp beneath a sky big enough to see the sun set behind a herd of caribou and dark enough to watch the northern lights dance for hours on early September nights.

Inland Inuit, “The People of the Deer,” used to live off the huge caribou herds until cultural change and disease wrought by contact with Hudson Bay traders forced the last aboriginals off the land after World War II. When Inuit like little Hosia regain control of these vast lands that evoke the ghosts of their ancestors, things will be different.

MEMO: Galen Rowell is the author and photographer of “Poles Apart: Parallel Visions of the Arctic and the Antarctic,” and 12 other books plus numerous articles for Life and National Geographic magazines.

This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO For more information or to arrange your own Nunavut adventure, contact: Nunavut Tourism, P.O. Box 59, Iqaluit, Northwest Territories, Canada, X0A 0H0; 800-491-7910; nunatour@nunanet.com. Great Canadian Ecoventures, Tom Faess, Box 6335, Wetaskiwin, Alberta, Canada, T9A 261; 800-667-WILD gce@bcsupernet.com; www.bcsupernet.com/users/gce. Toonoonik Sahoonik Outfitters, Pond Inlet, Northwest Territories, Canada, X0A 0S0; 819-899-8366; www.pondtour.com; pondtour@nunanet.com.