Sea Change in the Arctic Part I
Introduction
The North Dakota prairie was my home for 10 years. It was far removed from the clatter and swirl of mainstream American life--at the time, a perceived failing. In hindsight, its greatest strength. It was there I grew a voice, discovered photography, fell dumbstruck in love with the seasons of the Great Northern Plains. Brief, but vibrant summers, and winters of such intensity I can still imagine, even in a torpid, Virginia summer, the power of that arctic wind chill. There are few trees on the prairie, nothing to block the chill blasts dieseling down from the North, from October to March. And that Cold...
Our Coldest time was that February night it was minus 38 degrees Fahrenheit (and Celsius!) a 40-mile-per-hour wind, equaling a near 100 below wind chill. After warming our car for 30 minutes, its vaporous exhaust clouding the driveway, Jim and I drove out. Driving along dimly lit streets to a friend's house for dinner, the rubber wheels screeching and groaning on glassy pavement, the car seemed to swim through a swirling wind-whipped ground blizzard. All sound and light seemed muted, yet magnified, as if we we'd been transported to life on a different frequency, more akin to space travel than mere winter. It was easy that night to imagine an Inuit Cold, without a warmed car, murky streetlights, a 75 degree Fahrenheit friend's house. And be awed beyond count.
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| Carol south of Minot, North Dakota circa 1978 photo: Jim Wallwork |
Arctic Works
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In the 1950s, while Swiss photographer Robert Frank was driving across America, soon to change the world of photography, and Jackson Pollock was creating Abstract Expressionism, putting New York City on the international art map, an epic transformation was taking place in the Canadian Arctic.
Toronto, Canada 1939
Canada's Supreme Court ruling on the 1939 Indian Act that the aboriginal Inuit should receive the same rights to health, welfare, and education benefits as Canadian Indians. World War II delays its implementation.
Baker Lake, Keewatin, Western Hudson Bay, Canada 1940s-1950s
Reports flooded the South of dire circumstances in the Arctic
and of widespread loss of life. Members of the Canadian
government responded to this humanitarian crisis by forced
relocation of the Inuit into small villages.
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| Boy with Bear Artist Ohito Ashoona Inuit Courtesy Eskimo Art Gallery http://www.eskimoart.com/ |
"By 1951, the Eskimo throughout the Arctic were already dying at an unprecedented rate, of malnutrition and its attendant diseases. In those few areas where the incidence of tuberculosis was known with certainty, as many as 48 percent of the population was afflicted," reported Canadian writer Farley Mowat. He recounted, in his research expeditions around the Arctic that, "...a series of horrific disasters... resulting in the deaths of at least 200 Eskimos, mostly from starvation and consequences of severe malnutrition." Mowat also hints that the Canadian government's rush to evict Eskimo from their settlements, was to establish Canadian sovereignty of the resource-rich North, as it was increasingly evident that the Russians could challenge Canadian control of the tundra lands and blurred boundaries of moving glaciers.
These devastating forces set in motion rapid change of the Inuit, from a preeminent hunter-gathering society, that sustained itself for thousands of years in one of the harshest environments on earth, hunting the fiercest mammals, to the bottom of the market economy, domesticated, living in cities. This would be like plunking Wall Street stockbrokers, in their Brooks Brothers suits, and polished Florsheims, down by seaplane onto the western shore of Baker Lake, to sell stocks in a near-cashless society. They may have adjusted, but their hearts wouldn't have been in it.
Across the Arctic, from the Beaufort Sea to Labrador, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) began removing Inuit from their camps and placing them in villages so they could access modern medical care, education, and monthly government stipends. Some were sent to tuberculosis sanitariums. Many Inuit children were removed from their families all together, and sent to boarding schools in the South, to mainstream them into modern Canadian life. Some weren't even allowed to speak their native language. The rapidity and method of Inuit removal from their ancestral homes created profound social, physiological, psychological, spiritual, and economic hardship that those communities are still grappling with today, 60+ years later. According to the World Health Organization, Inuit suicide rates are among the highest in the world. They also have extremely high rates of alcoholism and depression. The Inuit did not have the right to vote until 1950.
Bibliography (for Hunting Art 1,2,3, & 4)
Blodgett, Jean Grasp Tight the Old Ways (Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario 1983)
-Collins, Henry, Frederica De LaGuna, Edmund Carpenter and Peter Stone
The Far North (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1973)
-Fitzhugh, William W. and Susan A. Kaplan, Inua Spirit World of the Bering Sea Eskimo (Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982) -
-Flaherty, Robert director, Nanook of the North, 1922, Criterion Collection 1998
-Hessel, Ingo Inuit Art an Introduction (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998)
-Houston, John Confessions of an Igloo Dweller (McClelland & Stewart 1996)
-Houston, John The White Dawn (Orlando, Florida, Harcourt Brace Inc.1973)
-Houston website http://www.houston-north-gallery.ns.ca/ for reproductions
-Mowat, Farley High Latitudes An Arctic Journey
(South Royalton,Vermont:Steerforth
Press, 2002)
______ Michael Scott director Lost in the Barrens Sunday Night Productions, 1990
-Report on Violence and Health Summary, 2000, http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/world_report/factsheets/en/selfdirectedviolfacts.pdf
-Ross, John F. “Top Dogs” Smithsonian, January 2004, 43.
-Rowell, Galen. “Nunavut: What’s to Become the Newest Canadian territory in 1999
Might Well Be the Continent’s Last Frontier.” Grand Forks Herald, March 19, 1998
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