The Ice Remembers: An Inuit Reading of the Edge

The scientists arrived with instruments and asked us where the ice was thin. We had known for six hundred years. They wrote it down and called it anecdote, and then their instruments agreed with us, and then it was data.

Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit is the word for it — that which has long been known. It is not folklore. It is a body of observation with a longer time series than any station in the Arctic, held in people rather than in a hard drive. I can look at the surface between here and the floe edge and tell you where a current has thinned it from below. My father taught me by making me wrong in safe places.

We built with what there was. Snow, because snow is an insulator and stone is not. Skin and sinew, because they move with a body in cold that makes cotton into a blade. Goggles cut from antler with a slit, which cure snow blindness by geometry. Nothing here was ever primitive. It was solved.

Then a ship came with a flag and a name for a strait that already had one, and men who died of lead and pride within sight of food they would not eat because it was raw. We watched them die. We told the searchers where the bodies were. It went into the record as a rumour from natives.

They took the children south to school and shot the dogs. That is not a metaphor. Without dogs a man cannot hunt, and without hunting he is on rations, and a family on rations for one generation is a family that has to be taught to hunt again from a book. We are doing that now, eleven years into a programme, with young people who are very good at it and who did not have to be.

So when a member stands with me at the ice edge in May, what he is paying for is the country-food programme and the ice-safety course. And he will be told where to put his feet, and he will put them there.