No shooting

We were going to shoot here, but then we figured we had better not.

Aiming your dish

I notice that these satellite dishes are aimed almost down at the horizon; back home they are still pointed more or less at the sky. That's part of what makes internet access so difficult up here - every form of telecommunication goes through these things, and the signal is going sideways through the atmosphere for many miles before it emerges. So if it's cloudy, or otherwise atmospherically challenged, all that interference gets extra time to work on your signal and mess it up.
These particular dishes are at 72 degrees north. Beyond 81 degrees north your satellite dish has to be pointed below the horizon. Which doesn't work at all.
That means that Santa Claus can't receive emails, which explains why he is the last guy on the planet to still get regular mail addressed to him. He can't get satellite TV or Netflix either. This year I'm switching, no more leaving out cookies and milk. Santa needs DVDs!

Rebecca and Edwin

Here are two of my favourite neighbors at the hunting camp. I don't have a lot to say about them. I like them. They are cute. End of story.

The Missing Link

Here's one of those peculiar combinations of images from different worlds I often see combined by random chance up here: a soldier taking a snapshot of the missing link. The soldier is up here for an extensive military exercise that's taking place up here, the base that's normally used by scientists is now stuffed to bursting with people in camouflage gear, although I'm not exactly sure what good green camouflage is going to do in a place that is entirely brown, grey and white.

On the table in the office is a replica of a famous fossil that was discovered in 2006 by a scientist working from here. It's called Tiktaalik Roseae, and it's a creature that shows the intermediate stage of development between fins and legs, one of the first animals ever to have the bright idea of crawling out of the water onto land. Which probably seemed like a better idea back in the Devonian period, when the weather around here was apparently quite tropical.
The military exercises are part of an effort by the Canadian government to establish sovereignty up here. Apparently the Northwest Passage is being used by all sorts of riff-raff these days, every now and then the local people look out into the bay and see a submarine popping up, and nobody knows whose submarine it is or what it's doing there. Russians, collecting glacial ice for their vodka, perhaps. Apparently the Canadians are a bit behind technologically - the Russians have submarines and stuff, the Canadian Army on the other hand don't even have enough skidoos to go round, I hear. Which could slow them down a bit if the battle for the north takes place anywhere away from paved roads. However no armed force in the world can match them in a snowball fight.
So the Canadian armed forces are spread out across the Arctic practicing various tasks, in this particular neighborhood they have a doll hidden somewhere representing a lost little girl and they're trying to find it and rescue it. Which will teach those pesky Russkies a thing or two; they may have the submarines but in the end, it's the scrappy Canadian underdogs who get the girl.
This noble effort to convince the world that Canada really owns the Arctic has been going on at least since the fifties, when they took a bunch of Inuit from a nice place near Pond Inlet, full of caribou and seal, and relocated them up here to Resolute Bay, where there is little to hunt and the landscape is basically a gravel pit. Human flags, they called them, and planted them here to flap in the breeze. It's a shameful little incident in Canada's past, which a few years later they tried to fix up by taking children away from their parents and sending them off to residential schools. And we all know how that worked out.
Some of the people who got uprooted and parked in Resolute Bay in the fifties are still living here now. One of them is a wonderful lady named Zipporah, which is such a great name that I would be her biggest fan even if she weren't awesome, which she is. Coincidentally, there is a photo of her on the front cover of this week's Nunavut News, blessing the military's new Arctic Training Centre. Which is very nice of her, considering.

There is also a photo of a bunch of people wading into the Arctic waters to participate in the "polar dip." Which shows that the survival instincts that drove Tiktaalik up onto land have pretty much faded away, I think.

An old friend

We just ran into our old friend the helicopter with the smashed windshield again. It has been patched together from two other broken windshields and joined with some kind of high-tech bandaid called 3M hundred mile an hour tape. If anyone from 3M wants to send me money for my mention of their product, I am open to discussing the idea.
I hope it works, because John is about to climb on that helicopter and fly around chasing polar bears in it. Here is the plan: a scientist drops John off, then flies over to a nearby polar bear and shoots it with a dart that tears off a little piece of its skin so he can get a DNA sample. Then he goes down to retrieve his dart, then he flies back to pick up John again.
That means a large irritated predatory mammal will be running around in a bad mood near my cameraman. This could be great cinema, or a nice lunch for one deserving polar bear. It's a win-win situation.

Inuit artist's statements

We have been filming with a number of Inuit artists, and their point of view about their art has been uniformly extremely practical. If you talk to an artist from my culture about their work, they talk about inspiration, about esthetics, about trying to communicate ideas, or in some cases, about stuff that's completely unintelligible to the average human being. But without exception, the artists we have been filming up here have talked money, about materials, and about logistics. Maybe they got offered a job so they started weaving, maybe  people were buying theor sculptures so it seemed like a good idea to keep making them, and so on.
I read something once about Inuit sculpture a long time ago that really struck a chord; I read that when they start working with a stone they don't decide in advance what it's going to be, they start carving it and discover the shape within it as they work. I spent years editing documentaries, I would quote that line a lot when I was talking about what an editor does. Sometimes a film becomes something rather different from what was planned, and you only find out what it should be by starting to work on it. People who watch what you've done often seem to discover things you hadn't realized were there, or at least hadn't realized were perceptible. So you sort of discover the film you are working on within the great big pile of raw material you start with.
We filmed with one of the best-known Inuit carvers in Canada, Looty Pijamini, and I had heard that he had been quoted as saying something much like this phrase I remembered hearing. So I asked him about it. Well guess what, he says something rather different. He said that he doesn't start carving without a plan, because then he would waste material. And he does try to imagine the shape within the stone, but mostly so that he can come up with a shape that more or less matches the shape of the stone, because then there will be less work to do to carve the excess away. Totally practical.
I am going to have to stop using that line about documentary editing now. That's too bad, it was my artist's statement, and now I will have to come up with a new one. Perhaps something completely unintelligible.

The Hunting of the Shark

We spent the day fishing for greenland shark. The scientist we are working with, Steven Kessel, had dropped a long line of hooks, baited with big delicious chunks of slightly rancid seal meat, the day before, and had left it there, anchored to the bottom, with a device that automatically releases a float when it is triggered remotely from above. Out we went in a small flotilla, one eighteen-foot boat piloted by Jeffrey Amarualik, our local Inuit captain, one small zodiac with a few military people from the base who were really really curious to see a greenland shark, and Scott and me with a second camera in a smaller aluminum boat with a motor that didn't exactly work correctly, stalled frequently, and had to be slightly disassembled and wrapped with an improvised starter cord to get going again. Humming the theme from Gilligan's Island.

Steven reached the point in the centre of the bay where his line had been dropped, hit the release code, and received a signal saying that the float had been deployed. But nothing came to the surface. He roamed around looking for it for a while, then he figured perhaps the line had tangled somewhat, so he enlisted us all to scan the waters for a float hovering just below the surface. We didn't find that either. So back to shore we went. The curious onlookers went home, and Steven started jury-rigging a grapple out of a variety of individual hooks and scrap metal that were lying about the shore. Back out he went to drag the bottom, trying to hook the line. I sent the cameraman and soundman back out for another try, knowing that they'd be out in an open boat on a windy lake in sub-zero temperatures for ages with a good chance of filming nothing at all. But if he did catch a shark with his little McGyver toy it was going to be awesome, so they had to go. Meanwhile Scott and I, who couldn't fit in the boat, hung out at the hotel bar for a while then decided we'd try out the steam room.
Just kidding. Hotel bars and steam rooms are not available options. Scott downloaded media in his room and I sat in a van waiting for the crew to return. But the van had a heater and a radio, up here that is the lap of luxury.
After an hour or two the adventurers returned to shore, cold, damp, and sharkless. Too bad. This is the problem with filming reality, reality doesn't arrange itself into nice neat storylines for you. That device would totally have worked in the sitcom. Steven would have wound up with the pretty corporal in camouflage fatigues, and I would have been played by Danny de Vito. That would be a much better film than mine. Drat.

Dog Food

The Inuit we are with, when they hunt narwhal, are mostly after the tusk and the muktuk, which is the skin. The meat itself, on the first one they caught, they just left behind. But we tried it and thought it was delicious. Way better than the muktuk. They say that the older people eat that stuff, but they don't really eat it any more themselves. Although perhaps different families have different tastes, because we did hear that the people at the next cabin were eating the meat too. In any case, we thought it was too good to waste, so Sanjay and Scott got permission to go down and carve off a few steaks to fry up later for ourselves.

Sam Omik, our boat captain, then killed another narwhal, and he took all the meat off that one. He's an older guy, we figured perhaps he still had a taste for it, but no - it turns out he eats the muktuk, and feeds the meat to his sled dogs. So when we started eating our narwhal steaks, there was a lot of laughing going on, because basically we were eating dog food. A few people tried it, Sam had a piece for example, but when his wife saw what we were up to she looked like she had seen someone picking their nose in public, and quickly went into her tent.
The next morning, Michael Kusugak, a storyteller and writer we brought along for this journey, told us about how when he was small, his father would bring a big sack of oatmeal along with them when they went out with the dog team in winter. Not to eat, but to fix the sled. If a piece of the runner broke you would mix up some oatmeal and pat it into place to freeze. In a few minutes, you had nice new runners ready to go.

But if times were tough, if the hunting was bad, if you didn't have enough walrus meat or whatever to keep your sled team going, guess what you would do with the oatmeal. Feed it to the dogs.
At that point one of the two scientists was having a nice big bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. Yep, dog food again.
Crazy white people.

Media management in the wild

Of course the early inhabitants of these parts didn't have diesel generators, they backed up their data using seal oil lamps. And an oral tradition.

Eating muktuk

Raw narwhal skin, that is, with a little blubber still attached. It's a bit like very very chewy octopus. Like a very weird sushi flavour - interesting but I probably wouldn't order it again next time. Maybe if I had had some wasabi.

Twins

John Tran and Sam Omik, two men obsessed with shooting stuff.

John steps up too

John, tired of hearing so much about how superior Sanjay's boots are, has upped the ante. In your face, Sanjay. These boots go up to 11.
This is how arms races begin. Although in this case arms don't really play a part.

Waiting on the shore, not quite sure what we are waiting for.

Here we are, having just been dropped off at an Inuit family's hunting camp, after a three-hour boat ride into a place called Milne Inlet. Apparently people call this area the Serengetti of the Arctic. I think Serengetti may be some kind of pasta. I do hope so, we haven't had lunch yet.

washing narwhal tusks

This guy was washing his narwhal tusks in the stream that runs through town. He had six of them. I am a bit confused about narwhals, they are not listed as endangered or at risk, but only Inuit can hunt them. In fact, it seems that there just isn't all that much information about them, nobody really knows how many of them there are. So perhaps they are protected from indiscriminate hunting just in case, by a society that puts care of the environment above immediate gain, and moves cautiously and wisely before endangering the delicate balance of nature.
Just kidding.
The Inuit hunt them for their meat and blubber, which they do love to eat, but the really valuable part is the tusk. They need to be registered and tagged before they can be sold, so they have to pass through the co-op, which I guess then resells them for more money. We saw the prices they go for at the co-op, they are posted. For a six or seven foot tusk, $240 per foot. This guy has six tusks, of various lengths; I figure he is soaking about nine thousand dollars in the stream. He won't be able to hunt narwhal all year, this may be his one big haul for the year for all I know, but still, in a place where there very few actual jobs as we know them down south, hunting narwhal is a pretty good thing to get good at.
It does make me wonder who is buying these things. Once they are tagged, marked up, and shipped somewhere they must cost the final buyer several thousand dollars each. Who is willing to spend that kind of money to put a weird animal tooth up on their wall?
There is a theory that narwhal tusks passing from hand to hand over a trade route from the north to Europe may have given rise to the myth of the unicorn. Maybe some of that magical value still attaches to them. Or maybe they make good pool cues. I don't know, it still seems like a lot of money. But I guess as long as someone out there disagrees, it's good news for this guy.
Bad news for narwhal, though.
Also - note to self - drink from upstream of this point only.

Dr. Seuss, field biologist

Here's an interesting-looking plant that grows all over the place here in Pond Inlet. We saw them in Greenland, too. They look oddly familiar; it took me a while to realize why. This is clearly the plant upon which Horton heard a Who. I was once in California and saw trees that looked exactly like the odd trees in Dr. Seuss' drawings, and realized that while I had thought his imaginary worlds were pure cartoon fantasies, in fact to some small extent he must have been drawing from life. Now I realize that he was faithfully depicting the arctic habitat as well. What a genius.
To further support my theory, I suggest that you look up a picture of a narwhal. See? Obviously drawn by Dr. Seuss. I rest my case.

Pond Inlet bulletin board

Naming places

In the Sirmilik park office in Pond Inlet they have a map showing the Inuit place names in the area. Europeans tended to name places for kings, queens, politicians, or their wealthy sponsors, that's why several islands in the far north are named for beer company owners, for example. The Inuit are more descriptive, if there are sharp rocks somewhere they name it accordingly. I want to visit number 233.

Shawarma below the Arctic Circle

Big news in Iqaluit: they now have a shawarma and donair place. Behind an unassuming facade next to the airport you can now find a delicious little piece of the Middle East in the Near North, which strikes me as a pretty great combination of moderate extremes. I hope I can be there one day when some people from the Midwest come visit.

Danish design

After all this time in Greenland, where the Danish influence is so evident in the architecture, furniture and fashions, it was a nice surprise to come home and find that a good portion of my house had been redecorated while I was away with the products of a well-known Danish design company.
Specifically, Lego.

Nive's biggest fan

As we were getting into the van with Nive to go shoot, we were approached by a very drunken man, who wanted to tell us that he loved her, and we should drive carefully, because he loved her. Also that we should drive carefully.
I was waiting in the driver's seat for the time to come when she would give him a polite brushofff, so I could start pulling away from him and get on with our business, but she carried on a long conversation with him in Greenlandic.
It turns out he was telling her a sad story, he had been diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live; he had told the doctor that he would rather drink himself to death first, and that is what he was setting out to do.
She also told me later that she had decided long ago not to treat people with any less respect because they were drunk, that is how they had chosen to live their lives and it was not up to her to judge them.
It''s a very different attitude to drunks on street corners than I have developed, living as I do in a large North American city. A much nicer and more tolerant attitude, although some days, in some parts of town, if I spent time having a conversation with every drunk that wanted to talk I'd spend all day walking ten blocks. Maybe it's different in a place like Nuuk, with 3,000 inhabitants.
Before we finished Nive had received several big hugs and a number of big wet kisses on her hand and on her cheeks. She accepted them all graciously.
I met him again the next morning, before he had managed to get himself thoroughly drunk yet. He's a nice guy, it turns out, and we had a conversation that made sense this time. He likes her music because it's real Greenlandic music, even though it's in a new style. She and he are two of the last real Nuukians (if that's a word), lots of people are moving in and it's changing fast, but they are both people whose families and whose roots are there.
So she is managing to make music that appeals to judgmental urban westerners like me, and at the same time makes inebriated authentic Greenlanders feel proud of their heritage. Quite an achievement.