00:00:01 Speaker 1: You know, if you have clothing which is packed tightly around your body and you're outside working hard, you're still sweating inside of very insulated layers of clothing. And that's fine and well while you're working. What happens when you stop? You know, when you stop, you suddenly find yourself encased in a sheet of ice. 00:00:24 Speaker 2: I want to tell you about an all but untold story of controversy, tragedy, and redemption. It's about the relocation by the government of some Inuit into the high Arctic in 1953. I'm going to introduce you to a young polar bear hunter I met in the town of Resolute Bay, Nunavut, one of the most northern villages in the world. The polar regions of the earth are the last frontiers of the planet. Lots of people want them. A lot is at stake. And the Inuit have been here for the last 10,000 years. We're going to learn the bare bones story of the relocation in this episode. We're going to meet this young guy, Devin Manick. But to understand these people, we've got to understand the high Arctic. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. This is a unique series for Bear Grease because you'll be able to watch on video my trip to Resolute Bay, Nunavut, on Meat Eater Season 14. And hey, this is separate from this series, but the book that I've been working on for three years, American Bear, will be available for pre-sale on November 9th. And if you pre-order the book between November the 9th and December the 9th, I will send you a signed American Bear Christmas card that you could put under the tree as a gift before the book actually ships on February the 9th. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight in unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. 00:02:16 Speaker 3: Brought to you by Tecova's Boots. 00:02:19 Speaker 2: I'm a cowboy boot man, and I've been wearing Tecova's for years. They're the most comfortable boot I've ever put on. Good boots for good times. 00:02:38 Speaker 4: Sometimes my grandpa tells me stories from when he was a kid and growing up. One of the craziest ones he told me was they were at Prince of Wales Island. He was probably like five years old. But they were running out of food and they couldn't catch any game. So his father decided that they would head to Resolute Bay for help. They had 20 dogs, two dog teams, 10 and 10 dogs. But they had all their gear, all their stuff. And by, like, that era, they started to trade. They would trade with trading posts to get supplies. So they had, like, sugar pots and pans and all that. So they had a little bit more than they had back then. So it was a heavy sled. So they were basically walking along with the sled. And the dogs were starving. 00:03:35 Speaker 2: This is Devin Manick. He's 25 years old and lives in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, Canada. This is the story about how his grandfather ended up here, which is ultimately Devin's origin story. It was the late 1950s, and his grandfather's family was going to Resolute Bay for help. But let me tell you, if you were going here for help in the mid-50s, your situation is dire. 00:04:02 Speaker 4: They only had one piece of caribou meat for themselves. but not enough to feed the dogs. But yeah, so they headed for Resolute, and his dad was hoping they'd find a polar bear along the way to feed the dogs, but that wasn't the case, so they just kept going. And my grandfather described to me what happens when a dog dies from exhaustion, starving while pulling. He says, like, all of a sudden, they get a burst of energy, And they pull really hard all of a sudden. They go, go, go. And then they just fall over. And I was like, oh, that's, that's like, that's tragic. Like, I don't want to see that in my life. I hope not. But then the dogs had to eat. So they butcher that dog and feed it to the living dogs. And by the time they got to Resolute, they had 10 dogs left. So 10 dogs died along the way. But yeah, they got to Resolute. They got help. They got food and the locals gave them some dogs. 00:05:17 Speaker 2: You might be surprised that the Inuit community of Resolute Bay didn't exist until 1953. The 10 families that moved here lived at first in seal skin tents, gradually building wooden structures made from scrap lumber and in one of the harshest environments on Earth. The town was named after the British ship, the HMS Resolute. But the Inuit, in their native language of Inuktitut, called it Kwozituk, which means land with no dawn. 1953 was actually the first time the Inuit had lived this far north in hundreds of years. Before contact with the Europeans, they began to move south when the climate cooled during the Little Ice Age, which dropped temperatures so low Humans couldn't survive here. Though it had warmed some by the 1950s, this place was hardly fit to live, even by the people who were the best equipped on the earth to live in these cold climates. Resolute is over 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The big question I'm trying to answer is why are these people here? Devin's grandfather, Tony Manick, was just a child. His family would leave Resolute Bay after they got help in the mid-1950s, but Tony would end up permanently living here later in life. 00:06:44 Speaker 4: Later on that spring, they went back to Somerset Island. So, like, back then, they didn't have, like, one place that was home. They were nomadic. Every two years, they'd move to a different island or whatever. So... But they've lived on Somerset before. They went to Aston Bay that spring. And that summer, his father, I think he shot, like, eight beluga whales and stored them all for the winter. Because I think he had, like, this starvation down his, like, fresh in his mind. Like, I'm not going to make sure that happens again. 00:07:21 Speaker 2: And this is your grandfather that's still alive. 00:07:23 Speaker 4: I've met him. 00:07:24 Speaker 1: Yep. Wow. 00:07:25 Speaker 4: They used to travel, like... I think it was like 300 kilometers to the trading post by dog sled. They would, you know, fox pelts, bear hides, and then bring them down by dog sled and trade for supplies and then come back. But he said they would live in the area for two years and then move somewhere else so they wouldn't overhunt that area. 00:07:50 Speaker 3: Tell me about how he got to Resolute Bay. 00:07:53 Speaker 4: Yeah, so my grandpa went to Resolute on his own. I think it was in 1960 or 61. Just him and his dogs. And they were at like Creswell Bay. So that was like 300 kilometers away from Resolute. But he dog sledded up. And he was like old enough now like he could, you know, start living on his own. Maybe start a family. But he went to Resolute to look for a job. And he met my grandma there. 00:08:25 Speaker 3: What did he say? 00:08:27 Speaker 4: Yeah, so, like, in Resolute Bay, there was families from northern Quebec that were relocated by the Canadian government to assert sovereignty because no one lived up in this area. The traditional name for this area was Tidjat, Cornwallis Island. Tidjat, which means, like, rough land or the land that cuts the dog's feet. 00:08:48 Speaker 3: And. 00:08:49 Speaker 4: But, yeah, so there was a military base just up on top of the hills. The community was at the beach. But he's... He says he made his own mistake coming to Resolute instead of being put there by the government. Yeah. 00:09:05 Speaker 2: He made his own mistake, he said. He wasn't put here by the government? What is he talking about? 00:09:12 Speaker 4: They teach us, yeah, they tell us all about Inuit history in school. So, right after World War II, people didn't live up here because it was harsh and Because of the mini ice age in the 1800s, Inuit moved south. But Canada wanted sovereignty over the high arctic islands, the Canadian Arctic. And you need a military presence, permanent settlements, and people living there. But no one was living there. So the Canadian government thought, okay, we should just move people up there. And the only people we can think of are Inuit. They would call them Eskimos. So they thought, okay, where should we get them from? There was a place in northern Quebec called Inukjoa. I forget the name, the English name. I think it was like Port Harrison or something. 00:10:02 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:10:03 Speaker 4: And that place was like, there was a lot of people living there at the time. So they got the RCMP to go there and ask those guys in quotations, but they wouldn't take no for an answer. They'd ask, they'd say no. come back to ask and they wouldn't leave until they said yes so finally i forget how many families but a whole bunch of families were asked and then they reluctantly said yes um and the government lied they said oh yeah there's tons of foxes up there you can trap a whole bunch and make a living trading we'll have houses there for you beautiful land lots of animals um so they all right let's go um They just asked one thing, like, don't split the families. Because they said they were going to drop them off at two places. So they got on the CD Howe, which is an old ship, hospital ship. And they took everything. Their dogs, their families, their tents, everything. And then they sailed north. I think it was like 2,000 kilometers of sailing. 00:11:13 Speaker 1: And a. 00:11:15 Speaker 4: Lot of the people on board got sick. From all the waves. Seasick. And... The first stop was Resolute Bay. One of the elders... Described it. She said... When they first saw the land... They were horrified. They just said it was just gravel. It was just all rock. They were like... What the heck? They lied to us. 00:11:44 Speaker 1: And. 00:11:45 Speaker 4: And by the time they got to Resolute, it was August. And it was snowing in August. So that's like fall time up here. And where they come from, there's trees. It would have been summer still in August. So when they got to Resolute, it was desolate. It was cold. And there was no houses there for them. There was a military base just up there. But they told them that they're not allowed to go up there. And their military are not allowed to come down. So they dropped off families in Resolute Bay. But then they split the families up. And they put another group of families up in Grease Fjord on Ellesmere Island. So they lied to them. They wouldn't have split the families, you know. And they just lied to them all the way. No houses. So the first winter, they had to sleep in tents. And to sleep in a tent, like, in the winter, that's... madness like setting yourself to death it's so cold and they weren't also used to the animals so there was like lots of caribou down there but up here it was just polar bears and seals and they weren't allowed to hunt muskox and it was muskox but at the time they weren't allowed to hunt them um previously the polar explorers exploited the muskox and killed a whole bunch like robert peering in on them killed like hundreds of them and depleted their populations So the Canadian government put them under protection, even though it wasn't by the Inuit. Yeah, so their first winter, intense, very hard. There's a thing called polar night up here. So that's, for residents, three months of no sun, just darkness. And they were not used to that. Where they come from, there's sun all through the year, all year round. But there was polar night and Someone in Greece Fjord said they would get ice from icebergs for drinking water. And they were picking away in pitch black. And then they realized they were chipping at a piece of rock. It was just so dark and very different to them. So then in 1955, the Canadian government saw like, all right, these guys are not doing very good. Let's do something about it. So they got people from the Pondland area. That's about 70 degrees north. Resolute and Grease Fjord are 75 and 76 degrees north. So those people are kind of used to the high Arctic. But not how desolate it is in Resolute. But they sent people from there to Resolute Bay and Grease Fjord to teach them how to live in the high Arctic. But there was a language barrier. So they had two different dialects. 00:14:35 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:14:36 Speaker 4: But they survived. 00:14:37 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:14:39 Speaker 4: You know, the communities now are an example of their survival. There's people still alive today that were a part of the relocation. Yeah, they're still. 00:14:48 Speaker 2: We tried to talk to some of them, but they weren't interested in talking to me. 00:14:53 Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah. 00:14:54 Speaker 3: That didn't surprise you, though? 00:14:56 Speaker 1: No. 00:14:57 Speaker 4: I'm sure they have a lot of distrust with people from the South. Yeah. After the way they were treated, it didn't hurt. 00:15:05 Speaker 3: To be clear. 00:15:07 Speaker 2: Inuit are an ethnic indigenous group separate from the First Nations people of Canada. In fact, Canada has three indigenous distinctions. First Nations, what the U.S. would historically have called American Indians, a term now outlawed in Canada. The second would be the Matisse, which is an aboriginal bison hunting tribe around the Red River. 00:15:31 Speaker 3: And the third would be the Inuits. 00:15:33 Speaker 2: The Inuit are in Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, roughly numbering 180,000 people. In the past, they were referred to as the Esquimaux in French, or Eskimo, which is now typically viewed as a slur, the term meaning eaters of raw meat, which was a name given to them by other native groups. In 1762, the governor of Quebec called them the wild and most untamable of any These people have a long history of not fitting in with the Western society that they never asked to be a part of. This is the story of how a nomadic people, without currency or even words for money, were crammed into a capitalistic society. Devin is telling me this story as we sit 40 miles from Resolute Bay on the sea ice in a tarped hut built on sleds. 00:16:27 Speaker 3: It's really hard to get here. 00:16:29 Speaker 2: And by here, I'm not necessarily talking about on the ice, which it is. I'm talking about just getting to Resolute Bay. I flew on standard commercial flights to Ottawa, Canada, retrieved my bags off those airlines, and then checked into a completely different airline that services what's called the High Arctic, as if the Arctic wasn't high enough. When I told the Canadian customs agent that I was going to Resolute Bay, breaking character from government employee to a simply curious, confused human, she asked almost as if concerned, what are you doing there? I told her I was going to see a friend, which was true, but I was concerned to tell her the bigger story of why I was going to Resolute Bay, which is over 2,100 miles north of Ottawa. It's the second most northern village in North America, just slightly further south than Greece Fjord. 00:17:24 Speaker 3: If you're describing the. 00:17:25 Speaker 2: Earth in terms of human habitation, this is literally the end of the earth. But this is Inuit land. I came here in the late winter of 2026, arriving on March 1st. I've come to accompany Devin on a traditional polar bear hunt using a dog sled and spear. 00:17:46 Speaker 3: He's the hunter. 00:17:47 Speaker 2: Resolute Bay currently has 150 people, a small airport, a hotel, a hardware and grocery store, and a Canadian military base. The town's electricity is produced by giant diesel fuel generators, the fuel brought in during the summer when the bay is free of ice. The people live in modern, comfortable homes painted in pleasantly bright colors of blue, yellow, and red. They speak both English and Inuktitut. Retired sled dogs roam the streets children sled down giant mounds of snow and the people. 00:18:21 Speaker 3: Are warm but reserved towards outsiders. 00:18:25 Speaker 2: When we arrived at the single hangar airport, a giant taxidermy polar bear greeted us from a glass box. Riding with us in the shuttle back to our lodging, there were three IT government workers and I just asked them what they were doing here and they'd been sent here on business and they had been trying to leave Resolute for over a week. but weather and canceled flights kept them there. This is a wild place. You can get trapped here. It's almost like visiting another planet. 00:18:58 Speaker 4: Nunavut was created by Inuit because we never had a saying in the government. They had like hunting laws where it was like for the North's territories now, but it didn't align with our seasons and we had no say. So we created our own territory We gave up a whole bunch of land, but now we have a say in what they can do with that land and our language and our culture. So now we teach it in schools and yeah. 00:19:29 Speaker 2: Before 1999, Nunavut was part of Canada's Northwest Territories, but in that year it was designated as its own territory. Nunavut is roughly the size of America east of the Mississippi River. 85% of its population is indigenous people. In Inuktitut, none of it means... our land. To understand the high Arctic and the story of Inuit relocation by the government, I read one of the few books in existence. It was published in 1994. A used copy of it was fairly expensive on Amazon. It was over 400 pages, small print, written in academic language, full of technical government terms and thorough history, but it was very well done. 00:20:18 Speaker 3: I'd like to introduce you to the author. 00:20:21 Speaker 2: From British Columbia. When I ordered this book, I had no idea who Frank James Tester was. I started to read this book and was just fascinated by what I found. And then I was even more fascinated when I looked you up And you had an email address, and I was able to contact you. 00:20:43 Speaker 3: And my phone rang, and you called me back. I was shocked. Thank you for being here. 00:20:48 Speaker 1: I was shocked, too. I thought, well, what in the blazes is somebody in the southern part of the United States doing with my book in their hand? What's going on here? This is truly weird and different. Hence the phone call. 00:21:04 Speaker 3: So this book was instructive to me. How do you say that word? 00:21:08 Speaker 1: Tamar nihit. Say it again. Tamar nihit. 00:21:12 Speaker 3: And what does that mean? 00:21:13 Speaker 1: It means mistakes. I mean, that's basically what the book is about. It's about mistakes that were made by government officials, and not only government officials, but other people the Inuit identify as kalunat or kablunat, you know, people who are not Inuit and are generally from Southern Canada or Euro-Canadians, however you want to put that. 00:21:40 Speaker 3: Mistakes. 00:21:41 Speaker 2: That's an interesting name for a book. Frank J. Tester is in his late 70s and is an expert in the High Arctic. He's an author, a filmmaker, and a professor emeritus at the University. 00:21:54 Speaker 3: Of British Columbia. 00:21:55 Speaker 2: He's kind of one of those most interesting man-in-the-world characters. He built a sailboat that he uses to travel on the western coast of Canada and He built his own house on an island. 00:22:06 Speaker 3: He's traveled and worked extensively in Africa. 00:22:09 Speaker 2: But most interesting to me, he spent several years in the high Arctic in the 70s. And much of his career has focused on the Inuit. 00:22:19 Speaker 1: So I basically, I spent two years, much of my time in the communities of Resolute Bay and Arctic Bay, or primarily Arctic Bay, but with some other travel to Greece Fjord. And I was utterly fascinated by everything that I saw and encountered, including many, many serious problems. I sort of combined my interest in public health and well-being with what I saw happening in terms of housing that was being provided, public health and sanitation, garbage collection, dealing with sewage wastes. You have to remember that... When I was in Arctic Bay, there were families that only, you know, five or six years before been living in their traditional family-based camps out on the land. Living in tents in the summer, igloos in the winter, kamaks, which are like sod houses with, you know, whalebone for framing and then seal skins over the roof. Wow. and they suddenly found themselves in the community of Arctic Bay living in wood frame houses that were being provided by the government. And, of course, the other thing I realized is that the government and people associated with the government, their lack of Arctic experience was playing a major role in some of the problems that were developing. 00:23:51 Speaker 2: We're going to set aside the story of the Inuit relocation of 1953 for a bit, because to understand this people and their story, we have to understand the land, the high Arctic. The word Arctic comes from the Greek word Arcticos, which means country of the great bear, which refers to the constellation Ursa Major, or that means the great bear. which has in it Polaris, which is the north star. The author Barry Lopez calls that star a celestial accident because seemingly by chance, it's located directly north of the Earth's geologic north pole. 00:24:31 Speaker 3: There is no southern star over the south pole. 00:24:35 Speaker 2: And Polaris is 45 times larger than our sun. The north pole, though, is just a chunk of ice in the Arctic Ocean, 6 to 10 feet thick. There's no land there. But you should know that there are two North Poles, the geographic and the magnetic North Pole. The magnetic North Pole, what a compass responds to, wobbles in any given year as wide as a 65-foot circle. It's called the Chandler Circle. But it actually moves dramatically from year to year based upon tectonic activity and sediment pushed around by rivers and ocean currents, making the globe unbalanced. The geographic North Pole doesn't move. That's just a point on a map. But the two poles can be hundreds of miles apart and change all the time as the magnetic pole moves. At the geographic North Pole, all the time zones meet. In any direction you go is south. The sun does not rise in the east or set in the west there, but rather, as Lopez writes it, the sun rises. slowly surfaces in the south, then disappears nearly at the same spot, like a whale rolling over. It's still disputed who the first person to reach the North Pole was. Frederick Cook or Robert Peary claimed to be there in the early 1900s, but their expeditions are widely disputed. But the first verified visit wasn't until 1948 when the Soviets flew a plane, landed, and walked there. Now this is some deep diving stuff about the Arctic, but man, it's interesting. 00:26:12 Speaker 3: We got to know it. 00:26:13 Speaker 2: And another question that you might have is where and what is the Arctic Circle? The Arctic Circle starts far below the North Pole at 66.5 degrees latitude, 1600 miles south of the North Pole. 00:26:29 Speaker 3: And this is it. 00:26:30 Speaker 2: It marks the southernmost point where you have 24 hour days and nights. That's the definition of the Arctic Circle. the latitude where you start to get periods with 24-hour days and nights. So just below the Arctic Circle, the sun would never be completely absent during a 24-hour period, and the days would gradually get longer the further south you went. Until you travel in the north, it's hard to comprehend this region's orientation to the sun. It's beyond odd to someone from the temperate regions of the earth where most of us live. Resolute Bay has three months roughly a hundred and eight days of complete darkness They call it the polar night from early November to February and that rolls into 24-hour days from late April to late August called the midnight Sun Oddly the Arctic gets as much solar energy or volume of sunlight as the tropics It just comes all at once As far north as Resolute Bay is, it still sits over a thousand miles south of the North Pole. 00:27:38 Speaker 3: Here's Frank on the Arctic. 00:27:41 Speaker 1: Much of the Arctic is a desert. And that is, and people don't realize that, the levels of precipitation are very low. It's just that when snow falls, it doesn't melt. It stays around. So And the Arctic geographically and biologically is very different. Arctic Alaska, for example, is very different than the Canadian Arctic. The Canadian Arctic, especially the Eastern Arctic, is very cold. It experiences long periods of, or has historically, long periods of very low temperatures. And much of it is characterized by tundra. There's a sort of Tiaga zone which runs across northern canada it's mostly uh species like black spruce which you know don't grow very tall a lot of um moisture a lot of water in that the ground underneath is frozen so you have ponded water on the surface so a lot of a lot of muskeg a lot of moist um wet area areas that freeze and are frozen for much of the year and vegetation you know struggles to survive i mean there are arctic willows for example i examined when i was in arctic bay i used to take them and dissect them and take them back to calgary put them under a microscope remember microscopes and count the number of rings they need to have this tiny little uh branch you know maybe it'd be about that big as your thumb yeah and you know you do you count the number of rings to figure out how old it is and you discover that this is this piece is you know 100 years old wow you know the growth rates are that slow so the other thing that is really plays a major role in everything that happens in the high eastern arctic is ice we're talking ice frozen ocean uh huge icebergs that uh in the area between alzheimer island and greenland and off the coast of green and break off from glaciers pour into um cane basin and smith sound and then make their way eventually down the coast of Labrador and end up off the coast of Newfoundland. By that time, they're starting to really melt and disappear. But ice and icebergs and ice conditions have played and still play a major role in what does or doesn't happen in the Canadian Eastern Arctic. 00:30:16 Speaker 2: Ice is still king here, but the reduction of ice is what formed the Arctic. This is the newest ecosystem on Earth. I'd like to just pause and say that again. The Arctic is the newest ecosystem on Earth, which began to be uncovered roughly 18,000 years ago with the retreat of the Wisconsin glaciation, with its star player being the Laurentide Ice Sheet. The Wisconsin glaciation over North America held the majority of the world's ice. with three giant ice sheets some two miles thick. That dropped sea levels as much as 400 feet lower than they are today. But like pulling the covers off a bed, the big ice sheets were basically gone by 10,000 BC, 10,000 years ago. So the Arctic as we know it is only. 00:31:04 Speaker 3: 10,000 years old. 00:31:12 Speaker 2: And I'll have you remember that I was once the captain of a Sea Ark boat named Laurentide. 00:31:17 Speaker 3: We called her Laura. 00:31:19 Speaker 2: That Brent Reeves and I took down the Mississippi River, but that's hardly the point here. The Arctic's young age means that the ecosystem is simple with low ecological diversity. Of the 3,200 mammals on Earth, there are 23 that live here. 00:31:34 Speaker 3: Of 8,600 global species of birds, seven live here. 00:31:41 Speaker 2: Of 30,000 species of fish, less than 50 live in the high Arctic. It's home to polar bears, muskox, caribou, wolves, arctic hare, arctic fox, seals, walrus, and many varieties of whales. In contrast, the tropics are the oldest ecosystems on the earth with the greatest biological diversity. If comparing the Arctic to other biomes, it's more like a desert than anything else. According to Barry Lopez, no more moisture falls on the Arctic tundra in a year than falls on. 00:32:16 Speaker 3: The Mojave Desert. 00:32:18 Speaker 2: Resolute Bay has an average yearly temperature of 3 degrees Fahrenheit, but it ranges from negative 60 to highs in the 40s during the summer. This is probably the most inhospitable place on Earth that humans live. Ancestors of the Inuit moved into the high Arctic soon after the ice sheets retreated. One group of people that anthropologists have named the Arctic small tool tradition people, it's a mouthful, were known for their meager existence and were some of the first into the Arctic. In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez quotes Canadian archaeologist Robert McGee, who said these people migrated into the coldest, darkest years. and most barren regions ever inhabited by man. Lopez writes, during the winters when they were hard pressed for food, these people may have almost hibernated in their unlit and unheated dwellings. One looks today on the remains of their dwellings, a fox bone awl, a quartz arrowhead, the ring of stone that held down their skin tents with profound respect. Later, the people that lived here would be referred to as the Thule people, having originated in Eastern Asia, then living in Alaska, and likely 10,000 years ago, moved into the high Arctic. These people would have been these small Thule people, but just the culture evolved, grew, got bigger, more people came, and they became known as the Thule people who would become extremely successful. specializing in hunting whales and walrus out of skin boats. These are the people that developed the dog-drawn sled and lived in semi-subterranean skin houses framed by whale ribs with turf as roof. These are the ancestors of the Inuit. Lopez writes, It's easy to underestimate the power of a long-term association with the land. I'm still trying to understand the Inuit's fixation on this land. But 10,000 years of history in the same place affects you psychologically, but also physiologically. My people have not been in the same place for that long. So I can't really understand it the way that they do. Let's get back to Frank Tester. So thinking about the Arctic, the North American continent is pretty much contiguous into none of it. Like you could drive a truck from Arkansas to the southern part of Nunavut. But then the Arctic archipelago starts, which is basically like a series of islands. 00:35:03 Speaker 1: Well, yes, it's a series of islands in the eastern Arctic. So the Arctic islands stretch across the very northern part of the continent. Okay. 00:35:12 Speaker 3: And then these islands, though, at least during the winter, would be connected by ice. 00:35:17 Speaker 1: Yes, you can travel from island to island on the ice. Now, Not always easily because there are leads in the ice depending on the currents and things. So, you know, you may even temperatures that have been, you know, well below zero for months on end, you can still find areas that are difficult to traverse by, for example, a snow machine because there'll be open water. There'll be leads in the ice. 00:35:44 Speaker 3: Cracks in the ice. 00:35:44 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:35:45 Speaker 1: And in fact, the leads in the ice are really important to certain species as well. Those leads are used by narwhal to start to move into their summer habitat in Admiralty Inlet. But it's also protective for them. It keeps them away from killer whales. But it also historically meant that that's where Inuit found it easier to hunt a narwhal from the edge of the ice because you'd have a lead that would be the width of this room. And you could be standing on the edge of the ice and harpooning a narwhal as they There were certain very interesting cultural traditions associated with doing that. I had the pleasure of interviewing a woman who was 102 years old. She was the oldest person in Nunavut at the time. She died about three months after I interviewed her, telling me about how they used to hunt narwhal and how they regarded narwhal. And listening to her was a delight because she talked about narwhal like they were friends. Like there were another species, just another species as Inuit are species. It's something that I think is missing from our own culture. We regard nature as the other, something that is different from ourselves. And that is there for our pleasure and for our betterment that we can exploit at will. And I think that's, in fact, our modern and very serious dilemma. But the way she talked about narwhal was they welcomed them back, you know, to spend the summer with them. And they never killed the first narwhal that entered out of respect. They would let the first pods of narwhal pass before they killed the narwhal. And they were very respectful because they realized that They depended on narwhal for survival. Narwhal flesh, they stored it. It was very important to see them through the winter months. So the relationship they had with narwhal, the songs they used to sing, and the way in which they made sure they used absolutely everything that the narwhal had presented to them, listening to it was a real treat. 00:38:06 Speaker 2: One of my favorite quotes that I'll never forget out of this book by Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, is he At some point in there, he says, we know more about the rings of Saturn than we know about narwhal, which when he wrote this book back in the 80s. 00:38:19 Speaker 1: Yeah, we know a lot more now, but we still have a lot to learn. 00:38:24 Speaker 2: Narwhals are medium-sized Arctic whales up to 18 feet long, and the males have spiraled tusks. 00:38:30 Speaker 3: That can be up to 10 feet long. 00:38:33 Speaker 2: Very little has been known about them until recent decades. The word narwhal in Old Norse translates into corpse whale. because they were the color of a drowned human corpse. European sailors viewed them as a bad omen. They're specialized deep divers, going up to 1.5 miles deep in the ocean to eat Arctic cod, shrimp, halibut, and squid. According to Lopez in the Middle Ages, when explorers brought narwhal tusks back to Europe in the 1500s, they became 20 times more valuable than gold. Many believed them to be the horns of a unicorn. Horns on a horse. People believed in unicorns for thousands of years. There is much speculation on why narwhals have tusks and why they're spiraled counterclockwise. It's basically a multi-tool full of millions of nerves. It acts as an antenna to find food, to fight other mammals. and it's still not fully understood. But the narwhal has been important to the Inuit since they arrived in the Arctic. Devin Manick has a narwhal tusk hanging in his house and hunts them often. I have a dumb question for Frank. How cold is the Arctic? 00:39:50 Speaker 1: It's darn cold. I mean, I've been out at minus 60. And if you get a little bit of wind blowing, the equivalent can be close to minus 100. Your fingers don't work very well for very long at those kinds of temperatures. And that's where the genius of Inuit clothing... This was a factor, by the way, in the exploration of the Arctic in the 1800s. The British Navy was, I don't know how to describe it. When I read what they did and how they equipped people and what they didn't learn, all I can say is they were incredibly arrogant. They would send people into the Arctic believing that wool and woolens were important to keeping people warm. The Inuit had learned that if you have clothing which is packed tightly around your body, And you're outside working hard. You're still sweating, you know, inside of very insulated layers of clothing. And that's fine and well while you're working. What happens when you stop? You know, when you stop, you suddenly find yourself encased in a sheet of ice. I'm being a little bit overly dramatic here, but you get the idea. Right, right. So body moisture is an issue in terms of survival and temperature. And the British didn't learn this. But Inuit clothing, caribou skins, for example, amazing. The fur would be back to front. In other words, you'd have fur on the inside and fur on the outside. And the clothing would be relatively loosely fitted. But it would also be closed in. It would be sewed real tight so that the air couldn't get in. In other words, you were really well insulated. And that's how they survived. Well, somebody like Amundsen picked this up and was wearing clothing made for him by Inuit seamstresses who were brilliant women. I've watched some of them. I have a collection of sealskin boots. And they're amazing. I mean, the sewing, the hand sewing on them is just absolutely brilliant. They're waterproof. They're warm. They're just, you know, incredibly well done. 00:42:07 Speaker 2: They have a unique stitch pattern that makes the seams waterproof. 00:42:12 Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Depending on the material, the stitch pattern changes. 00:42:16 Speaker 3: Like the way they fold the skin, sew it, and then. 00:42:19 Speaker 1: Yeah, there are many different ways of doing this. 00:42:21 Speaker 2: When I went there, we quite literally had the best, quote-unquote, gear that you could buy. When I went there and we actually went onto the ice, Devin kept saying to me, hey, you ought to put on that caribou parka. It sounds so ridiculous for me to say that I kind of just didn't think that it was going to be any better than my big, fancy goose down jacket. 00:42:49 Speaker 3: And it took me two days. No comparison. Two days. And finally. 00:42:55 Speaker 2: There was a psychological tax that was kind of unnerving once we got on the ice. And I was like, you cannot get away from this cold. Here sitting in this warm building right now in Arkansas, it's like easy to talk about. But in the moment, it was actually unnerving, if not slightly scary to me. And finally, on the second day, I put on this caribou parka. 00:43:20 Speaker 3: Yeah. They had to help me get it on. 00:43:22 Speaker 2: It's bulky, and there's no zipper, so it's not like you put it on like a jacket. You have to kind of go into it. And when I put it on, it felt like I walked into a warm house. 00:43:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, and at 50 below, you'd still be comfortable. And the other thing is polar bear skin pants. 00:43:38 Speaker 3: Devin had a pair of those. 00:43:39 Speaker 1: Which I've worn. And there's nothing beats them. There is nothing that anybody is making in southern latitudes that can even compare with this stuff. 00:43:49 Speaker 3: So Devin, this young guy, he wore seal skin boots with no socks. 00:43:54 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:43:55 Speaker 3: And he had polar bear on the inside of the boot. 00:43:58 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:43:59 Speaker 3: And seal skin on the outside. 00:44:00 Speaker 1: That's it. 00:44:01 Speaker 3: And no socks. So at night when he came into the hut, he would pull his boots off. And he wouldn't have socks on. And it just was astonishing that he wasn't cold. And he's out there. 00:44:11 Speaker 2: Have you ever been so cold that it was really dangerous? Have you been in a compromising situation? 00:44:17 Speaker 1: Yes. So cold that the eunuch I was traveling with made it quite clear that we were not going outside. We stayed in the igloo. Because even he would not go out in those kinds of temperatures. And we waited for two days outside. until things changed. And then we headed back to Ikbyarjuk. Yeah, I mean, Inuit also recognize the limits. And there are some conditions where, you know, you get temperatures down minus 50 or even worse. And sometimes, very unusual, but it does happen, because when temperatures get cold, it's usually dead still. But sometimes you get a wind, and you combine that with minus 50, and whoa, you've got a problem on your hands. 00:45:02 Speaker 3: They know how to hunker down. 00:45:03 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:45:04 Speaker 2: In the 1970s, Frank went on a four-week-long trapping trip with an Inuit hunter from the village of Arctic Bay. Will you tell me about the trapping trip when you went with this guy? Like, when was it? 00:45:17 Speaker 3: February. 00:45:18 Speaker 1: February. down to the end of Admiralty Inlet, which is about 170 kilometers, over Polar Bear Pass, which is well-named, and up the Bordeaux Peninsula on the other side, into Lancaster Sound and back into Arctic Bay. This is in the 70s, so we had these very primitive snow machines. I broke a ski when I jumped a lead in the ice, and he had an extra one at a depot that he'd created further down the inlet, so... we were going to go down and get that and then bring it back and repair the skidoo. But I realized, you know, when you got 18 horsepower motor on one of those early generation skidoos, you know, you add a weight of another person sitting behind you, it really slows you down. So I said, well, why don't you just leave me here? 00:46:04 Speaker 4: And he said, what? 00:46:05 Speaker 1: I said, yeah, well, let's build a windbreak and, you know, and I'll throw some caribou skins on top of it and I'm dressed well and that'll keep the wind down. And it was, pitch dark but it was light i mean the thing about you know being out on uh on the snow when it's dark it's not dark because you know you have a star studded sky and you have northern lights and it you have more than enough light to travel with and hunt with even though there's no sun and uh it left me with a rifle in case a polar bear came wandering around and headed off down the uh inlet and uh was out of sound and out of sight. And then I realized, you know, where I was, you know, like in the middle of, by myself in the middle of absolutely nowhere. 00:46:55 Speaker 3: On the ocean, on the ice. 00:46:57 Speaker 1: Yeah. I wrote an essay about this. It's called Being Small in a Big Place. If you want to be humbled, you know, that was a humbling experience. 00:47:05 Speaker 3: Did it scare you? 00:47:07 Speaker 1: It scared me, yeah, at first. Once I went, it dawned on me, you know, that what if he doesn't come back? Or something happens to him, you know, like, good grief. You know, I'm a long, long way from Arctic Bay. How would I get back? 00:47:22 Speaker 3: How did you deal with that fear? 00:47:27 Speaker 1: Philosophically, that's what I meant by being small in a big place. You know, you start asking yourself some questions about who you are and what life is all about, and you go, Realize that life ends as well as begins. Something that we're so busy running around in our culture. When you're 35, 40, even 50 years of age, you often don't think about this. But it ends. For everybody. It's not something over which you have any control. I mean, it can end tomorrow. It can end 20 years from now. you know, it humbles you. You're not in control. We're so used to being in control. When you're sitting behind the steering wheel of a vehicle, you're in control. You know, when you're, you know, in your own built environment, you know, you're in control. You know, you turn the tap on, water comes out, you're in control. We are in control. And that's what it dawned upon me that it's a bit of a myth that There are many things that we are not in control of and can't be in control of and will never be in control of. And sometimes our attempt to be in control is destructive of us. So it was like a, I don't know how to describe it, it's like an existential moment. It's when you get in touch with things that are immaterial and that really count. And so that's what I did. I wrote an essay called, you know, Being Small in a Big Place. 00:49:05 Speaker 2: Being alone in a place like the Arctic would be hard to describe. I wouldn't know I was never alone. But going back to Frank's experience of his guide fixing that snowmobile, but it reminds me of Barry Lopez's in his book when he remarked on the mechanical nature of the Inuit. He said they were very, very mechanical in nature and they were masters at fixing stuff with just the tools that they had. He said, I like this quote, very sharp were these broadly smiling men with no pockets, no hats, and no wheels. To get back to your trapping trip, that story is so compelling to me of you being on the ice. 00:49:52 Speaker 3: What happened? How long were you out there? He obviously came back. 00:49:56 Speaker 1: I was out there for about 10 hours. 00:49:58 Speaker 3: 10, 12 hours. 00:50:00 Speaker 1: Did you get cold? I didn't. I stayed warm. 00:50:05 Speaker 3: And so he comes back. 00:50:05 Speaker 1: Polar bear skin pants and caribou jacket. The works, you know. And the other thing that's really important is this. Your face. You know, the face. And the fur that you have around your face. Clothing that's made in... Do you think it's. 00:50:17 Speaker 3: Better to have a beard or not have a beard? 00:50:19 Speaker 1: I think it's better to have a beard, but it depends. You know, if the beard gets moist and frozen solid, you've. 00:50:25 Speaker 3: Got a problem. When I was there, I had a beard. And it was constantly holding ice. 00:50:31 Speaker 2: And I actually thought, I wonder if it had been better if I had a shaved face because the Inuit don't have beards. 00:50:36 Speaker 1: No, they don't. And that's the other thing. The Inuit physiology is different than yours. When Inuit sweat, we lose a lot of body heat, upper back area, neck area, this area here, and also in the groin and underarms. Inuit lose a lot of heat through their face. Really? 00:51:03 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:51:04 Speaker 1: They have an adaptation, a physiological adaptation that actually makes them much better suited to cold climates. They don't lose as much heat and generate as much body sweat as we do. 00:51:17 Speaker 2: That was one of my questions because there's got to be some just them acclimatizing to the cold. Like if I was there for five years, I would probably be a little bit more tolerant of cold. There's some degree of that that's probably true. Yeah, how much of it is physiological? Are they really different? You've kind of answered that question, but what do you think? Do you think they're actually different? 00:51:41 Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. 00:51:42 Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Their physiology is different than ours, and that makes a difference. 00:51:46 Speaker 3: They've just been there that long. 00:51:48 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. 00:51:49 Speaker 3: Well, I was amazed at Devin, what he would wear. He literally wore. 00:51:56 Speaker 2: an under layer of like a hoodie sweatshirt, like my son would wear if it was like 50 degrees outside. 00:52:02 Speaker 3: And a light jacket. 00:52:04 Speaker 2: But while he was on his dog sled and he, he would be running. Like he would tell you, I mean, it was, if he was just sitting for hours, he would have wore more, but he would, he would run beside the sled and then jump on and run. But I mean, he would do this for hours and I was in full get up. I would run too with him. Sometimes just to stay, I would have to run even in my full gear. 00:52:30 Speaker 3: To just stay warm. 00:52:31 Speaker 2: You know, about every 15 minutes I would step off and, you know, I couldn't run as far as him, but I would just get some body heat going. 00:52:38 Speaker 1: Yeah, I've had that experience. 00:52:40 Speaker 2: Frank is an expert, but I still wanted to verify this idea of Inuit physiology being unique. And I did find research from the Canadian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology from 1974 stating that this was true. However, there is some online chatter today about this not being true. But let's get back to Frank. 00:53:03 Speaker 3: Okay. Trapping trip. What were you guys trapping? This is back in the 70s. 00:53:08 Speaker 1: This is Arctic Fox. 00:53:11 Speaker 3: Did you catch some? 00:53:12 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:53:13 Speaker 3: How was he catching them? 00:53:14 Speaker 1: Leg hold trap. Leg hold trap. 00:53:16 Speaker 2: Yeah. Tell me about him making igloos and where you stayed and. 00:53:22 Speaker 1: Uh, to make an igloo, you, you need the right kind of snow, you know, and the Inuit are very, very in touch with, you know, different kinds of snow. There's a, a commonly, uh, known kind of a way in which, uh, Kaluna or white folk talk about, you know, with languages and, you know, uh, a marvel at all the different words that Inuit have for snow. But in actual fact, they don't have more words than we do. But it's just the way the language works. The language involves adding suffixes and prefixes to basic words. So we would have two words like wet snow, and they would have one word for it. But they have all kinds of ways of describing snow and the different conditions of snow. So there's certain kinds of snow that are better for making snow houses or igloos than others. And he was just really good. I mean, he could put together an igloo that was capable of accommodating two people in about 50 minutes. 00:54:27 Speaker 3: He would make blocks with a big knife? 00:54:29 Speaker 1: He would make blocks with a big knife, but what he would do is, if you had a snowbank, he would start cutting into the bank to take the blocks out, and then he would pile them up around. So he was going down into the snowbank at the same time as he was going up. So it isn't like the igloo is sitting right on top of the snow. It's built into the snow. 00:54:49 Speaker 2: So the blocks that he's taken out are actually becoming part of the cavity of the ice. 00:54:54 Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, igloos are incredible. I mean, you can have a temperature of minus 50 outside, and you can have a nice toasty minus 5 inside. Obviously, you can't have, you know, above freezing, or you're going to have... That's the other problem with igloos. Igloos, they glaze over. So in the winter, you know, it might go through a number of igloos. They'd have to rebuild them because they stop breathing after a while, which is kind of dangerous. And you get a glazed surface on the inside. When it starts to glaze over and freeze over, you get kind of an icy coating on the inside. The air is no longer passing through the snow, and you run the risk of suffocating yourself. 00:55:35 Speaker 2: Oh, really? 00:55:36 Speaker 1: So one igloo doesn't last the entire winter, historically. 00:55:40 Speaker 2: I think that seems a little confusing, but having been up there in those extreme temperatures, the difference between negative 40 and negative 5 is so much that you could step into negative 5 after being in negative 40, and it. 00:55:55 Speaker 3: Would feel warm. I think sometimes to us... It would be like, how could an igloo produce any warmth? Because it's still below freezing. 00:56:05 Speaker 1: But when you're dressed properly, you know, and you're not changing, you're still wearing the same clothes you were outside. But once you're inside, those clothes keep you really warm. Yeah. 00:56:14 Speaker 3: What was this guy like traveling with him? Was it just you and him? Yeah. And what was his name? 00:56:19 Speaker 1: Atagutsiak. 00:56:20 Speaker 3: And he was just a well-known trapper. 00:56:22 Speaker 4: There in the region? 00:56:22 Speaker 1: He was an elder and well-known, yeah. Yeah, he was somebody who, for example... had a pretty important role to play in narwhal hunting. In fact, the woman that I talked to that I interviewed was his wife. 00:56:38 Speaker 4: Oh, really? 00:56:39 Speaker 3: The 100-year-old woman? 00:56:40 Speaker 1: Yeah. I brought some photographs with me, some pictures I'd taken, and she looked at me and said, oh, I remember you. 00:56:47 Speaker 3: You were that guy. 00:56:49 Speaker 1: Yeah, you were that guy. 00:56:50 Speaker 2: How was he relationally with you? Was he open with you? Did you feel like he was glad you were there? 00:56:59 Speaker 1: You know, he was curious as to why I was there and why I was interested in doing this. His command of English was pretty limited, but he was also very respectful. He let me make mistakes. He treated me, I think, in the same way that Inuit treated their own children. You know, it would allow them a lot of freedom. You get to learn from doing things wrong or from not doing them right. And then you also learn by watching. Not by talking and asking, but by really watching and paying attention to what somebody does and how they do it. 00:57:40 Speaker 3: How many Arctic fox did you catch during that time? 00:57:43 Speaker 1: About 40. 00:57:46 Speaker 3: 40. He'd prepare the skins there. 00:57:48 Speaker 1: No, no, no. That didn't happen until it got back. So he just kept the whole carcass. Yeah, yeah. They're tiny. Arctic fox are not that big. And we had two kamatooks with us. 00:58:03 Speaker 3: What did you eat? What did he cook? 00:58:05 Speaker 1: We took a lot of frozen bannock. 00:58:08 Speaker 3: What is that? 00:58:09 Speaker 1: We had a lot of caribou. We had some narwhal. Bannock is unleavened bread. It's a Scottish introduction to Scottish traders and introduced bannock to Canadian indigenous peoples a long, long time ago. 00:58:26 Speaker 3: So you were eating caribou, narwhal? 00:58:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Frozen caribou, you know, you take an ulu and you take a very thin slice off the hind quarter and put it in your mouth. It sort of melts instantly. Raw? Raw, yeah. 00:58:40 Speaker 3: Raw caribou? Yeah. 00:58:42 Speaker 1: Raw everything. 00:58:43 Speaker 4: So. 00:58:44 Speaker 2: I had an experience with raw caribou when I was in Resolute Bay. Devin, they had killed some caribou. They'd killed them in December. But what is hard to understand is that everything is a deep freeze. And so these caribou, they had basically put them in this kind of storage building in quarters. And it's not in a freezer because it's cold. 00:59:09 Speaker 3: It's not a heated. building, just total frozen. 00:59:13 Speaker 2: And he took a little hatchet and clacked off some pieces and some fat, and we sat around and just ate raw caribou meat. 00:59:22 Speaker 1: Well, when I was in the community of Baker Lake, Kamenitwak, I can remember in the late 70s being quite amazed by what was up on the roof. They were caribou carcasses being stored up on the roof of many houses to keep them away from the dogs, of course, but they were frozen solid on the roof. 00:59:44 Speaker 3: That's wild. 00:59:46 Speaker 2: Frank's story of trapping with the Inuit may seem disconnected from our wider story of the Inuit relocation into the high Arctic. But in fact, we've ended up on the Arctic fox on purpose. We've just been brought into the beginnings of a much bigger story. In the first half of the 1900s, Arctic fox pelts were some of the most valuable furs in the world. And the big trapping companies like the Hudson Bay Company contracted with the only people who could survive where that fox lived. 01:00:18 Speaker 3: The only people who could catch them. I'll give you a guess who it was. It was the Inuits. 01:00:23 Speaker 2: And that's the starting point of our story. But it's too much for now. We're going to talk about this episode on the next Bear Grease Render. And then on episode two, we're going to get into the nitty gritty of why the Canadian government moved these people into this place. The next episode in our series will come out on November 18th. 01:00:48 Speaker 3: Of course, there'll be a render in between that. 01:00:51 Speaker 2: And remember to check out Season 14 of Meat Eater on YouTube. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please remember to pre-order my book, American Bear, on November the 9th. I'll be sending you a Christmas card. Thanks for listening to Brent's This Country Life. Lakes Backwoods University. 01:01:23 Speaker 3: It's fall. 01:01:25 Speaker 2: It's time to rock and roll. This is the time of year that we all love. 01:01:30 Speaker 3: Thank you all so much.