Taissumani, Nov. 18
Knud Rasmussen and the Iglulik Inuit, Part 6
Aua's wife, Orulo.
Aua’s wife, Orulo, was almost as garrulous as Tagurnaaq had been. She described her life in detail for her visitor. She had been born far to the north at the mouth of Admiralty Inlet, but her family had moved to the Iglulik area when she was but a child.
She had travelled extensively in that area and on Baffin Island and, she told Rasmussen, she had been many times to Pond Inlet to trade with the Scottish whalers who frequented Baffin Bay and Lancaster Sound.
She recounted the earliest memories of her childhood and described seasons spent living at Piling, a favoured hunting ground on the Foxe Basin coast of Baffin Island. She told of the death of her father who had been lashed inside a skin, dragged away from the village and left lying in the open, his face toward the west, to die. It was then that she realized that people feared the dead and that special customs governed the behavior of people associated with the recently deceased.
Orulo’s mother had remarried but her step-father had perished in a kayak accident. She married again, to a young man who soon abandoned her, and again, this time to a man who took her, but not her daughter, off to Pond Inlet in search of white men with whom to trade.
Orulo had been left to fend for herself and had lived with two families before Aua had come to fetch her as his wife. It had been, she claimed, a happy life, overall, and she had borne seven children with Aua, whom she always called by the pet name of Uvitaara — my new husband.
Rasmussen asked the old lady what had been the bitterest memory of her eventful life. She answered immediately:
“The bitterest I have ever known was a time of famine shortly after my eldest son was born. And to make matters worse, all our stores of meat from the previous hunting had been destroyed by wolverines. During the two coldest months of the winter, Uvitaara hardly slept indoors a single night, but was out all the time hunting seals, and made do with a snatch of sleep now and then in the little snow shelters he built by the blow holes. We nearly starved to death, for in all that time he got only two seals. To see him go out cold and hungry day after day to his hunting, in all manner of cruel weather, to see him grow thinner and weaker all the time – oh, it was terrible. But then at last he got a walrus, and we were saved.”
Lost in memory, she then described, again at Rasmussen’s request, the happiest thing she could remember:
“It was the first time I came back to Baffin Land after I was married. I had always been a poor fatherless creature, passed from hand to hand; but now I was welcomed with great festivity by all in the village. My husband had come to challenge one of the others to a song contest, and there were many feasts on that occasion, feasts such as I had only heard about, but never taken part in myself.”
When she was finished relating her life of bitter-sweet memories, she suddenly burst into tears, explaining to Rasmussen, with the eternal optimism and cheerfulness of the traditional Iglulik Inuit:
“I have today been a child once more. While I was telling you all about my life, I lived it over again, and saw and felt everything in the same way as when it really happened. There are so many things we do not think of until the memories are upon us. And now you have learned the life of an old woman from the very beginning to this day. And I could not help crying for joy to think I had been so happy.”
This concludes the series on Knud Rasmussen’s time among the Iglulingmiut and the Aivilingmiut.
He visited many other groups of Inuit in his travels across the Canadian Arctic, and recorded the legends and lore of all the Inuit he met. It is through his writings that much of the traditional knowledge of Canadian Inuit has been preserved.
Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
