How We See the Land

Thirty years ago, when I was a younger man, perhaps made of tougher stuff, I travelled by dog team with Inuit friends for twelve days from Uqsuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven), across Rae Strait, up into the highlands and across the Boothia Peninsula, back down onto the sea ice, then southeast to the community known today as Kugaaruk (formerly Pelly Bay). It was a formidable and memorable journey for us all, in different ways.

Along the way, there was a particular incident (among several, really) which has stayed with me. We were high in the hills of the Boothia: beautiful country, scoured by the glaciers, as wild and rugged as anywhere I’ve travelled. Our four sleds followed the valleys for the most part, crossing myriad frozen lakes along the way. But on one occasion, unexplained at the time, we trailed behind the lead team to climb slowly up a backslope onto a height of land.

There we stood, gazing out over something like 10,000 square kilometres of “empty” spectacular landscape. Our leader, aptly named Okpik (meaning “a snowy owl”), was seeing in his mind a landscape made up of lines, in this case the twisting valleys and ridges that defined our trail. Although he was briefly uncertain which of the sinuous curves to follow, he was equally unperturbed.

As it happened, I had not revealed previously that, stashed away in my pack, I had the detailed, government-survey topographic maps which covered our route. I chose this moment to offer the maps for his use. He dismissed the suggestion out of hand—they were of no interest to him in that context. I knew he was good at reading maps—we had spent some hours during the planning of this little expedition the year before poring over the maps in detail. Perhaps he was humouring me, but he certainly knew his way around a map.

More critical for Okpik during the planning phase was the visit we paid to his father-in-law, a respected elder in the community of Uqsuqtuuq at the time. The old man spoke; we listened. He described in compelling detail the 500-kilometre journey; every landmark along the way had a name and a story. That “story-line” became embedded in Okpik’s memory forever.

From atop that hill on the Boothia Peninsula, the most northerly piece of continental North America, at more or less the mid-point of our journey, Okpik was able to pick out the story-line from the maze of lines at his feet, and regain our way. Linear conceptualization of the territory provided a sense of order to an otherwise chaotic landscape. That night, we built our iglu exactly where he had expected. He knew the spot—it had a story.

It was while thinking about all this later, as we bumped along gently over the crusted snow, back on our intended trail, that I remembered another experience, and realized it was somehow related.

Ten years before this dog sled trip in the High Arctic, I was living in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake) and had occasion to travel with a friend around his fox trapline. Normally, that would have been a pleasant two-day trip, with a single overnight in an iglu beside the Kazan River, less than a hundred kilometres, as the raven flies, south of Qamani’tuaq.

On that occasion, however, an unexpected blizzard blew in that first night, and kept us locked in our iglu for days. On day four of this, sensing that we’d both had enough, Tulurialik suggested that we “go outside for some fresh air.” The blizzard was still raging. At a distance of only three metres, I lost sight of my companion beside the iglu, before quickly retracing my steps downwind to find him again. He was calmly brushing accumulated snow from the snowmobile.

Of one thing I was certain: if he was going somewhere on that machine, I wanted to go with him. We tore away across the bumpy ridges of windswept snow. Without the clue of gravity, it would have been almost impossible to tell which way was up in the boil of wind and snow that surrounded us.

Tulurialik sped across the frozen river for at least ten minutes before stopping. We’d lost track of our iglu, which was forgivable in such limited visibility. Tulurialik, however, was unperturbed. He joked about "being lost," a state he understood in my terms, but which was completely unreal to him. He remained confident, driving on even farther in the same straight line.

After a few minutes, he stopped and pointed at a bare tip of rock protruding from the snow. "I remember that rock," he assured me.

Later, back in the iglu over hot tea, Tulurialik explained that he had kept going in a straight line even after we were "lost" because he knew he’d eventually encounter a familiar landmark to give him his bearings. Four days prior, he’d noticed that small protruding rock and he remembered it. If not the rock, there would have been something else.

Like most non-Inuit wilderness travellers, I carry a map and remain conscious of my location on that spatial surface. I view the surrounding land as my area, for the moment at least. An older Inuk travels differently. Rather than areal thinking, he sees the world around as linear.

It was the same for Okpik on top of that hill in the Boothia. He was looking for a line. Later in the trip, I asked Okpik to draw me a map of our route. He took my blank sheet of paper and drew several large dots on it. It soon became apparent that each one represented a specific location along the trail for him, all of which had placenames.

Once all the dots were placed in what he deemed to be the correct relative positions, he connected them with a line and handed the completed map back to me. Landmarks off the route were, apparently, of little consequence. The path was seen as free-standing, not tied to the environment around it. Okpik's map reflected his view of space. It was very much route-oriented, drawn to illustrate our trail rather than all his geographical knowledge of the area.

Inuit are right, of course. If you could rise up above the barrenlands and look down, you would see a landscape filled with lines made by rivers, eskers, and caribou paths, all running with some regularity in a linear pattern across the tundra. For the areal thinker to get this linear view, we have to separate ourselves from the landscape. Inuit instinctively adopt this perspective at ground level, with themselves in it. It is an ancient skill that, for millennia, was key to their survival and today is all but supplanted by modern technologies like GPS.

For Inuit, traditional navigation included use of the stars, of course, a sensitivity to the prevailing wind, and the patterns of uqalurait (known as “sastrugi” in English, from the Russian) on the wind-packed snow. But more than anything, it was their instincts for the land as a matrix of lines which led them safely out for the hunt and back home to the iglu.