Seven
THE COUNTRY OF THE MIND
Pingok Island.
HPI HE DAILY CYCLE of tides rising and falling on the narrow
I beaches of Pingok Island during the open-water season is
m hard to read. In this part of the Arctic Ocean, where the
Beaufort Sea washes against the north coast of Alaska, the vertical
rise of the tide can be measured with a fingertip. On a windless day
one can see reflected clouds undisturbed at the rim of the ocean's
surface. It is possible to stand toe-to at the water's edge and, if one
has the patience, see it gain only the heels of one's boots in six hours.
Another peculiarity inherent in the land. In the eastern Arctic, at
Ungava Bay and in embayments of the Canadian Archipelago, the
tides are more substantial, rising up to 40 feet.
252
Pingok Island lies at yo^TSI and i49°35'W, a few miles off
the north Alaska coast, some 30 miles east of the Colville River
delta. It is the westernmost of the Jones Islands, a stretch of barrier
islands that protects a shallow area along the coast called Simpson
Lagoon, favored by migrating ducks.
This particular part of the arctic coast was little visited by
Westerners until recently. Prudhoe Bay, where oil was discovered
in February 1968, is 40 miles to the east; on clear days black clouds
from flare-offs in those oil fields are faintly visible on the horizon.
To the southwest a few miles, at Oliktok Point on the mainland, is
an operational DEW line station. Pingok Island itself carries traces
of modern inquiries into the region: the ubiquitous detritus of
industrial reconnoitering and military exercises; and refuse from
recent Eskimo and scientific encampments--strands of yellow poly-
ethylene rope, empty wooden boxes and white gas tins, and out-
board motor parts.
The most noticeable, man-made features of this island--it is
about four and a half miles long and a half-mile wide at several
points--are a shed and two pale yellow clapboard buildings that
2
54 ARCTIC DREAMS
stand at its west end, and a cluster of coastal survey markers erected
on the east end. For parts of two summers I lived with several
marine biologists in one of the small, one-room buildings at the
edge of the western beach. We were at sea most of the time; but on
"weather days," when the inevitable August snow squalls or heavy
seas prohibited our working efficiently from a small boat, I walked
the island's tundra plain.
This is an old business, walking slowly over the land with an
appreciation of its immediacy to the senses and in anticipation of
what lies hidden in it. The eye alights suddenly on something
bright in the grass--the chitinous shell of an insect. The nose tugs
at a minute blossom for some trace of arctic perfume. The hands
turn over an odd bone, extrapolating, until the animal is discovered
in the mind and seen to be moving in the land. One finds anomalous
stones to puzzle over, and in footprints and broken spiderwebs the
traces of irretrievable events.
During those summers I found, too, the molted feathers of
ducks washed up in great wrack lines, in heaps, on the beach.
Undisturbed in shallow waters on the lagoon side, I found hoof-
prints of caribou, as sharp as if the animals had stepped there in
fresh clay only a moment before. They must have crossed over in
late spring, on the last of the ice. I squatted down wherever the
evidence of animals was particularly strong amid the tundra's
polygon fractures. Where Canada geese had cropped grass at the
edge of a freshwater pond; at the skull of a ringed seal carried
hundreds of yards inland by ice, or scavengers; where grass had
been flattened by a resting fox.
I saw in the sea face of a low bench of earth along the beach
the glistening edge of an ice lens that underlay the tundra. The
surface layer of plants and dirt overhung it like a brow-thatch of
hair. I tried persistently but without success to sneak up on the
flocks of feeding geese. I lost and regained images of ptarmigan
against the ground, because of their near-perfect camouflage. I
brought back to the cabin to set on a shelf by my bed castings of
The Country of the Mind 255
the landscape, to keep for a while and wonder over. The fractured
intervertebral disk of a belukha whale. The prehistoric-looking
exoskeleton of a marine isopod. And handfuls of feathers. Tangible
things from my gentle interrogations, objects to which some part
of a pervasive and original mystery still clung.
In the sometimes disconcerting summary which is a photo-
graph, Pingok Island would seem bleak and forsaken. In winter it
disappears beneath whiteness, a flat white plain extending seaward
into the Beaufort Sea ice and landward without a border into the
tundra of the coastal plain. The island emerges in June, resplendent
with flowers and insects and birds, only to disappear again in a few
months beneath the first snowstorms. To a Western imagination
that finds a stand of full-crowned trees heartening, that finds the
flight and voice of larks exhilarating, and the sight of wind rolling
over fields of tall grass more agreeable, Pingok seems impoverished.
When I arrived on the island, I, too, understood its bleak aspect as
a category, the expression of something I had read about or been
told. In the weeks during which I made some passing acquaintance
with it, its bleakness was altered, however. The prejudice we
exercise against such landscapes, imagining them to be primitive,
stark, and pagan, became sharply apparent. It is in a place like this
that we would unthinkingly store poisons or test weapons, land like
the deserts to which we once banished our heretics and where we
once loosed scapegoats with the burden of our transgressions.
The differing landscapes of the earth are hard to know indi-
vidually. They are as difficult to engage in conversation as wild
animals. The complex feelings of affinity and self-assurance one
feels with one's native place rarely develop again in another
landscape.
It is a convention of Western thought to believe all cultures
are compelled to explore, that human beings seek new land because
their economies drive them onward. Lost in this valid but never-
theless impersonal observation is the notion of a simpler longing, of
a human desire for a less complicated life, for fresh intimacy and
256 ARCTIC DREAMS
renewal. These, too, draw us into new landscapes. And desire
causes imagination to misconstrue what it finds. The desire for
wealth, for revivification, for triumph, as much or more than
scientific measurement and description, or the imperatives of eco-
nomic expansion, resolves the geography of a newfound landscape.
IN 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner read a paper in Chicago before
the American Historical Association that changed the course of
American historiography--the way historians understand how ele-
ments of the past are causally related. Turner's idea, which came to
be called the Frontier Hypothesis, has become so much a part of
the way we think about the country's past that it now seems self-
evident. At the time he presented it, it was unheralded and unique.
Prior to 1893, most historians believed America had been
shaped by the desire to separate itself from European influences, or
by the economic and social issues that came to a head in the Civil
War. Turner offered a third view, that America was shaped by
both the fact and the concept of its westering frontier. The national
character, so distinguished by enterprise, initiative, and hard work,
he said, derived from an understanding of its citizens' experiences
on the frontier. Historians generally accepted Turner's hypothesis,
and have refined upon and extrapolated from it for nearly a century.
Turner's observation showed at least two things: the narrative
direction that a nation's history takes is amenable to revision; and
the landscapes in which history unfolds are both real, that is, pro-
found in their physical effects on mankind, and not real, but mere
projections, artifacts of human perception. Nowhere in North
American history is this more apparent than in the westward move-
ment of the nineteenth century. Politicians and promoters, news-
paper editors and businessmen argued hotly over the suitability of
the tallgrass and shortgrass prairies for farming. In most of these
arguments the political cant of boomers and nay-sayers and the
abstractions of agrarian theorists counted for more than the factual
testimony of the land in the form of rainfall records or the state-
ments of people who lived there.
The Country of the Mind 2
57
Perhaps this is obvious. In the modern age, one of the most
irksome, and ironic, of political problems in North America is the
promulgation of laws and regulations from Washington and
Ottawa that seem grossly ignorant of the landscapes to which they
apply. We all, however, apprehend the land imperfectly, even
when we go to the trouble to wander in it. Our perceptions are
colored by preconception and desire. The physical landscape is an
unstructured abode of space and time and is not entirely fathom-
able; but this does not necessarily put us at a disadvantage in seeking
to know it. Believing them to be fundamentally mysterious in their
form and color, in the varieties of life inherent in them, in the
tactile qualities of their soils, the sound of the violent fall of rain
upon them, the smell of their buds--believing landscapes to be
mysterious aggregations, it becomes easier to approach them. One
simply accords them the standing that one grants the other myster-
ies, as distinguished from the puzzles, of life.
I recall in this context two thoughts. A man in Anaktuvuk
Pass, in response to a question about what he did when he visited a
new place, said to me, "I listen." That's all. I listen, he meant, to
what the land is saying. I walk around in it and strain my senses in
appreciation of it for a long time before I, myself, ever speak a
word. Entered in such a respectful manner, he believed, the land
would open to him. The other thought draws, again, on the experi-
ence of American painters. As they sought an identity apart from
their European counterparts in the nineteenth century, they came to
conceive of the land as intrinsically powerful: beguiling and
frightening, endlessly arresting and incomprehensibly rich, un-
knowable and wild. "The face of God," they said.
As I step out of our small cabin on Pingok Island, the undistin-
guished plain of tundra spreads before me to the south and east. A
few glaucous gulls rise from the ground and drop back, and I feel
the cold, damp air, like air from a refrigerator, against my cheeks.
A few yards from the door, stark and alone on the tundra, a female
common eider lies dead. A few more yards to the west, a bearded-
258 ARCTIC DREAMS
seal skin has been expertly stretched between short wooden stakes to
dry. A few yards beyond, a northern phalarope spins wildly on the
surface of a freshwater pond, feeding on zooplankton.
A southwest wind has been blowing for two days; it's the
reason we are ashore today. The sky threatens squalls and snow. I
head south across the tundra toward the lagoon, wondering if I will
find ducks there. In my mind is a vague plan: to go there, then east
along the coast to a place where the tundra is better drained, easier
walking, then back across the island, and to come home along the
seaward coast.
In such flat terrain as this, even with the lowering skies, I brood
on the vastness of the region. The vastness is deceptive, however.
The journals of arctic explorers are full of examples of messages
stashed out there with a high expectation of their discovery, be-
cause the prominent places in such a featureless landscape are so
obvious. They are the places a human eye notices right away. And
there is something, too, about the way the landscape funnels human
movement, such that encounters with strangers are half expected, as
is the case in a desert crossing. Human beings are so few here and
their errands such a part of the odd undercurrent of knowledge
that flows in a remote region that you half expect, too, to know of
the stranger. Once, camped on the upper Yukon, I saw a man in a
distant canoe. When he raised his field glasses to look at a cliff
where peregrine falcons were nesting, I surmised who he was (a
biological consultant working on a peregrine census) from a remark
I had overheard a week before in a small restaurant in Fairbanks.
He probably knew of my business there, too. Some of the strange-
ness went out of the country in that moment.
If the mind releases its fiduciary grip on time, does not dole it
out in a fretful way like a valued commodity but regards it as
undifferentiated, like the flatness of the landscape, it is possible to
transcend distance--to travel very far without anxiety, to not be
defeated by the great reach of the land. If one is dressed well and
carrying a little food, and has the means to secure more food and to
construct shelter, the mind is that much more free to work with the
The Country of the Mind 259
senses in an appreciation of the country. The unappealing tundra
plain, I recall, is to its denizens a storehouse of food and instant
tools.
As I thread my way southwest, along the margins of frost
polygons, I am aware of the movement of birds. A distant speck
moves across the sky with a loon's trajectory. A Savannah sparrow
flits away over the ground. The birds come and go--out to sea to
feed or to the lagoon to rest--on a seemingly regular schedule.
Scientists say the pattern of coming and going, of feeding and rest-
ing, repeats itself every twenty-four hours. But a description of it
becomes more jagged and complex than the experience, like any
parsing of a movement in time.
The sound of my footfall changes as I step from damp ground
to wet, from wet to dry. Microhabitats. I turn the pages of a mental
index to arctic plants and try to remember which are the ones to
distinguish these borders: which plants separate at a glance mesic
tundra from hydric, hydric from xeric? I do not remember. Such
generalities, in any case, would only founder on the particulars at
my feet. One is better off with a precise and local knowledge, and
a wariness of borders. These small habitats, like the larger land-
scapes, merge imperceptibly with each other. Another, remembered
landscape makes this one seem familiar; and the habits of an animal
in one region provoke speculation about behavior among its rela-
tives in another region. But no country, finally, is just like another.
The generalities are abstractions. And the lines on our topographic
maps reveal not only the scale at which we are discerning, but our
tolerance for discrepancies in nature.
A tundra botanist once described to me her patient disassembly
of a cluster of plants on a tussock, a tundra mound about 18 inches
high and a foot or so across. She separated live from dead plant
tissue and noted the number and kind of the many species of plants.
She examined the insects and husks of berries, down to bits of
things nearly too slight to see or to hold without crushing. The
process took hours, and her concentration and sense of passing time
became fixed at that scale. She said she remembered looking up at
i6o ARCTIC DREAMS
one point, at the tundra that rolled away in a hundred thousand
tussocks toward the horizon, and that she could not return her gaze
because of that sight, not for long minutes.
My route across Pingok seems rich, but I am aware that I miss
much of what I pass, for lack of acuity in my senses, lack of dis-
crimination, and my general unfamiliarity. If I knew the indigenous
human language, it would help greatly. A local language discrim-
inates among the local phenomena, and it serves to pry the landscape
loose from its anonymity.
I know how much I miss--I have only to remember the faces
of the Eskimos I've traveled with, the constant nicker of their eyes
over the countryside. Even inside their houses men prefer to talk
while sitting by a window. They are always looking away at the
land or looking up to the sky, the coming weather. As I near the
lagoon, pondering the identity of something I saw a flock of
ptarmigan eating, I smile wryly at a memory: it was once thought
that scurvy was induced in the Arctic by the bleakness of its coasts.
There are no ducks nearby in the lagoon. With my field
glasses I can just make out the dark line of their rafts on the far side
of the water, a lee shore. I settle myself in a crease in the tundra,
out of the wind, arrange my clothing so nothing binds, and begin
to study the far shore with the binoculars. After ten or fifteen
minutes I have found two caribou. Stefansson was once asked by an
Eskimo to whom he was showing a pair of binoculars for the first
time whether he could "see into tomorrow" with them. Stefansson
took the question literally and was amused. What the inuk probably
meant was, Are those things powerful enough to see something that
will not reach you for another day, like migrating caribou? Or a
part of the landscape suitable for a campsite, which you yourself
will not reach for another day? Some Eskimo hunters have astound-
ing natural vision; they can point out caribou grazing on a slope
three or four miles away. But the meticulous inspection of the land
that is the mark of a good hunter becomes most evident when he
uses a pair of field glasses. Long after the most inquiring nonnative
has grown weary of glassing the land for some clue to the move-
The Country of the Mind 261
ment of animals, a hunter is still scouring its edges and interstices.
He may take an hour to glass 360° of the apparently silent tundra,
one section at a time.
You can learn to do this; and such scrutiny always turns up a
ground squirrel, an itinerant wolverine, a nesting bird--something
that tells you where you are and what's going on. And when you
fall into the habit, find some way like this to shed your impatience,
you feel less conspicuous in the land.
I walk a long ways down the beach before arriving at the place
where the tundra dries out, and turn inland. Halfway across I find
the skull of a goose, as seemingly random in this landscape as the
dead eider in the grass by the cabin. A more thoughtful inquirer,
someone dependent upon these bits of information in a way that I
am not, would find out why. To the southwest I can see a snow
squall--I want to reach the seaward side of the island before it
arrives, in case there is something worse behind it. The shoreline is
my way home. I put the paper-thin skull back on the ground. Far
to the east I see a dilapidated spire of driftwood, a marker erected
in 1910 by Ernest Leffingwell when he was mapping these coasts.
Leaning slightly askew, it has the aspect of an abandoned building,
derelict and wind-punished. It is a monument to the desire to con-
trol vastness. It is a referent for the metes and bounds that permit
a proper division and registry of the countryside, an assignment of
ownership.
THE western history of Pingok Island comprises few events. John
Franklin, a young British naval officer, led an overland party almost
this far west from the mouth of the Mackenzie in 1826, trying for a
rendezvous at Point Barrow, 250 miles farther on. But with bad
weather and the physical strain on the men, he "reached the point
beyond which perseverance would be rashness," and turned back,
in the fall of that year. Robert M'Clure put a party ashore in
August 1850, to entreat with a small group of resident Eskimo. The
Eskimos regarded Investigator as "a swimming island," wrote a
thirty-three-year-old Moravian missionary with the shore party.
262 ARCTIC DREAMS
"At every movement of the ship, though it was half an hour's pull
distant, they showed fresh alarm and an electric shock, as it were,
went through them all."
Late in the nineteenth century the island was visited by
American whalers, who took on fresh water from its ponds.
Stefansson abandoned the ill-fated Karluk nearby, in September
1913. (Caught in the ice, the ship, a brigantine whaler refitted as a
scientific expeditionary vessel, later drifted far to the west, where it
was crushed and sank, with the subsequent loss of half the party.)
Traders and explorers like Leffingwell were also in the area in these
years. In 1952 an archaeologist named William Irving made the
first excavations of the island's prehistoric sites. A few years later,
the DEW line station was built at Oliktok. In the 1960s the U.S.
Navy built two sheds and a 10- by 18-foot cabin for the use of
scientific field parties working out of the Naval Arctic Research
Laboratory at Barrow, and later for the federal Outer Continental
Shelf Environmental Assessment Program and other projects. These
buildings also occasionally shelter Eskimos traveling along the
coast, whence the bearded-seal skin pegged on the tundra by the
door of the cabin we were using.
The aboriginal history of the island is much deeper and also
more obscure. It is likely, because of the way it is situated, that the
island has been used by hunting peoples for centuries, though prob-
ably not continually. Today, a dozen 400-year-old dwellings, out-
lined on the tundra by protruding driftwood logs and bowhead
whale ribs, are the only traces of early occupation left. This stretch
of North American coastline was apparently never heavily popu-
lated. The Pingok houses, however, constituted the largest pre-
historic site on the north Alaska coast in 1981.
An astute archaeologist would have anticipated the remains of
such an encampment here. Pingok Island gets its name from an
Inupiatun word for "a rising of earth over a dome of ice." The
reference is to a long sand dune on the seaward edge of the island
which gives protection from storm surges. Such protection is rare
along this coast. It would be noticed and taken advantage of.
The Country of the Mind 263
Hunters camped at Pingok would benefit, too, from early access to
bearded and ringed seals around the mouth of the Colville, where
freshwater ice begins to disintegrate before the sea ice breaks up.
On Simpson Lagoon they would find migrating geese and ducks.
Along the beach are great supplies of driftwood (from the Mac-
kenzie River), some of the trees 30 or 40 feet long. There are large
freshwater ponds on the island, and from here there is good access
to runs of char and to herds of belukha whale, and, in September,
to bowhead whales headed west for Bering Strait. On the landward
side of the lagoon they could expect to see caribou.
Excavations at the Pingok houses indicate that the people living
here between 1550 and 1700 hunted all of these animals, and also
walrus and polar bear. Among the more intriguing objects un-
earthed are a polar-bear-tooth (?) fish lure, a child's miniature
hunting bow, and a piece of caribou-antler(P) plate armor.
Standing by the remains of these houses, one is struck by the
fact that in the Arctic so much human history lies undisturbed on
the surface of the land. And by the contrast with a more easily
retrieved past, such as our own. Here is a prong from a bird spear;
here is a walrus-tooth pendant; but what were the ideas attached to
these objects?
The remains of other, more modern Eskimo dwellings are also
found on Pingok--sod and whalebone houses from the 1920s. In
recent years ethnohistorians have visited the islands, bringing with
them the people who once lived in these houses. The people were
interviewed here with these artifacts and the landscape itself close
at hand in order to plumb "the memory culture," the culture tied
to tools no longer used and still most accurately described in the
Inupiatun language, whose vocabulary is rapidly fading.
One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1981 several Eskimos
from the village of Barrow paid us a visit on Pingok. They were
conducting a land-use survey, a complex process of land assessment
used by native peoples to substantiate their aboriginal claims to
certain sections of land. We talked a little about the Eskimo
"history" of Pingok Island (as if, without such corroborative de-
264 ARCTIC DREAMS
tails, acceptable to the men who owned the maps, the place would
remain vague and unclaimable). Only some sort of acceptable, veri-
fiable history could save it for them now. We all turned, with more
ease and enthusiasm, to talk of hunting. Such chance conversations
as this, far from the villages, where political and racial tensions can
be strong, are often cordial. No one is apt to pursue a point that
might lead to disagreement, or to ask a question that might be con-
strued as prying. It is always acceptable, and good, to speak of
hunting. A great deal of information about the local landscape
passes back and forth in this context. One feels here, sharing the
details of animals' lives in the memories of those present, the author-
ity for a claim to the land just as legitimate and important as the
things found at a 400-year-old house.
After they left--they were traveling in a small boat toward
the east (and to most foreign observers they would have seemed
underdressed and poorly provisioned for their journey, a common
impression)--we talked among ourselves about the Eskimos' cul-
tural history. The men who left carried with them a borrowed
historiography, a matrix they put down like a net in the undiffer-
entiated sphere of time that welled up in their own traditional
and unwritten history. It is a system they are becoming familiar,
and handy, with. And there was great dignity and authority in the
Eskimo women who sat on driftwood logs on Pingok Island,
recalling into tape recorders the details of their lives from so many
years ago. One could so easily imagine, as memory bloomed before
the genuine desire of another to know, filaments appearing in the
wind, reattaching them to the land, even as they spoke.
Land-use-and-occupancy projects have been conducted by
and with native peoples throughout the Arctic, in furtherance of
their land claims and to protect their hunting rights. These studies
have revealed a long and remarkably unbroken connection between
various groups of indigenous people and the particular regions of
the Arctic they inhabit. It is impossible to separate their culture
from these landscapes. The land is like a kind of knowledge travel-
ing in time through them. Land does for them what architecture
The Country of the Mind 265
sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of
history; and a conviction that what they most dread--annihilation,
eclipse--will not occur.
"We are here [i.e., alive now in this particular place] because
our ancestors are real," a man once told an interviewer. The ances-
tors are real by virtue of their knowledge and use of the land, their
affection for it. A native woman, alone and melancholy in a hospital
room, told another interviewer she would sometimes raise her hands
before her eyes to stare at them: "Right in my hand, I could see
the shorelines, beaches, lakes, mountains, and hills I had been to. I
could see the seals, birds, and game. . . ." Another Eskimo, sensing
the breakup of his culture's relationships with the land, the replace-
ment of his ancient hunting economy by another sort of economy,
told an interviewer it would be best all around if the Inuit became
"the minds over the land." Their minds, he thought, shaped as they
were to the specific contours of the land, could imagine it well
enough to know what to do. Like most Eskimos, as the land-use-
and-occupancy surveys made clear, he could not grasp the meaning
of a life divorced from the landscape--the animals, the weather, the
sound of ice, the taste and nourishment that came from "the food
that counts."
In a long passage in The Central Eskimo (1888), Franz Boas
describes the birth of a child and the types of clothing the child
wears during the first few days of its life--a cap made of arctic
hare fur, underclothes of bird feathers, a hood made of a caribou
fawn with the ears attached. One is struck by the great efforts of
the mother, especially, to confirm the child immediately in a com-
plex and intricate relationship with "the land," the future source of
the child's spiritual, psychological, and physical well-being. Nearly
a hundred years later, Richard Nelson, a northern ethnologist,
described a similar, modern Koyukon understanding of natural
history in Make Prayers to the Raven (1983). While many things
have changed, the evidence of continued intimacy with a local
landscape--a practical knowledge of it, a sensitivity toward it, a
supplication of it--is still clear. The incorporation of the land into
266 ARCTIC DREAMS
traditional stories--evidence of close association with the land and
the existence of an uncanny and mesmerizing conformity of human
behavior in response to subtleties in the landscape--is also still
evident. The people, many of them, have not abandoned the land,
and the land has not abandoned them. It is difficult, coming from
cities far to the south, to perceive let alone fathom the richness of
this association, or to assess its worth. But this archaic affinity for
the land, I believe, is an antidote to the loneliness that in our own
culture we associate with individual estrangement and despair.
I move the glasses off Leffingwell's tower. On the ridge of sand
dune along the beach to the north I spot an arctic fox. A great
traveler in winter, like the polar bear and the wolf. In summer,
when water intervenes in the fox's coastal habitat, he may stay in
one place--an island like this, for example. The fox always seems to
be hurrying somewhere, then stopping suddenly to sit down and
rest. He runs up on slight elevations and taps the air all over with
his nose.
The arctic fox's fur runs to shades of brown in summer, which
blend with ivory whites on its underparts. (In winter the coat is
gleaming white or a grayish blue to pale beige, which is called
"blue.") As with any animal, the facets of its life are complexly
engaging. The extent and orderliness of its winter caches and its
ability to withstand very cold weather are striking. Also its tag-
along relationship with the polar bear. It is the friendliest and most
trusting of the North American foxes, although it is characterized
in many expedition journals as "impudent," derided for its "per-
sistent cheekiness," and disparaged as a "parasite" and a scavenger.
Arctic foxes are energetic and persistent in their search for food.
They thoroughly scour the coastlines over which they travel and,
like polar bears, will gather from miles around at a source of
carrion. If it's a cook tent they choose instead, and thirty or forty
of them are racing around, tearing furiously into everything, an
expedition's initial sense of amusement can easily turn sour or
violent. Arctic foxes so pestered Vitus Bering's shipwrecked second
The Country of the Mind 267
Kamchatka expedition that the men tortured and killed the ones
they caught with the unrestrained savagery one would expect of
men driven insane by hordes of insects.
In his encounter with modern man in the Arctic, then, the fox's
efficient way of life has sometimes gone fatally against him. (His
dealings with modern Eskimos have fit more perfectly, though also
fatally, with human enterprise. Once largely ignored, he became
the most relentlessly pursued fur-bearer in the Arctic with the
coming of the fur trade and the advent of the village trading post.)
I watch the fox now, traveling the ridge of the sand dune, the
kinetic blur of its short legs. I have seen its (or another's) tracks at
several places along the beach. I think of it traveling continuously
over the island, catching a lemming here, finding part of a seal
there, looking for a bird less formidable than a glaucous gull to
challenge for its eggs. I envision the network of its trails as though
it were a skein of dark lines over the island, anchored at slight
elevations apparent to the eye at a distance because of their dense,
rich greens or clusters of wildflowers.
Because the fox is built so much closer to the ground and is
overall so much smaller than a human being, the island must be
"longer" in its mind than four and a half miles. And traveling as it
does, trotting and then resting, trotting and then resting, and "see-
ing" so much with its black nose--what is Pingok like for it? I
wonder how any animal's understanding of the island changes over
the year; and the difference in its shape to a gyrfalcon, a wolf
spider, or a bowhead echolocating along its seashore. What is the
island to the loon, who lives on the water and in the air, stepping
awkwardly ashore only at a concealed spot at the edge of a pond,
where it nests? What of the bumblebee, which spends its evening
deep in the corolla of a summer flower that makes its world 8°F
warmer? What is the surface of the land like for a creature as small
but as adroit as the short-tailed weasel? And how does the recollec-
tion of such space guide great travelers like the caribou and the
polar bear on their journeys?
A friend working one summer near Polar Bear Pass on Bathurst
268 ARCTIC DREAMS
Island once spotted a wolf running off with a duck in its mouth.
He saw the wolf bury the duck, and when the wolf left he made
for the cache. He couldn't find it. It was open, uncomplicated
country. He retraced his steps, again took his bearings, and tried a
second time. A third time. He never found it. The wolf, he thought,
must have a keener or at least a different way of holding that space
in its mind and remembering the approach. The land then appeared
to him more complicated.
One day, out on the sea ice, I left the protection of a tem-
porary building and followed a bundle of electric cables out into a
blizzard. The winds were gusting to 40 knots; it was --20T. I
stood for a long time with my back to the storm, peering downwind
into the weak January light, fearful of being bowled over, of losing
touch with the umbilical under which I had hooked a boot. Both
its ends faded away in that swirling whiteness. In the 40-foot circle
of visibility around me I could see only ice hummocks. I wondered
what notions of "direction" a fox would have standing here, how
the imperatives for food and shelter would affect us differently.
One can only speculate about how animals organize land into
meaningful expanses for themselves. The worlds they perceive,
their Umwelten, are all different.* The discovery of an animal's
Umwelt and its elucidation require great patience and experimental
ingenuity, a free exchange of information among different ob-
servers, hours of direct observation, and a reluctance to summarize
the animal. This, in my experience, is the Eskimo hunter's method-
ology. Under ideal circumstances it can also be the methodology of
Western science, t
* The world we perceive around an animal is its environment; what it
sees is its Umwelt, or self-world. A specific environment contains many
Umivelten, no two of which are the same. The concept, developed by
Jakob von Uexkiill in 1934, assumes that the structure of the organs of
perception, the emphasis each receives, the level of their sensitivity,
and the ability of each to discriminate, are different in all animals,
t In practice, the two methodologies usually differ. The Eskimo's
methods are less formal than those of the scientist, but not necessarily
The Country of the Mind
Many Western biologists appreciate the mystery inherent in
the animals they observe. They comprehend that, objectively, what
they are watching is deceptively complex and, subjectively, that
the animals themselves have nonhuman ways of life. They know
that while experiments can be designed to reveal aspects of the
animal, the animal itself will always remain larger than the sum of
any set of experiments. They know they can be very precise about
what they do, but that that does not guarantee they will be accu-
rate. They know the behavior of an individual animal may differ
strikingly from the generally recognized behavior of its species; and
that the same species may behave quite differently from place to
place, from year to year.
It is very hard to achieve a relatively complete and accurate
view of an animal's life, especially in the Arctic, where field con-
ditions present so many problems, limiting observation. Many
biologists studying caribou, muskoxen, wolves, and polar bear in
the North are more distressed by this situation than they otherwise
might be. Industry, which pays much of the bill for this arctic
research, is less interested in the entire animal than it is in those
aspects of its life that might complicate or hinder development--or,
to be fair, how in some instances industry might disrupt the animal's
way of life. What bothers biologists is the narrowness of the
approach, the haste with which the research must be conducted,
less rigorous. By comparison, Western scientists often fall far short on
hours of observation; and they usually select only a few aspects of an
animal's life to study closely. The Eskimo's ecological approach, how-
ever, his more broad-based consideration of an animal's interactions
with many, some seemingly insignificant, aspects of its environment, is
increasingly becoming a Western approach. Western science is better
informed about the life history of migratory animals, especially dis-
tribution and movement. Eskimos, on the other hand, show a marked
reluctance to extrapolate from the individual to include all other
animals of that type, as Western scientists do. In recent years some
scientists have come to learn more than many Eskimos about specific
animals. The last generation of highly informed, broadly experienced
native hunters is passing away.
27 O ARCTIC DREAMS
and, increasingly, the turning of an animal's life into numbers. The
impersonality of statistics masks both the complexity and the ethics
inherent in any wildlife situation. Biologists are anxious about "the
tyranny of statistics" and "the ascendency of the [computer]
modeler," about industry's desire for a "standardized animal," one
that always behaves in predictable ways.
A Canadian scientist told me, "I hate as a biologist having to
reduce the behavior of animals to numbers. I hate it. But if we are
going to stand our ground against [head-long development] we
must produce numbers, because that's all they will listen to. I am
spending my whole life to answer these questions--they want an
answer in two months. And anything a native says about animals,
well, that counts for nothing with them. Useless anecdotes."
A belief in the authority of statistics and the dismissal of
Eskimo narratives as only "anecdotal" is a dichotomy one en-
counters frequently in arctic environmental assessment reports.
Statistics, of course, can be manipulated--a whale biologist once
said to me, "If you punish the data enough, it will tell you any-
thing." And the Uwwelt of a statistician, certainly, plays a role in
developing the "statistical picture" of a landscape. The Eskimos'
stories are politely dismissed not because Eskimos are not good
observers or because they lie, but because the narratives cannot be
reduced to a form that is easy to handle or lends itself to summary.
Their words are too hard to turn into numbers.
What the uninitiated scientist in the Arctic lacks is not ideas
about how the land works, or a broad theoretical knowledge of
how the larger pieces fit together, but time in the field, prolonged
contact with the specific sources of an understanding. Several
Western scientists, including anthropologist Richard Nelson,
marine mammal biologists John Burns, Francis Fay, and Kerry
Finley, and terrestrial mammal biologist Robert Stephenson, have
sought out Eskimo hunters as field companions in order to get a
better understanding of arctic ecology. Nelson, who arrived in
Wainwright in the early 1960s quite skeptical about the kinds of
animal behavior the hunters had described to him, wrote a line any
The Country of the Mind 271
one of the others might have written after a year of traveling
through the country with these people: "[Their] statements which
seem utterly incredible at first almost always turn out to be correct."
I walk on toward the dune where the fox has disappeared. The
inconspicuous plants beneath my feet, I realize, efficiently harbor
minerals and nutrients and water in these acidic, poorly drained
soils. They are compact; they distribute the weight of snow, of
passing caribou and myself, so it does not crush them. The stems of
these willows are shorter than those of their southern counterparts,
with many more leaves to take advantage of the light. Tt may take
years for a single plant to produce a seed crop. What do these
plants murmur in their dreams, what of warning and desire passes
between them?
It is beginning to snow a little, on a slant from the southeast.
I walk on, my eye to the ground, out to the horizon, back to the
ground. And what did Columbus, sailing for Zaiton, the great port
of Cathay, think of the reach of the western Atlantic? How did
Coronado assess the Staked Plain of Texas, the rawest space he ever
knew, on his way to Quivera? Or Mungo Park the landscape of
Africa in search of the Niger? What one thinks of any region,
while traveling through, is the result of at least three things: what
one knows, what one imagines, and how one is disposed.
What one knows is either gathered firsthand or learned from
books or indigenous observers. This information, however, is as-
sembled differently by each individual, according to his cultural
predispositions and his personality. A Western traveler in the Arctic,
for example, is inclined to look (only) for cause-and-effect relation-
ships, or predator-prey relationships; and to be (especially) alert
for plants and animals that might fill "gaps" in Western taxonomies.
Human beings, further, are inclined to favor visual information
over the testimony of their other senses when learning an area, and
to be more drawn to animals that approximate their own scale. Our
view is from a certain height above the ground. In any new country
we want panoramas.
272 ARCTIC DREAMS
What one imagines in a new landscape consists of conjecture,
for example, about what might lie beyond that near horizon of
small hills, or the far line of the horizon. Often it consists of what
one "hopes to see" during the trip--perhaps a barren-ground
grizzly standing up on the tundra, or the tusk of a mammoth in the
alluvial silt of a creek. These expectations are based on a knowledge
of what has happened in this land for others. At a deeper level,
however, imagination represents the desire to find what is unknown,
unique, or farfetched--a snowy owl sitting motionless on the hips
of a muskox, a flower of a favorite color never before reported,
tundra swans swimming in a winter polynya.
Imagination also poses the questions that give a new land
dimension in time. Are these wolverine tracks from this summer or
the summer before? How old is this orange lichen? Will the caribou
feeding placidly in this swale be discovered by those wolves
traveling in the distance? Why did the people camped here leave
this piece of carved seal bone behind?
The way we are disposed toward the land is more nebulous,
harder to define. The reluctant traveler, brooding about events at
home, is oblivious to the landscape. And no one is quite as alert as an
indigenous hunter who is hungry. If one feels longing or compas-
sion at the sight of something beautiful, or great excitement over
some unexpected event, these may effect an optimistic disposition
toward the land. If one has lost a friend in the Arctic to exposure
after an airplane crash, or gone broke speculating in a northern
mine, one might regard the land as antagonistic and be ill-disposed
to recognize any value in it.
The individual desire to understand, as much as any difference
in acuity of the senses, brings each of us to find something in the
land others did not notice.
Over time, small bits of knowledge about a region accumulate
among local residents in the form of stories. These are remembered
in the community; even what is unusual does not become lost and
therefore irrelevant. These narratives comprise for a native an
intricate, long-term view of a particular landscape. And the stories
The Country of the Mind 273
are corroborated daily, even as they are being refined upon by
members of the community traveling between what is truly known
and what is only imagined or unsuspected. Outside the region this
complex but easily shared "reality" is hard to get across without
reducing it to generalities, to misleading or imprecise abstraction.
The perceptions of any people wash over the land like a flood,
leaving ideas hung up in the brush, like pieces of damp paper to be
collected and deciphered. No one can tell the whole story.
I must set my face to the wind to head west, back toward the cabin.
I drop down to the seaward beach where I will have the protection
of the dune. Oldsquaw and eider ducks ride the ocean swell close
to shore in the lee of the storm, their beaks into the wind. Between
gaps in the dune I catch glimpses of the dark tundra, swept by
wind and snow. My thoughts leap ahead to the cabin, to something
warm to drink, and then return. I watch the ducks as I walk.
Watching animals always slows you down. I think of the months
explorers spent locked up in the ice here, some of them trapped in
their ships for three or four years. Their prospects for an early
departure were never good, but, their journals reveal, they rarely
remarked on the animals that came around, beyond their potential
as food, as threats or nuisances. These were men far from home,
who felt helpless; the landscape hardly registered as they waited,
except as an obstacle. Our inattentiveness is of a different order.
We insist on living today in much shorter spans of time. We
become exasperated when the lives of animals unfold in ways in-
convenient to our schedules--when they sit and do "nothing." I
search both the featureless tundra to my left and the raft of brown
sea ducks to my right for something untoward, something that
stands out. Nothing. After hours of walking, the tundra and the
ducks recede into the storm, and my mind pulls far back into its
own light.
A Lakota woman named Elaine Jahner once wrote that what
lies at the heart of the religion of hunting peoples is the notion that
a spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape. To put it
2
74 ARCTIC DREAMS
another way, occasionally one sees something fleeting in the land,
a moment when line, color, and movement intensify and something
sacred is revealed, leading one to believe that there is another realm
of reality corresponding to the physical one but different.
In the face of a rational, scientific approach to the land, which
is more widely sanctioned, esoteric insights and speculations are
frequently overshadowed, and what is lost is profound. The land is
like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its
meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human
life.
The cabin emerges silently up ahead in the blowing snow as the
storm closes in. It seems to rest within a white cave or at the far end
of a canyon. Sound only comes now from what is immediately
around me. The distant voices of birds are gone. I hear the gritty
step of my boots in the sand. Splash of wavelets on the beach. Wind
rushing over the cones of my ears.
Through a window yellow with light I see a friend at a table,
whipping the end of a boat line with waxed thread. I will have hot
tea and lie in my bunk, and try to recall what I saw that did not, in
those moments, come to mind.
IN the 1930s a man named Benjamin Lee Whorf began to clarify
an insight he had had into the structure of the Hopi language. Hopi
has only limited tenses, noted Whorf, makes no reference to time
as an entity distinct from space, and, though relatively poor in
nouns, is rich in verbs. It is a language that projects a world of
movement and changing relationships, a continuous "fabric" of
time and space. It is better suited than the English language to
describing quantum mechanics. English divides time into linear
segments by making use of many tenses. It is a noun-rich, verb-poor
tongue that contrasts fixed space with a flow of time. It is a language
of static space, more suited, say, to architectural description. All else
being equal, a Hopi child would have little difficulty comprehend-
ing the theory of relativity in his own language, while an American
child could more easily master history. A Hopi would be con-
The Country of the Mind 275
founded by the idea that time flowed from the past into the present.
In 1936 Whorf wrote that many aboriginal languages "abound
in finely wrought, beautifully logical discriminations about causa-
tion, action, result, dynamic and energetic quality, directness of
experience, etc. . . ." He made people see that there were no prim-
itive languages; and that there was no pool of thought from which
all cultures drew their metaphysics. "All observers," he cautioned,
"are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of
the universe."
These ideas were anticipated to some extent by the anthro-
pologist Franz Boas, who emphasized the individual integrity of
different aboriginal cultures. His was a reaction against the pre-
dominant Victorian view that considered all cultures reducible to a
set of "true" observations about the world. (Boas's "functionalist"
approach has since been replaced by a "structuralist" view, which
knowingly imposes abstract and subjective patterns on a culture.)
Whorf, Boas, and others in this tradition urged people after
the turn of the century to see human culture as a mechanism for
ordering reality. These realities were separate, though they might
be simultaneously projected onto the same landscape. And there
was no ultimate reality--any culture that would judge the percep-
tions of another, particularly one outside its own traditions, should
proceed cautiously.
In recent years the writing of people like Joseph Campbell and
Claude Levi-Strauss has illuminated the great panorama of human
perceptual experience, pointing up not only the different approaches
we take to the background that contains us (the landscape) but the
similarities we seem to share. For hunting peoples, for example, says
Levi-Strauss, an animal is held in high totemic regard not merely
because it is food and therefore good to eat but because it is "good
to think." The animal is "good to imagine."
In the Arctic, researchers such as Richard Nelson, Edmund
Carpenter, and Hugh Brody, each addressing a different aspect of
Eskimo existence, have reiterated these themes in studying the land.
Their work has made clear the integrity and coherence of a differ-
2? 6 ARCTIC DREAMS
ent vision of the Arctic; misunderstandings that arise when a view
of reality similar to our own is assumed to exist; and the ways in
which the Eskimo's view of the land presents us with growing
ethical, political, and economic problems, because we would prefer
that ours was the mind of record in that landscape.
I have already referred to Nelson's work on natural history and
hunting. Brody has been influential in the development of land-use-
and-occupancy studies. Carpenter has written cogently on Eskimo
art and Eskimo perceptions of space. Not surprisingly, each has
emphasized that a knowledge of the language, the pertinent regional
dialect, is critical to an understanding of what Eskimos are talking
about when they talk about the land. Says Nelson, an understand-
ing of the behavior of sea ice off the coast at Wainwright, where
the ice is very active, is "difficult to acquire, especially without a
full understanding" of Eskimo terminology. Brody, discussing
Eskimo concepts of intimacy with the land, says, flatly, "The key
terms are not translatable."
Carpenter discerns a correspondence between the Inuktitut
language and Eskimo carving: the emphasis in both is on what is
dynamic, and on observations made from a variety of viewpoints.
In our language, says Carpenter, we lavish attention on concepts of
time; Eskimos give their attention to varieties of space. We assume
all human beings are oriented similarly in space and therefore re-
gard objects from the same point of view--the top is the top, the
bottom the bottom; that direction is north and this south. In de-
scribing a distant place, however, says Carpenter, an Eskimo will
often make no reference to the mass of the land in between (which
would impress us, and which we would describe in terms of dis-
tance), but only to geographical points, and not necessarily as seen
from the point of one's approach. Thus, to a non-Eskimo observer,
the Eskimo might seem to have "no sense of direction." And be-
cause he travels somewhat like the arctic fox--turning aside to
investigate something unusual, or moving ahead in a series of steps
punctuated by short stops for tea, instead of in a straight, relentless
dash for a "goal"--the Eskimo might be thought poorly self-
The Country of the Mind 2
77
disciplined or improvident. But it would only have to do with how
the Eskimo saw himself in the fabric of space and time, how he
conceived of "proceeding" through the world, where he placed
lines or points in the stream of duration.
The Eskimo's different but still sophisticated mind is largely
inaccessible without recourse to his language. And, of course, it
works the other way around. Each for the other is a kind of
primitive.
The Eskimo language reaches its apogee in describing the
land and man's activity in it. Young people in modern Eskimo
villages, especially in the eastern Arctic, say that when they are out
on the land with their parents, they find it much more difficult to
speak Inuktitut, though they speak it at home all the time. It is not
so much a lack of vocabulary as a difficulty with constructions,
with idioms, a lost fluency that confuses them. It is out on the
land, in the hunting camps and traveling over the ice, that the
language comes alive.* The Eskimo language is seasonal--terms
for the many varieties of snow emerge in winter, while those for
whaling come into use in the spring. Whole areas of the language
are starting to disappear because they refer to activities no longer
much practiced, like traveling with dogs; or to the many different
parts of an animal like the walrus that are no longer either eaten or
used; or to activities that are discouraged, such as the intercession
of shamans.
For Whorf, language was something man created in his mind
and projected onto reality, something he imposed on the landscape,
as though the land were a receptacle for his imagination. I think
there are possibly two things wrong with this thought. First, the
landscape is not inert; and it is precisely because it is alive that it
eventually contradicts the imposition of a reality that does not
* So do some people. It is relatively common in the Arctic to meet a
person in a village who seems clumsy, irresponsible, lethargic, barely
capable of taking care of himself--and then to find the same person in
the bush astoundingly skilled, energetic, and perspicacious.
27 8 ARCTIC DREAMS
derive from it. Second, language is not something man imposes on
the land. It evolves in his conversation with the land--in testing
the sea ice with the toe of a kamik, in the eating of a wild berry, in
repairing a sled by the light of a seal-oil lamp. A long-lived inquiry
produces a discriminating language. The very order of the language,
the ecology of its sounds and thoughts, derives from the mind's
intercourse with the landscape. To learn the indigenous language,
then, is to know what the speakers of the language have made of
the land.
THE American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan distinguishes in his writing
between concepts of space and a sense of place. Human beings, he
says, set out from places, where they feel a sense of attachment, of
shelter, and comprehension, and journey into amorphous spaces,
characterized by a feeling of freedom or adventure, and the un-
known. "In open space," writes Tuan, "one can become intensely
aware of fa remembered] place; and in the solitude of a sheltered
place, the vastness of space acquires a haunting presence." We turn
these exhilarating and sometimes terrifying new places into geo-
graphy by extending the boundaries of our old places in an effort
to include them. We pursue a desire for equilibrium and harmony
between our familiar places and unknown spaces. We do this to
make the foreign comprehensible, or simply more acceptable.
Tuan's thoughts are valid whether one is thinking about enter-
ing an unused room in a large house or of a sojourn in the Arctic.
What stands out in the latter instance, and seems always part of
travel in a wild landscape, is the long struggle of the mind for con-
cordance with that mysterious entity, the earth.
One more thought from Tuan: a culture's most cherished
places are not necessarily visible to the eye--spots on the land one
can point to. They are made visible in drama--in narrative, song,
and performance. It is precisely what is invisible in the land, how-
ever, that makes what is merely empty space to one person a place
to another. The feeling that a particular place is suffused with
memories, the specific focus of sacred and profane stories, and that
The Country of the Mind 279
the whole landscape is a congeries of such places, is what is meant
by a local sense of the land. The observation that it is merely
space which requires definition before it has meaning--political
demarcation, an assignment of its ownership, or industrial de-
velopment--betrays a colonial sensibility.
It is easy to underestimate the power of a long-term associa-
tion with the land, not just with a specific spot but with the span
of it in memory and imagination, how it fills, for example, one's
dreams. For some people, what they are is not finished at the skin,
but continues with the reach of the senses out into the land. If
the land is summarily disfigured or reorganized, it causes them
psychological pain. Again, such people are attached to the land
as if by luminous fibers; and they live in a kind of time that is not
of the moment but, in concert with memory, extensive, measured
by a lifetime. To cut these fibers causes not only pain but a sense
of dislocation.
The expansion of nations into lands beyond their borders, and
the rearrangement of these lands, conceptually and in real terms, to
serve the expanding nation's ends, are among the most perplexing
political problems of our time. A traveler often differs from a
nation-state, however, in wishing to disturb nothing in the land
beyond his borders, but only to visit and somehow arrive, through
the inevitable contrasts, at a renewed sense of the worth of his own
place, of the esteem in which he wishes to hold the landscape that
originally shaped him.
In setting out, however, the traveler immediately confronts
the problem of the map, an organization of the land according to
a certain sense of space and an evaluation of what is important. I
traveled everywhere with maps, no one of which was ever entirely
accurate. They were the projection of a wish that the space could
be this well organized. You cannot blame the maps, of course; nor
can you travel without them. I was glad to pull them out of a pack
or a back pocket and find clarification. I have leaned over the
navigator's shoulder in a C-130 to get a better idea of where we
were going and where at that moment we were. I have drawn
28O ARCTIC DREAMS
maps in a notebook to explain to someone where I had been, to see
if he could corroborate or amplify what I had seen. I knew that
mixture of satisfaction and desire--to know exactly how one is
situated in the vastness; and that wish to fully comprehend the
space a map renders and sets borders to. But I would try to be
wary. Even a good map, one with the lines and symbols of a hand-
written geography on it, where Tuan's "spaces" have been turned
into "places," masquerades as an authority. What we hold in our
hands are but approximations of what is out there. Neatly folded
simulacra.
The perspective of most maps of the land, to begin with, is an
abstraction, because it represents what the moving eye, not the
stationary eye, sees in an overview. The map is two-dimensional,
while the earth is three-dimensional and curved in two planes;
neither the renderings nor the projections are ever quite accurate,
and if the scale is large, the distortion can be extreme. (The most
familiar sort of world map, the Mercator projection, in which the
Arctic looms larger than all the Russias, and Greenland is almost
the size of North America, is a distortion that takes a long while
and some thought to unlearn.) Maps organize space mathematically.
They set down outlines over various kinds of coordinates and use
a distribution of names to make an abstraction--sometimes beauti-
ful or astonishing--of what is real. The orderliness, simplicity, and
clarity of the presentation, of course, is often seductive.
The variety of Arctic maps is enormous, and the information
they provide is astonishing. If you could sit in a room with them
undisturbed and digest the information they represent, you would
become an Arctic Marco Polo. Beyond the predictable high-
resolution, satellite- and U-2-generated, computer-enhanced as-
sembly of physiographic maps, there are ones that show the
migration routes of caribou with ten years of acetate overlays;
the cobweb of electronic surveillance at sensitive military points
such as northern Bering Sea; daily updates of ice coverage in
summer shipping lanes, sent electronically and rendered on Thermo-
fax paper; and maps that require much pondering, with isotherms
The Country of the Mind 281
(temperature gradients), isograms (magnetic gradients), and
isanthers (time gradients for the blooming of flowers). And maps
of archaeological sites, polar bear denning sites, and the distribution
of sources of gravel in the Arctic*
Of them all, the one I carry in my mind most prominently
is a polar projection, a physiographic map with the Arctic Ocean
centrally located. The northern reaches of Eurasia and North
America and the whole of Greenland form a perimeter. The narrow
entrance to the ocean between Greenland and Svalbard stands out
because the deep waters there are a darker shade of blue than those
over the continental shelf. (Here is the only place a deep current
can move in and out of the Polar Basin.) And all the obscure places
--the New Siberian Islands, the Kara Sea, Franz Josef Land, places
banished to regions of distortion in the Mercator projection--are
accorded their proper proportions.
When I look at this map on my wall, I am reminded of the
geographical continuity of the region, which is unique--no matter
how far east or west you go, you are still there. I can see how much
shorter the route from Rotterdam to Yokohama is via Bering Strait
than through the Panama Canal. And there is a fetching remoteness
to northern Greenland when the island is seen in its entirety, not
distorted or truncated. And I can put my fingers on wild Ellesmere,
with its Agassiz Ice Cap and exotic plateaus, a daydreamed land-
scape of my youth. The Baffin Island Eskimos call it ooming-
mannuna, where the muskoxen have their country.
THE earliest maps of the Arctic reflected the skills and conceptions
(and misconceptions) of the cultures that produced them. Long
before it became a field science, cartography was a contemplative
pursuit; cartographers drew fabled landscapes and imaginary lands
* Gravel deposits are second only to hydrocarbon (gas and oil) deposits
in their importance to arctic villages. Vast quantities of gravel are
needed to prepare airstrips and construction pads because of the
difficulty of building over permafrost.
282 ARCTIC DREAMS
of their own divining. The Arctic they depicted was a dark, moun-
tainous, icy region of "brutes with neither language nor reason
[who] hiss like geese"; or, alternately, an idyllic place of perpetual
sunshine and warm seas. Either Asgard, the Norse citadel of
zephyrs, brilliant light, and reigning power; or Niflheim, a cold
wasteland of unending darkness hung with the stench of death.
The discovery of Svalbard by Dutch whalers in the sixteenth
century and explorations north and west toward Novaya Zemlya
by Willoughby and Chancellor (1553), and Barents (1596), and to
the west by Frobisher (1576-1578), Davis (1585-1587), Hudson
(1607-1610), and Baffin (1616), brought the Arctic to a more
empirical definition. In succeeding centuries, it was discovered,
piece by piece, beneath the ice and snow. Its lands were mapped
and its waters charted. The final break with an Old World image
of the Arctic was made when a Norwegian ship called the From
completed a spectacular circumarctic voyage (1893-1896). Robert
Peary proclaimed Greenland an island in 1892. In 1915-1917 Ste-
fansson discovered the last, large pieces of land in the Far North.
The coastline of the Canadian Archipelago was extensively re-
drawn during and immediately after World War II, as a result of
military reconnaissance, and the last large islands in the south
were discovered, in Foxe Basin west of Baffin Island (including
Air Force Island, approximately 500 miles square).
Part of the allure of the Arctic has always been the very im-
precision of its borders. The flat topography of the land becomes
part of the frozen sea in winter. In summer, in some regions, low-
lying land extends so far into shallow seas it is hard to tell them
apart. It is easy to imagine that small bits of land might still lie
hidden--and this indeed recently proved true in a dramatic way.
In 1968, geographers finally determined mathematically that a
small island called Kaffeklubben, which Peary had discovered in
1900, not Cape Morris Jesup, Greenland, was the northernmost
point of land. In 1978, however, a tiny new island was discovered
in the ice, 1500 yards north of Kaffeklubben. It was named
The Country of the Mind 283
Oodaaq for a Polar Eskimo who accompanied Peary on his 1909
trip to the Pole.*
In time, then--and more sophisticated satellite-mapping tech-
nology continues to improve the accuracy of arctic maps---the
lands that were imagined to exist in the Arctic were slowly re-
placed on the maps by the outlines of the lands that were actually
found to be there. "Frobussher's Straights," which cut across
northern Canada from the Atlantic to the Western Ocean in
George Best's 1587 map; the Open Polar Sea, which Henry Hudson
confidently sailed for in 1607; and the land bridge from Norway to
Svalbard--all these misconceptions faded from the maps.
Many of the old maps of the Arctic, with their fabled islands,
were only expressions of a wish for something better, for an easing
of human travail--to find the Blessed Isles of the West, or a route
to the Moluccas, the "Spice Islands," free of Spanish ships or
Turkish middlemen. One folds such maps and puts them gently
back in the drawer, out of a certain regard for human history, the
long reach of human desire, and a search for contentment that goes
beyond the borders of one's homeland.
To set these maps aside makes the colonial tragedies they
record no less tragic; the admonition against imperious delusions
no less sharp; and evidence of the real landscape no less insub-
stantial. Another age will surely find us as headstrong and avaricious
as our exploring ancestors, and our plans as disrespectful and unwise
* Oodaaq was born in 1878 or 1879 and lived until the mid-1950s. He
assisted a number of explorers and scientists, most of whom introduced
different spellings of his name into the historical records--Ootah
(Peary), Odark (Mvlius Erichsen), Odaq (Rasmussen), and Ctaq
(Jean Malaurie). Oodaaq Island was discovered on July 26, 1978, by
Uffe Petersen during a Danish Geodetic Institute survey of regional
topography in northern Greenland. "It is a rather small [patch of
gravel]," a colleague of Petersen wrote me, "only 30 m (98.4 feet) in
diameter and less than 1 m (3.28 feet) over sea level at its highest point.
Its position is 83°4o'32.5i"N 3o°4o'io.i2"W."
284 ARCTIC DREAMS
as some of these earlier schemes for prosperity seem to us now. Per-
haps they will be forgiving as well.
WE have come to think of the Arctic as vast because in the familiar
Mercator projection it stretches from one side of the world to the
other. The suggestion that the region never comes together, how-
ever, that its various sections are "a world apart," is false. The
region turns in on itself like any nation. It is organized like Australia,
around an inland desert sea, with most of its people living on the
coastal periphery. It is not vast like the Pacific. It is vast like the
steppes of Asia. It has the heft, say, of China, but with the popula-
tion of Seattle.
The Arctic's geographical unity derives from the sameness of
its climate and seasons of light, and the similarity of its animal
populations east and west--polar bear, bowhead whale, arctic fox,
ringed seal, snowy owl. There are relatively few localized arctic
species, such as the narwhal; and very few circumpolar animals
show any subspecific differences (the walrus is one).*
To a modern traveler the arctic landscape can seem numbingly
monotonous, but this impression is gained largely, I think, from
staring at empty maps of the region and from traveling around in it
by airplane. The airplane, like the map, creates a false sense of
space; it achieves simplicity and compression, however, not with
an enforced perspective but by altering the relationship between
space and time. The interior of a plane is artificially lit, protected
from weather, full of rarefied air cut with the odor of petroleum
* Further enhancing a sense of the region's natural homogeneity is the
fact that the native people of half the Arctic, from Bering Strait to
northern Greenland, speak nearly the same language. A linguistic
continuity like this is not known anywhere else in the world. The
mutual intelligibility of Eskimo dialects has facilitated the formation of
a political body, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which now assists
Alaskan, Canadian, and Greenlandic Eskimos in the settlement of land
claims and in their pursuit of self-determination.
The Country of the Mind 285
distillates and tobacco, and far noisier than the ground below. Many
who fly in arctic aircraft, often crowded together with sled dogs
and boxes of freight, incur slight headaches, and many experience
some sort of spatial or temporal disorientation. Stories of govern-
ment officials and reporters who arrive in northern villages by jet
from somewhere in southern Canada, hear little of what is spoken
to them, and insist on departing the very same day, are legion.
Their haste, their cool insensitivity and aura of power seem, some-
how, a part of the aircraft. The great compression of time and
space the plane effects is without parallel in the northern villages.
The knowledge of the land that such people carry home, therefore,
is often false, and their summaries are bitterly resented.
The plane is a great temptation; but to learn anything of the
land, to have any sense of the relevancy of the pertinent maps, you
must walk away from the planes. You must get off into the country
and sleep on the ground, or take an afternoon to take a tussock
apart. Travel on the schedule of muskoxen. Camp on a seaward
point and watch migrating sea ducks in their days of passage. You
need to stand before the green, serpentine walls of the Jade Moun-
tains north of the Kobuk River, or walk out over the sea ice to
the flaw lead in winter to hear the pack ice grinding and scraping,
a noise like "the whining of puppies and swarming of bees," in
the words of the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane. In the
stomach of a walrus butchered on the spring ice you will find the
sediment of the ocean floor. Slowly comes the realization that
250,000 walrus in the Bering and Chukchi seas are moving tons of
sand and fine gravel around, every day. You will think of lemmings
and voles turning over thousands of tons of soil on the tundra. And
of the Thule, who carried large stones into their camps and set
them up in a pattern for a jumping game, like hopscotch. Of the
huge stone polar bear traps the Thule built with their sliding stone
doors. Residents, moving stones about.
When you have walked for days under the enormous sky;
when you have felt the remoteness of the world from the Thomsen
286 ARCTIC DREAMS
River country of Banks Island; felt the unquenchable exuberance
of sled dogs cracking off the frozen miles down a river valley; or
been shown how some very small thing, like a Lapland longspur
eating the lemming's bones for calcium, keeps the country alive,
you begin to sense the timeless, unsummarized dimensions of a
deeper landscape.
But you must insist on time to walk away from the plane,
which daily enters and leaves the Arctic like some sort of bullet.
Christian Vibe told me a story. He was in northern Green-
land, coming and going by dog sledge from the small village of
Uummannaq (Thule) on Hayes Peninsula. In the spring of 1940
he was traveling along the east coast of Ellesmere Island, living on
supplies he had cached there months before. An Eskimo friend of
his from Uummannaq knew that Vibe was a Dane and that some
information that had reached Uummannaq in May would be im-
portant to him. The man sledged across Smith Sound and found a
cache where he knew Vibe would show up. He scratched this
message in Eskimo syllabics on the side of a pemmican can:
germans taking meat from denmark
the king is still alive
no gas left in shop.
The meaning was almost instantly clear to Vibe. Germany
had gone to war with Denmark (i.e., "was taking her food"); the
government of King Christian had not been deposed; and, because
of the war, there would be no supplies coming by ship to Uum-
mannaq in the spring. Vibe said he held the can in his gloved
hands and looked around in the bright light, at his dogs and his
few supplies, and knew he would not get home for a very long
time.
SOME early explorers took Eskimos and their knowledge of the
land seriously and asked them to draw maps of the surrounding
The Country of the Mind 287
country.* The Eskimos obliged. These maps were a great boon
to arctic travel and exploration; today they offer an insight into
the way Eskimos perceived the space around them.
A good knowledge of the local landscape and the ability to
draw a detailed map are two very different cognitive skills. Never-
theless, many Eskimos, both men and women, produced highly
accurate maps of the coastal and interior regions of their homeland.
Robert M'Clure told his biographer in 1856 that the Eskimo of
western Victoria Island drew expertly with pencil and paper "as
if they were accustomed to hydrography." Another British naval
officer marveled at a map created for him on the beach by Eskimos
at Cape Prince of Wales in 1826, where stones, sticks, and pebbles
were used "in a very ingenious and intelligible manner" to create
a scaled replica of the region. Franz Boas reported Eskimos in the
eastern Arctic drawing maps so fine he could recognize their every
point in comparison with his own charts. "It is remarkable," wrote
Boas, "that their ideas of the relative position and direction of
coasts far distant from one another are so clear." The linear dis-
tances involved were as much as 1000 miles, and the areas repre-
sented as large as 150,000 square miles. Eskimos could also read
European maps and charts of their home range with ease, in
whatever orientation the maps were handed to them--upside down
or sideways. And they had no problem switching from one scale
to another or in maintaining a consistent scale in a map they drew.
Eskimos were making and using maps long before they met
Europeans, both as mnemonic devices for ordering extensive sys-
* Mapmaking in the Arctic presented Europeans with several problems.
The season for ship travel, to begin with, was very short, and during
these summer months much of the coastline was either shrouded in fog
or blocked by ice. Alternately, the same conditions that created mirages
distorted the coasts and caused inconsistent readings when the ship tried
to fix its own position. The sheer length of the coastline, and the
barrenness and ruggedness of the land where survey parties had to put
ashore, made this formidable task even more daunting.
288 The Country of the Mind 289
Above, map of the Cumberland Sound-Frobisher Bay region, drawn
from memory by an Eskimo named Sunapignanq. Below, map of the
same area generated with modern cartographic techniques.
terns of place names and as navigational aids. Some of the latter were
carved of wood--excellent for sea travel because they rendered
coastlines in three dimensions (very useful in the eastern Arctic),
were impervious to weather, and would float if dropped overboard.
Edmund Carpenter, with his particular interest in Eskimos'
differing appreciation of the volume of space and their lack of a
preferred orientation in it, has noticed that in maps of Southampton
Island that the Aivilik prepared for him, the only distortions
appeared in areas that were hunted very intensively. These regions
were drawn larger than those visited less frequently. Contem-
porary Eskimo maps evince the same accuracy and richness,
testifying to the continued maintenance of local geographic knowl-
edge by those for whom this aspect of the culture is still alive, the
astonishing degree to which the faculty of memory is cultivated
among them, and their enduring penchant for long journeys over
the land and sea ice. All this, despite their having moved into
permanent settlements in most cases.
Traces of human presence in the land, like maps, organize un-
differentiated space in certain ways, and the effect, especially in
open country, is soothing. To come upon a series of Dorset camp-
sites adds dimension and direction to the land; and one of course
takes pleasure in the objects seen at these places. The same is true
of a place where caribou for hundreds of years have crossed a
river, or moved between mountains.
Distinctive landmarks that aid the traveler and control the
vastness, as well as prominent marks on the land made inadvertently
in the process of completing other tasks, are very much apparent in
the Arctic. The most evocative are the inuksuit (stones piled up
in the shape of human beings) that dot the eastern arctic landscape.
They once funneled herds of caribou into depressions or rock
corrals and marked lake shores at points where the fishing was good.
One also finds stone fish dams and ptarmigan fences that date from
Thule times. Rock cairns raised by early European explorers still
stand out crisply in the landscape, on hills and headlands, and at
290 ARCTIC DREAMS
turns of the coastline; and they are still utilized by bush pilots and
others as navigational aids.
More modern traces of man on the land, infinitely more prev-
alent, are not as charming. Canada's recently awakened sense
of a northern destiny, for example, initiated a contemporary period
of fervent cairn-building that proceeds unabated. Geological survey
crews, oil-drilling crews, and various bureaucratic officials and
dignitaries now routinely erect commemorative cairns. A simple
cigar tube placed inside might contain a Polaroid print of mugging
pals, or a more substantial metal case might hold a large color print
of a government official and his family. (The diminishment of
genuine exploration history suggested by these acts infuriates some
northerners. They regard such cairn-building as pompous or silly,
and dismantle the cairns whenever they come upon them.)
More irritating to the eye than these gratuitous monuments
are the tens of thousands of miles of seismic trails generated in a
continuing search for oil and gas, and the hundreds of thousands of
empty aviation gas barrels scattered across the tundra at thousands
of spike camps used by scientists, technicians, and, in recent years,
by Eskimo hunters. As the science of seismic surveying improves,
the same areas are surveyed all over again, and the system of trails
left in the tundra by the cleat-footed tractor trains is extended.
Vegetation does not grow back; the compressed soil does not re-
bound; spring rains do not wash the trails away. If anything, they
occasionally grow worse. The exposed soil absorbs more sunlight,
permafrost below begins to melt, and the tractorway begins to
sink and separate, like a prairie gully in soil held together by no
roots.
PULUWATAN natives in the Caroline Islands are famed for the ac-
curacy with which they navigate on the high seas between distant
archipelagos of the South Pacific. They align their boats with cer-
tain rising and setting stars, and note the presence at sea of particular
species of birds, the salinity of the water, the set of currents, and
the behavior of swell systems. Likewise, an Eskimo navigating in
The Country oftheMind 291
polar darkness and white-outs and across featureless stretches of
ice and snow makes full and efficient use of the few clues available
to him. On shorefast ice in summer fog he travels between the
voices of seabirds on landward cliffs and the sound of surf on the
seaward edge of the ice. When he begins a journey over open
terrain he marks the angle of the wind and checks his bearing
periodically by glancing at the fur of his parka rim, at its alignment
with the breeze. He bends down to feel the trend of sastrugi
(ridges of hard snow that form in line with the prevailing wind)
when he cannot see them in darkness or blowing snow. He notes
the trend of any cracks in the ice as he crosses them. Sea ice cracks
can reveal the presence of a cape or headland invisible in the dis-
tance, or they may confirm one's arrival at a known area, where
the pattern of cracks is the same, year after year. The need to pay
attention to the smallest clues is essential--a dark object on the ice
could be a stone, revealing a hidden shoreline.
Constant attention to such details, memories of the way the
land looks, and stories told by other travelers and hunters about
the region are used together with the movements of animals,
especially those of birds, and "sky maps" to keep the traveler on
course.* Searching for such small but crucial clues, especially in
the tremendous glare of light in spring (the traditional season for
long journeys, because of the combination of good light and firm
ice) or in the low-contrast conditions of winter, can be exhausting
for a man who does not know what to ignore.
These navigational skills are still part of village life for some
in the Arctic, used just as often today in traveling long distances
* A distant body of open water in the sea ice will often cast a dark
shadow in the clouds above, producing a "water sky," while ice lying
over the horizon often produces a soft white reflection in the air above
it called "ice blink." The term "sky map" refers to either phenomena
or to the pattern of light and dark they create together in the sky. A
very discerning eye can distinguish among several sorts of ice blink.
Snow-covered land appears yellowish white in the sky. Field ice is a
lucid white, tinged with yellow. Pack ice is a pure white. Sea ice in
embayments is a grayer white.
202 ARCTIC DREAMS
by snow machine as they were once by people traveling by dog
sledge or on foot. And such skills still remain more critical for the
success of a journey, especially over the sea ice, than even the best
maps and navigation aids. Fogs and blizzards obscure the reference
points important in navigation by topographic map--even com-
passes can't be consistently relied on here. The closer one gets to
the magnetic pole, the stronger the vertical component and the
weaker the horizontal component of this electromagnetic field be-
come, causing the needle to wander listlessly, east and west of
magnetic north. Corrections for compass declination at certain
longitudes and latitudes are useless. Ionospheric disturbances, in-
cluding magnetic storms and a phenomenon called "polar cap
absorption," adversely affect radio direction-finding equipment.
The frequency of temperature inversions in the summer makes it
difficult to align a sextant on an undistorted horizon. And satellite-
generated maps showing the extent of the sea ice, sent electronically
to ships, are dated in twenty-four hours.
In the Arctic the sun does not rise reliably in the east and set
in the west, and the farther north one goes, the fewer are the stars
that rise and set. The summer moon is so dim that its presence is
barely noticed. The most dependable sources of direction for most
Eskimos, therefore, are the behavior of the wind and ocean currents,
the consistent alignment of a flaw lead, and such things as the
direction of flow of a river. You hardly ever hear someone say he
is going to head "east" to hunt or visit or look around.
ONE September morning I traveled east (the way I envisioned it)
with several friends in a small boat from our scientific base camp
at Beaufort Lagoon, near the Canadian border. It was a balmy day,
exhilarating weather after a week of cold wind and rain and over-
cast skies during which we had been working at sea. We were
headed for the Yukon border, which had for all of us a romantic
allure. We traveled about 2 5 miles along the coast before we were
cut off in the shore lead by ice. Fortuitously, we were within a
hundred yards of the border.
TheCountry oftheMind 2
93
We doffed our parkas and wandered about the tundra some-
what aimlessly, in the vicinity of a cluster of weathered driftwood
piles that marked the dividing line between the two countries.
Caribou trails and the sight of migrating ducks and geese, the
absence of immigration officials, and, not least, the sun shining
brightly in a cloudless sky made us all take crossing the border less
seriously. We found tufts of polar bear fur caught in the dry
tundra grasses, and the tracks of a bear in the steep embankment,
where it had descended the coastal bluff to the ice and headed out
to sea.
In such benign circumstances it was hard to imagine the
deadly tension that characterized other national borders on that
same day. We were all of us more affected by an exotic childhood
idea--reaching the Yukon Territory. We took our bearings from a
country in our heads--it was an idea that brought us here, to a
spot on the tundra we would be hard pressed to distinguish in
terms of plant life or animal life or topography from the tundra
a mile farther to the east, or back to the west. To come here at all
was an act of carefree innocence. We stood around for nearly an
hour. We took each other's pictures. We were delighted by the
felicitous conjunction of this good weather and our idea of "the
Yukon Territory."
Ideas no less real and far more affecting brought European
explorers into the Arctic hundreds of years ago. They were search-
ing for lands and straits they knew existed but which they had
never seen; and they could not believe they did not exist when they
failed to find them. As there was a Strait of Magellan at Cape Horn,
they thought, so too should there be a northern strait, a Strait of
Anian, just as there were Western and Eastern, Northern and
Southern oceans. Did not the most learned references of the day,
the sea charts, depict such a passage? And did it not make sense
that Frobisher should find gold in the Arctic, just as the Spaniards
had in the tropics?
When the early arctic explorers wrote down in official com-
mentaries what they had seen, they were hesitant to criticize the
294 ARCTIC DREAMS
wisdom of the day, what the esteemed maps indicated. They were
prone, in fact, to embellish, in order to make themselves seem more
credible. They even believed on occasion that they had sensed some-
thing where there was nothing because it seemed ordained that it
should happen--did not the eye glimpse faintly a shore before the
fog closed in? Had not the ear recorded a distant surf before dark-
ness and a contrary wind conspired against it? The land, they be-
lieved, should corroborate, not contradict, what men knew from
sources like Ptolemy about the shape of the world. The accounts of
such explorers were read and passed on; the entangled desires and
observations of the writers, with a liberal interpretation by cartog-
raphers with reputations of their own to protect, perpetuated a
geography of hoped-for islands and straits to the west of Europe
that could not be substantiated, a geography only of the mind.
The influence of these images, of course, was considerable.
Such a mental geography becomes the geography to which society
adjusts, and it can be more influential than the real geography. The
popular image of a previously unknown region, writes J. Wreford
Watson, is "compounded of what men hope to find, what they
look to find, how they set about finding, how findings are fitted
into their existing framework of thought, and how those findings
are then expressed." This, says Watson, is what is actually "found"
in a new land.
Another geographer, John L. Allen, pondering the way we
set off for a fresh landscape, writes, "When exploration is viewed
as a process rather than as a series of distinct events, its major
components [are seen to be] clearly related to the imagination. No
exploratory adventure begins without objectives based on the
imagined nature and content of the lands to be explored." The
course of discovery is guided, then, by preconceived notions. Field
observations, writes Allen, "are distorted by these images. The re-
sults of exploration are modified by reports written and interpreted
in the light of persistent illusions and by attempts made to fit new
information into partly erroneous systems and frameworks of
geographical understanding."
The Country oftheMind
Over the past twenty years, some of the focus of academic
geography has shifted away from descriptions of the land and
focused instead on landscapes that exist in the human mind. The
extent and complexity of these geographical images, called mental
maps, are wonderful. An urban resident, for example, sees himself
situated in urban space with specific reference to certain stores,
parking spaces, and public transportation stations. He assigns one
street or building more importance than another as a place for
chance meetings with friends. He knows which routes between
certain points are safest and how to get to a certain restaurant even
though he doesn't know the names of any of the streets on the way.
The mental map of an Eskimo might be an overview of the region
where he customarily hunts--where caribou are likely to turn up
in the spring, where berries are to be found, where consistent runs
of char are located, where the ground is too swampy to walk over
in June, where good soapstone is to be had, or a regular supply of
driftwood.
The mental maps of both urban dweller and Eskimo may
correspond poorly in spatial terms with maps of the same areas
prepared with survey tools and cartographic instruments. But they
are proven, accurate guides of the landscape. They are living
conceptions, idiosyncratically created, stripped of the superfluous,
instantly adaptable. Their validity is not susceptible of contra-
diction.
Our overall cultural perception of a region requires another
term. Mental maps are too personal; and the term does not convey
sufficiently the richness of the invisible landscape, that component
of a regional image that aboriginal groups dwell on at least as much
as they consider a region's physiographic components. Jahner's
term, the spiritual landscape, refers more specifically to relationships
inherent in the physical landscape which make us aware of the
presence of the forces and relationships that infuse our religious
thought. If one can take the phrase "a country of the mind" to mean
the landscape evident to the senses, as it is retained in human
memory and arises in the oral tradition of a people, as a repository
296 ARCTIC DREAMS
of both mythological and "real-time" history, then perhaps this
phrase will suffice.
Amos Rapoport, an Australian architect, and like Tuan and
Carpenter curious about the meaning of "place," made a landmark
study among Kurna, Arunda, Walbiri, and other Australian
aborigines. He mapped their mythological landscapes. He under-
stood that the stories that compose a tribe's mythological back-
ground, their origin and their meaning and purpose in the universe,
are "unobservable realities" that find their expression in "observable
phenomena." The land, in other words, makes the myth real. And
it makes the people real.
The stories that unfold against the local landscape, and that
give expression to the enduring relationships of life, said Rapoport,
are as critical for people as food or water. The mythic landscape is
not the natural landscape, Rapoport concluded, but the mythic and
natural landscapes overlap at certain visible points in the land. And
the limits of the local landscape, he emphasized, are not something
that can be politically negotiated; they are fixed in mythology.
They are not susceptible of adjustment. Rapoport's study made it
eminently clear, as he put it, that Europeans may "completely mis-
understand the nature of the landscape because of their point of
view."
It is always somewhat risky to extrapolate from one aboriginal
culture to another. I know of no work comparable to Rapoport's
in the Arctic, however, and his observations come as close to being
generically sound as any anthropologist's I know. The journals of
the most attentive arctic explorers, those with both a flair for
listening and a capacity to record metaphorical impressions without
judgment, are filled with references to mythological events that
occurred at particular places. Eskimos are not as land-conscious as
aborigines; they are more sea-conscious, and the surface of the sea
is impermanent, new every year. Still, the evidence for a landscape
in the Arctic larger than the one science reports, more extensive
than that recorded on the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey
TheCountry oftheMind 297
quadrangle maps, is undeniable. It is the country the shamans
shined their qaumaneq, their shaman light, into.
The aspiration of aboriginal people throughout the world has
been to achieve a congruent relationship with the land, to fit well
in it. To achieve occasionally a state of high harmony or reverbera-
tion. The dream of this transcendent congruency included the
evolution of a hunting and gathering relationship with the earth,
in which a mutual regard was understood to prevail; but it also
meant a conservation of the stories that bind the people into the
land.
I recall a scene in one of the British discovery expeditions to
the Arctic of a group of ship's officers standing about somewhat
idly on a beach while three or four Eskimo men drew a map for
them in the sand. The young officers found the drawing exotic and
engaging, but almost too developed, too theatrical. I can imagine
the Eskimos drawing a map they meant not to be taken strictly as
a navigational aid, but as a recapitulation of their place in the
known universe. Therefore, as they placed a line of stones to repre-
sent a mountain range and drew in the trend of the coast, they
included also small, seemingly insignificant bays where it was
especially good to hunt geese, or tapped a section of a river where
the special requirements for sheefish spawning were present. This
was the map as mnemonic device, organizing the names of the
places and the stories attached to them, three or four men unfold-
ing their meaning and purpose as people before the young officers.
They did not know what to leave out for these impatient men.
There was no way for them to separate the stories, the indigenous
philosophy, from the land. The young officers later remembered
only that the maps were fascinating. Had the Eskimos told them
that the Pentateuch was merely fascinating, they would have
thought them daft.
The place-fixing stories that grew out of the land were of two
kinds. The first kind, which was from the myth time and which
occurred against the backdrop of a mythological landscape, was
298 ARCTIC DREAMS
usually meticulously conserved. (It was always possible that the
storyteller would not himself or herself grasp completely the
wisdom inherent in a story that had endured, which had proved
its value repeatedly.)
The second kind of story included stories about traveling and
what had happened to everyone in the years that could be recalled.
It was at this place that my daughter was born; or this is where my
brother-in-law killed two caribou the winter a bear killed all my
dogs; or this, Titiralik, is the place my snow machine broke down
and I had to walk; Seenasaluq, this is a place my family has camped
since before I was born.
The undisturbed landscape verifies both sorts of story, and it
is the constant recapitulation in sacred and profane contexts of
all of these stories that keeps the people alive and the land alive in
the people. Language, the stories, holds the vision together.
To those of us who are not hunters, who live in cities with no
sharp regret and enjoy ideas few Eskimos would wish to discuss,
such sensibilities may seem almost arcane. And we may put no
value to them. But we cut ourselves off, I think, from a source of
wisdom. We sometimes mistake a rude life for a rude mind; raw
meat for barbarism; lack of conversation for lack of imagination.
The overriding impression, I think, for the visitor in the Arctic who
walks away from the plane, and waits out the bouts of binge
drinking, the defensive surliness and self-conscious acting in the
village, is that a wisdom is to be found in the people. And once in
a great while an isumataq becomes apparent, a person who can
create the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself.
This is a timeless wisdom that survives failed human economies.
It survives wars. It survives definition. It is a nameless wisdom
esteemed by all people. It is understanding how to live a decent
life, how to behave properly toward other people and toward the
land.
It is, further, a wisdom not owned by anyone, nor about which
one culture is more insightful or articulate. I could easily imagine
some Thomas Merton-like person, the estimable rather than the
The Country oftheMind 299
famous people of our age, sitting with one or two Eskimo men and
women in a coastal village, corroborating the existence of this human
wisdom in yet another region of the world, and looking around to
the mountains, the ice, the birds to see what makes it possible to
put it into words.
ONE July evening I flew with two paleontologists from Ellef
Ringnes Island some 400 miles southwest to their new camp near
Castel Bay on Banks Island. In the years before, these two people
had elucidated a wonderful bit of arctic history. A collection of
fossils they assembled from a thick layer of interbedded coal and
friable rock called the Eureka Formation on Ellesmere Island in-
dicated that 40 to 50 million years ago, during the Eocene, the
Arctic was a region forested with sequoias and ginkgo trees. It
enjoyed a moist and temperate, almost warm climate and a col-
lection of animals that showed a resemblance to the kinds of animals
that have been discovered in Eocene deposits in Europe. At the
time, the Eurasian and North American crustal plates were just
beginning to separate at the northern end of the Atlantic Ocean,
and animals had only recently ceased moving back and forth.
Robert West and Mary Dawson and I sat in the jump seats
of an aircraft called a Twin Otter, amid their camp gear and fossil
collections, for several hours. I listened to them explain their work,
and took pleasure in it, in the fulfilled hopes and dashed dreams of
a field season, and in some of the scenes they envisioned in the land
below us during the Eocene, when three-toed horses, ancestral
flying lemurs, and prehistoric crocodiles lived. It was not some-
thing they could see clearly, only imagine. They recounted their
patient search through frost-riven rubble in the Arctic, looking for
bits of mineralized bone, teeth, and shells, for pieces of petrified
wood and casts of fallen leaves, the shreds of evidence that sug-
gested a landscape.
It was a long flight. To be heard we had to shout a little over
the sound of the engines or draw things on pieces of paper. Some-
where over Melville Island the pilot, Duncan Grant, turned around
300 ARCTIC DREAMS
in his seat to listen. The copilot flew on. Grant began to tell us
about the history of arctic exploration, a subject upon which he was
keen and knowledgeable. We were approaching Dealy Island on
the south coast, where Kellett and his crew wintered in 1852
aboard HMS Resolute. He wanted us to see that, and, farther on,
the winter quarters of Parry at the bay now called Winter Harbor.
As we crossed from Melville Island to Banks Island we looked
down on massive pressure ridges, the jumbled, very heavy ice of
M'Clure Strait. As we neared the coast, Grant, shouting, tried to
get us to see what Pirn had seen as he approached Banks Island,
when he made a dash from Dealy Island in the spring of 1853 to
rescue M'Clure and the men aboard the Investigator, Even though
it was July, a different cast of light entirely, you could see what
Grant meant and how the event loomed for him as we approached.
We all stopped talking. For the last half hour we just looked out
the windows.
We flew over herds of muskoxen. The slanting light was so
bucolic in its effect on the hillsides that they looked like herds of
black angus grazing in English pastures. We crossed the mouth of
the Thomsen River and then circled while West and Dawson
surveyed the terrain and decided where to camp. Grant landed on a
gravel ridge, where only a few plants were growing--a good
exposure of the Eureka Formation. We unloaded their gear and
then stood there, just looking around. It was a beautiful evening.
We were all smiling with an unspoken hope that their work would
be successful.
Dawson handed me a packet of letters they had written to their
families and asked me to mail them when we got back to Resolute.
We waved, a mixture of regret and good wishes at parting. I rode
for hours with the letters on the seat beside me. I thought about
the great desire among friends and colleagues and travelers who
meet on the road, to share what they know, what they have seen
and imagined. Not to have a shared understanding, but to share
what one has come to understand. In such an atmosphere of mutual
The Country of the Mind 301
regard, in which each can roll out his or her maps with no fear of
contradiction, of suspicion, or theft, it is possible to imagine the
long, graceful strides of human history.
I thought about it all the way back to Resolute, watching
Melville Island and then Bathurst disappear beneath the clouds,
as weather moved in from the west.