Read Online In the Empire of Ice by Gretel Ehrlich - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gretel Ehrlich
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says as we put on our parkas. It’s 50 below zero outside with the wind chill and getting dark. “They are using someone else’s language and they don’t even know it. English doesn’t have the words to explain who we are, what we know about the land and ice, and how the ice is changing.”
One of the young teachers invites us for dinner. She’s a gregarious Vermonter who has lived in the North for years. Her house is modern and cozy. Her ponytailed Inuit boyfriend, from Little Diomede, is carving a walrus-ivory handle in the shape of a polar bear for an ulu. It’s exquisite, and Joe compliments him on his carving. “My father thought that with every generation, things were being done less well. But seeing this, I’m not so sure,” he says. For dinner, we have a reheated tuna-noodle casserole and tea brewed from local herbs.
They lend us a flashlight for our walk home in the dark. The old part of town where Joe grew up is covered with hoarfrost. He shines a dim light on the broken boards. “We were never cold,” he says. “We always had fires going and food on the stove. Mountains of food—ducks, walrus, and seal meat. They’d divide it all up so everyone had something to eat whether their hunt was successful or not,” he says, switching off the flashlight. The ruined houses shine in the night.
JOE KEEPS SAYING we’re losing daylight, but all I see is the night sky wiped clean by the white cloth of snow. Maybe what he means is that his grasp of who he was and who he is in Wales is elusive. The whiteout is nearly continuous, with only short glimpses of the revolving airport light or the headlights of a snow machine dashing by. A wind picks up and gusts hard, shaking the windows. Earlier in the week five polar bears were sighted nearby.
Above the sky is darkness, and below the advancing and retreating ice pack counterbalances dusky days. When the ice came down the strait from the north, nanoq, the polar bear, was often seen hitching a ride. Bears travel, hunt ringed seals from their white deck of drift ice, eat prey, beachcomb, grab eider ducks, and wander the land between Tin City, where Joe’s father once worked, and Wales.
Villagers don’t want polar bears too close, yet they are always watching them, learning from them. They found a den carved in a wind-hardened snowdrift at the second inlet to the Lopp Lagoon near town. When spring came, the bears swam across gaping leads in the ice. Between March and May they began moving north again, hitching rides on pack ice as it receded from the shore. Another hunter found a denning female on the east side of Little Diomede Island that had excavated a cave in the cliff 50 feet above the shore. It was 4 feet high, with two chambers each 13 feet long. Only females hibernate. Once they go in a den, the males have been observed blocking the entrance with hardened snow, then going off until spring.
A hunter from St. Lawrence Island said he once had trouble with too many bears coming near, so he lit a bonfire using bear fat to ignite it. The smell scared the bears. They dived into the ocean and began swimming. Others joined them, forming a wedge in the dark sea that he said “looked like a large white ice floe.”
In the morning there are no bears in sight. Ronnie, Winton Weyapuk, and others come to work in the office, a small room off the main hall. We talk to Winton about uncontrolled natural resource extraction, about sovereignty, self-rule, sustainable economies, and indigenous peoples—issues that are always on the front burner up here, but about a hundred years too late, Joe says.
Winton explains that the 1971 Alaska Claims Settlement Act provided the 80,000 Alaskan natives with 44 million acres of land and $962 million as payment for lands given up. But the question of how to use this “tool of money” for the benefit and health of the land and its people is a continual debate. Still, spend it they do.
Oil and gas development have been intense and
One of the young teachers invites us for dinner. She’s a gregarious Vermonter who has lived in the North for years. Her house is modern and cozy. Her ponytailed Inuit boyfriend, from Little Diomede, is carving a walrus-ivory handle in the shape of a polar bear for an ulu. It’s exquisite, and Joe compliments him on his carving. “My father thought that with every generation, things were being done less well. But seeing this, I’m not so sure,” he says. For dinner, we have a reheated tuna-noodle casserole and tea brewed from local herbs.
They lend us a flashlight for our walk home in the dark. The old part of town where Joe grew up is covered with hoarfrost. He shines a dim light on the broken boards. “We were never cold,” he says. “We always had fires going and food on the stove. Mountains of food—ducks, walrus, and seal meat. They’d divide it all up so everyone had something to eat whether their hunt was successful or not,” he says, switching off the flashlight. The ruined houses shine in the night.
JOE KEEPS SAYING we’re losing daylight, but all I see is the night sky wiped clean by the white cloth of snow. Maybe what he means is that his grasp of who he was and who he is in Wales is elusive. The whiteout is nearly continuous, with only short glimpses of the revolving airport light or the headlights of a snow machine dashing by. A wind picks up and gusts hard, shaking the windows. Earlier in the week five polar bears were sighted nearby.
Above the sky is darkness, and below the advancing and retreating ice pack counterbalances dusky days. When the ice came down the strait from the north, nanoq, the polar bear, was often seen hitching a ride. Bears travel, hunt ringed seals from their white deck of drift ice, eat prey, beachcomb, grab eider ducks, and wander the land between Tin City, where Joe’s father once worked, and Wales.
Villagers don’t want polar bears too close, yet they are always watching them, learning from them. They found a den carved in a wind-hardened snowdrift at the second inlet to the Lopp Lagoon near town. When spring came, the bears swam across gaping leads in the ice. Between March and May they began moving north again, hitching rides on pack ice as it receded from the shore. Another hunter found a denning female on the east side of Little Diomede Island that had excavated a cave in the cliff 50 feet above the shore. It was 4 feet high, with two chambers each 13 feet long. Only females hibernate. Once they go in a den, the males have been observed blocking the entrance with hardened snow, then going off until spring.
A hunter from St. Lawrence Island said he once had trouble with too many bears coming near, so he lit a bonfire using bear fat to ignite it. The smell scared the bears. They dived into the ocean and began swimming. Others joined them, forming a wedge in the dark sea that he said “looked like a large white ice floe.”
In the morning there are no bears in sight. Ronnie, Winton Weyapuk, and others come to work in the office, a small room off the main hall. We talk to Winton about uncontrolled natural resource extraction, about sovereignty, self-rule, sustainable economies, and indigenous peoples—issues that are always on the front burner up here, but about a hundred years too late, Joe says.
Winton explains that the 1971 Alaska Claims Settlement Act provided the 80,000 Alaskan natives with 44 million acres of land and $962 million as payment for lands given up. But the question of how to use this “tool of money” for the benefit and health of the land and its people is a continual debate. Still, spend it they do.
Oil and gas development have been intense and
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