When I first came to Princeton, I told people that I was from the North Pole, but I have to confess this wasn't quite true. The North Pole is still a long way off — almost 1,500 miles — but with the closest city to my home being 1,000 miles south, it was as good a landmark as any. And I can bet that most of you will never meet anyone who lives closer to the North Pole than I do.
Going home sometimes feels like confronting all the stereotypes of Canada that most Canadians experience very little in reality: Eskimos, igloos and cold — very cold — weather. So let me tell you about the Canadian north and maybe even tempt you to come visit sometime — the weather's great in July!
The logistics: My family moved to Cambridge Bay, Nunavut in 1992 from Saskatchewan so my parents could take teaching positions.
Cambridge Bay is a small Inuit community of 1,500, located on an island in the Arctic Ocean, northeast of Alaska. Nunavut is Canada's newest territory, created on April 1, 1999 as the largest native land claim in Canadian history. All in all, Nunavut contains one-fifth of Canada's landmass but has only about 20,000 inhabitants, 85% of whom are Inuit.
No roads connect the towns of Nunavut, which themselves are separated by hundreds of miles, so travel is expensive and it is not uncommon to leave town only a few times a year.
The environment: The surroundings are exquisite and virtually untouched — you need just venture a few miles out of town and all signs of civilization disappear, giving way to pristine lakes and rolling hills of tundra, spattered with color for a few weeks every July when the flowers spring to life for a brief but glorious summer. Birds migrate from all over North America to spend summer in the Arctic, and it is not uncommon to see swans, cranes and peregrine falcons, to name a few. Other wildlife includes caribou, arctic hares, foxes, seals and lemmings, but my favorite is the muskox — a huge and woolly relative of the mountain goat and extremely common in and around Cambridge Bay.
The Inuit: "Inuit" means people. Elders speak Inuktitut, a dying language that the people of Nunavut are desperately trying to keep alive. "Yes" is said by raising your eyebrows, "no" by scrunching your nose. "Koana" means "thank you." Most Inuit are pretty short, so even though I wasn't much of an athlete, I was a great basketball player in high school!
The food: Food is always an adventure. Seeing as little grows in the arctic and fresh produce has to be flown up and therefore expensive, I know very few vegetarians. Beef, pork and chicken are available at the grocery store, but locally we have a wide array of wildlife to select from as well. I have eaten seal. I have eaten raw frozen fish and whale meat, and dried meat of all kinds. But the most common meats are fish, muskox, and caribou (caribou steak is divine!).
Walking around town, you can see portions of caribou carcasses drying in the sun on the porch or in front of the houses, and you can even tear off a piece of meat to chew on while you visit someone for a cup of tea.
Fun: Malls, movie theaters and bowling alleys are lacking, but if you love the outdoors, we've got a lot of it. Everyone goes camping in the summer — some for the weekends, others leave town for months at a time. Snowmobiles and four-wheelers are fun and practical ways to get around.
Kayaking, fishing, hunting and hiking are great in the summer, and with the sun circling the horizon, people are out at all hours — you can see kids on the playground as late as 2 or 3 a.m. In the winter, life slows down, and people stay close to home, visiting relatives or friends and playing cards while watching the WWF.
The ups and downs: As in all towns, beauty coexists with ugliness. The ugliness lies in the severe problems of drug and alcohol abuse and in the high levels of suicide and family violence throughout the north. Few people graduate from high school, let alone go away to college. Abusive and alcoholic parents foster abusiveness and alcoholism in their children, and teen pregnancies are far from uncommon: the year I moved to Cambridge Bay, there were two 14-year-old girls who were pregnant — one with her second child.
But it would be a mistake to dwell on the problems without giving due attention to all that is wonderful. Cambridge Bay is not a town or a village; it is a community in which everyone laughs — and everyone cries — together. And I know of few places where strangers are treated with such kindness — where people will so readily welcome you into their homes, lend you their trucks, cabins, or camping equipment or stop and offer you a ride when you're walking.
Oh, and one last thing: Inuit don't kiss by rubbing noses. And they don't live in igloos. Not very often, anyway.
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