Across Arctic America/Chapter 28

​

One morning at the end of October, 1924, I awoke for the last time in the little wooden dwelling on the outskirts of Nome, where I had been living for the past month. By noon that day I must be on board the big tourist steamer bound for Seattle, and these years of life among the Eskimos would be at an end.

I was delighted at the work I had been able to accomplish during that time, and my thoughts naturally turned once more to a last survey of the vast regions which we had traversed and the people we had met. One could not but feel some regret that it was all over and done; a happy spell of work that would never come again, and now must give place to the hurry of returning to civilization, and the monotonous toil of trying to give out again something of all I had received.

Alas, what are words compared with life itself!

I went out into the morning sunlight and felt the ​cool breeze in my face. The lakes were already frozen over, and the first sledges were driving over the snowy plains. The town itself was getting ready for the coming winter; white men were writing their letters for the last mail before the port was closed by ice, and the Eskimos were making preparations for return to their scattered villages far around.

As fate would have it, this very morning I received a visit from an angakoq; one of the few still remaining in these parts. And as he was the last of all I met, it seems fitting to conclude with him.

His name was Najagneq, and I met him for the first time in the streets of Nome, as a fugitive in a strange place. His appearance alone was enough to create a sensation; among the well-dressed people, with fashionable shops on either hand, and motor cars hurrying past, he looked like a being from another world. His little piercing eyes glared wildly around, his lower jaw hung down, swathed in a bandage half undone; a man had recently tried to kill him, and wounded him badly in the face.

Strange things were told of him. He had turned his house into a fort and waged war single-handed against the rest of his tribe. And against all white men as well. He had already killed several people, when he was captured by a ruse and brought in to Nome. Here he was kept in prison for a year, and had just been released for lack of evidence to convict him. Opinions were divided as to the rights of the case; some declared he was simply half-mad, and a danger to the community; others regarded him as fighting on behalf of his people against the whites, ​ ​and against those misguided natives who supported them. He was forbidden to speak his own language in prison, and as he could not speak any other, he did not speak at all for a whole year. By the end of that time, ten witnesses from his own village had been brought in to give evidence against him; but when confronted with the accused, all without exception declared they had nothing to say. He was known to be a powerful wizard, and no one dared to give evidence against him. In face of this, there was nothing to be done but release him, and send him back to his own place, on Nunivak Island.

I managed to get into touch with him just before his release, and as I happened to be working among his fellow countrymen at the time, I had ample opportunities for observation. He was never tired of telling stories of his life in prison, and by no means disinclined to triumph a little over those of his own people who had tried to rid themselves of his eccentricity by alliance with the whites, yet had not dared to say a word when brought face to face with him in court.

He had found fresh food for thought in this great town. Though accustomed only to earthen huts, sledges and kayaks, he was not impressed by the great houses, the steamers or the cars; but a white horse pulling a heavy cart had set his imagination working. And he solemnly informed his wondering fellow-tribesmen that the white men in Nome had killed him ten times during the past winter; but he had had ten white horses for his helping spirits, and by sacrificing one on each occasion he had managed ​to save his life! For the rest, his confinement in a solitary cell had not crushed his spirit. He, the great hunter, had learned to talk to the darkness, had vanquished solitude itself, and now, released at last, had accustomed himself to the lack of open air life, of speech and humankind.

This 10 HP wizard was an oldish man, with fiery eyes, a power of words and a forceful utterance that impressed those with whom he spoke. He was curiously gentle and friendly toward me, and when we were alone, was not afraid of confessing that he had been playing on the credulity of his native friends. He was not a humbug really, but a man accustomed to finding himself alone against a crowd, and with his own little tricks of self-defense. Whenever the talk turned on his early visions and the faith of his fathers, he spoke firmly, clearly, and in the plainest earnest. His words were brief and to the point; and I suited myself to his manner as far as I could. So that a conversation between us would be something like this:

"What does man consist of?"

"Of the body; that which you see; the name, which is inherited from one dead; and then of something more, a mysterious power that we call yutir—the soul, which gives life, shape and appearance to all that lives."

"What do you think of the way men live?"

"They live brokenly, mingling all things together; weakly, because they cannot do one thing at a time. A great hunter must not be a great lover of women. But no one can help it. Animals are as ​unfathomable in their nature; and it behooves us who live on them to act with care. But men bolster themselves up with amulets and become solitary in their lack of power. In any village there must be as many different amulets as possible. Uniformity divides the forces; equality makes for worthlessness."

"How did you learn all this?"

"I have searched in the darkness, being silent in the great lonely stillness of the dark. So I became an angakoq, through visions and dreams and encounters with flying spirits. In our forefathers' day, the angakoqs were solitary men; but now, they are all priests or doctors, weather prophets or conjurers producing game, or clever merchants, selling their skill for pay. The ancients devoted their lives to maintaining the balance of the universe; to great things, immense, unfathomable things."

"Do you believe in any of these powers yourself?"

"Yes; a power that we call Sila, which is not to be explained in simple words. A great spirit, supporting the world and the weather and all life on earth, a spirit so mighty that his utterance to mankind is not through common words, but by storm and snow and rain and the fury of the sea; all the forces of nature that men fear. But he has also another way of utterance, by sunlight, and calm of the sea, and little children innocently at play, themselves understanding nothing. Children hear a soft and gentle voice, almost like that of a woman. It comes to them in a mysterious way, but so gently that they are not afraid; they only hear that some danger ​threatens. And the children mention it as it were casually when they come home, and it is then the business of the angakoq to take such measures as shall guard against the peril. When all is well, Sila sends no message to mankind, but withdraws into his own endless nothingness, apart. So he remains as long as men do not abuse life, but act with reverence towards their daily food.

"No one has seen Sila; his place of being is a mystery, in that he is at once among us and unspeakably far away."

These mighty words form a fitting close to the sketch I have tried to give throughout this book of Eskimo life and thought. Before many years are past, their religion will be extinct, and the white man will have conquered all, the country and its people; their thoughts, their visions and their faith.

I am glad to have had the good fortune to visit these people while they were still unchanged; to have found, throughout the great expanse of territory from Greenland to the Pacific, a people not only one in race and language, but also in their form of culture; a witness in itself to the strength and endurance and wild beauty of human life.

Najagneq's words come as an echo of the wisdom we admired in the angakoq we met at every stage of the journey; in the inhospitable regions of King William's Land, in Aua's snow-palace at Hudson Bay or in the circle of the Caribou Eskimo Igjugarjuk, whose words are quoted at the head of this chapter.

​A month later, I stood on the roof of a skyscraper looking out over the stony desert of New York. Miteq and Anarulunguaq stood beside me, impressed, as I was myself, by the marvels we saw about us.

"Ah," sighed Anarulunguaq, "and we used to think Nature was the greatest and most wonderful of all! Yet here we are among mountains and great gulfs and precipices, all made by the work of human hands. Nature is great; Sila, as we call it at home; nature, the world, the universe, all that is Sila; which our wise men declared they could hold in poise. And I could never believe it; but I see it now. Nature is great; but are not men greater? Those tiny beings we can see down there far below, hurrying this way and that. They live among these stone walls; on a great plain of stones made with hands. Stone and stone and stone—there is no game to be seen anywhere, and yet they manage to live and find their daily food. Have they then learned of the animals, since they can dig down under the earth like marmots, hang in the air like spiders, fly like the birds and dive under water like the fishes; seemingly masters of all that we struggled against ourselves?

"I see things more than my mind can grasp; and the only way to save oneself from madness is to suppose that we have all died suddenly before we knew, and that this is part of another life."

The Expedition was at an end. The years which to us white men had been full of strange happenings and experiences, were just everyday life to our two Greenlanders. It was their turn now; their expedi​tion was beginning. But as I showed them the marvels of this new world, my thoughts were constantly returning to the people we had left, to the men and women who had spoken so simply and yet so powerfully of the greatest and the smallest things. Hunger and feasting, happiness and adversity, the daily round and the great moments of life—they spoke of all with true and simple feeling. So here; face to face with a chaos and confusion of marvels, Anarulunguaq found the very words for all it meant:

Nature is great; but man is greater still.