Aporta, Claudio

ARCTIC

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Claudio Aporta

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Watching Ice and Weather Our Way: Sikumengllu Eslamengllu Esghapalleghput, buy Conrad Oozeva, Chester Noongwook, George Noongwook, Christina Alowa, and Igor Krupnik

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432 • REVIEWSHumphreys, nominally the expedition’s leader. Whilenoting that the party’s plan to send a large party to northernEllesmere Island was impractical and had to be modifiedby splitting the party into three separate excursions, theauthor did not have the benefit of recent revelations thatexplain why the shake-up occurred. In 1986, the late LordShackleton revealed to Jean Malaurie (2003) the realreason—an incipient mutiny by their Inughuit guides, whoconcluded that Humphreys’ authoritarian actions wouldimperil the group. Faced with aborting the entire expedi-tion, Humphreys’ British colleagues prevailed on him towithdraw from its effective leadership. Here, Stallworthymay also have played a role. Sent largely to chaperone theinexperienced British explorers, Stallworthy had priorrelationships with the Inughuit that may have helped per-suade Nukappiangguaq and Inuatuk, both indispensableguides, to remain with the party.Following his High Arctic service, Stallworthy served invarious other postings with the Mounties, including one inOttawa, before he retired in 1946. His long relationship withhis spouse Hilda, through many work-induced separations, isalso detailed throughout the book, along with their establish-ment of a resort on Vancouver Island in retirement.Barr’s book is well documented, drawing in particularon Stallworthy’s surviving papers. Some of the book’smost engaging passages are extended excerpts from thesepapers, including a six-page excerpt from the Mountie’sunpublished essay on a sledge journey he carried out fromChesterfield Inlet with the Inuk Naujaa, which gives thereader a feel for the character of RCMP service in theArctic and its intercultural relations. If Aboriginal testi-mony were available, more credit might have been ac-corded the Inughuit special constables, who taughtStallworthy much about living, travel, and survival in theHigh Arctic. The book is well illustrated with photographsfrom Stallworthy’s collection, including the front coverimage depicting Stallworthy and special constable Inuatukwith a walrus they had killed, as well as cropped, full-pagephotographs at the beginning of each chapter. The qualityof reproduction and printing is generally good. The photo-graphs effectively convey the extremely rugged characterof the topography of Ellesmere Island, as well as thefragile RCMP toeholds at the Craig Harbour and BachePeninsula detachments in the 1920s and 1930s. Some ofthe maps trace Stallworthy’s itineraries, but this is not truein all cases. Given the text’s particular emphasis on thesearch for the Krüger expedition, the general map ofEllesmere Island and adjacent landmasses might havebenefited from laying out these routes to show readersexactly where the Mounties went on these remarkablejourneys.Barr has done a creditable job of narrating the outlinesof Stallworthy’s life, especially the story of several nota-ble patrols that he and others carried out to assert and thenmaintain Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic islands.The author’s chosen genre, narrative biography, is wellsuited to presenting the sequence of activities of hissubject’s life, although it does not readily lend itself to thedetailed study of character. In the end, Stallworthy’s per-sonality remains something of an enigma. Nevertheless,the book is a worthy contribution to the scholarly literatureon the exploration of Canada’s High Arctic, and it will alsobe of interest to general readers. Stallworthy and SergeantA.H. Joy were never accorded the celebrity of Peary orStefansson, but Stallworthy’s articles in the RCMP Quar-terly, followed by Harwood Steele’s quasi-official Polic-ing the Arctic (1935), gave them some prominence in theinter-war period. Perhaps Stallworthy’s most enduringcontribution was to help maintain the Arctic islands as aregion of Canada during a period when its sovereignty wasbeing challenged by other countries. Barr’s account doesjustice to this legacy.REFERENCESMALAURIE, J. 2003. Ultima Thule: Explorers and Natives in thepolar North. Translated by Willard Wood and Anthony Roberts.New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company.STEELE, H. 1935. Policing the Arctic: The story of the conquest ofthe Arctic by the Royal Canadian (formerly North-West) MountedPolice. Toronto: The Ryerson Press.Lyle Dick, West Coast HistorianWestern Canada Service CentreParks Canada, #300 – 300 West Georgia StreetVancouver, British Columbia, CanadaV6B 6B4Lyle.Dick@pc.gc.caWATCHING ICE AND WEATHER OUR WAY:SIKUMENGLLU ESLAMENGLLU ESGHAPALLE-GHPUT. By CONRAD OOZEVA, CHESTER NOONGWOOK,GEORGE NOONGWOOK, CHRISTINA ALOWA, and IGORKRUPNIK. Washington, D.C.: Arctic Studies Center,Smithsonian Institution, and Savoonga, Alaska:Savoonga Whaling Captains Association, 2004. ISBN0-9673429-5-3. 207 p., b&w illus. Softbound. US$12.00.This book presents a comprehensive description of Yupikknowledge and understanding of sea ice and weather in thecommunities of Savoonga and Gambell on St. LawrenceIsland (Alaska). The idea for documenting and publishingYupik observations originated in a workshop held in 2000in Girdwood, Alaska, where scientists and Yupik expertsgot together to discuss signs of change in the Arcticenvironment. It is evident that the methods and approachesused by Yupik hunters differ significantly from those usedby scientists, but the book reflects the growing efforts tolink northern scholars working on issues of global warm-ing and climate change with local experts. Watching Iceand Weather Our Way is a systematic attempt to documentenvironmental observations “the Yupik way.” This goal isREVIEWS • 433largely accomplished through presenting data that werecollected, recorded, and illustrated by the local experts ofSavoonga and Gambell.The book is organized into four parts, and each contrib-utes in a different way to understanding the Yupiks’knowledge of the environment in which they live. The firstpart contains a dictionary of Yupik terms for sea ice,compiled and written mostly by Conrad Oozeva and beau-tifully illustrated by Vadim Yenan and Chester Noongwook.The second part summarizes detailed weather and iceobservations for the year 2000 – 01, as documented byChester Noongwook and Conrad Oozeva. Both elderswere given the freedom to choose their own observationand recording methods. This resulted in two remarkablydifferent but equally valuable reports of weather patternsand ice conditions. Part 3 presents Yupik stories about iceand weather, mostly recorded between 1982 and 1983.This is an excellent addition to the book because it showsto what extent environmental knowledge is often transmit-ted in the context of broader narratives such as epics andlife stories. Part 4 presents historical written data aboutweather and ice conditions dating back to 1898 (the mostremarkable source is the diary kept by Dr. Vene, the firstschoolteacher in Gambell). This historical information isdiscussed and compared to current conditions by Yupikexpert Conrad Oozeva. By comparing historical and cur-rent data on the dates when the ice broke up, for example,or the dates when Siberian visitors arrived in the commu-nity, Oozeva can provide a sharp image of what has (andhas not) changed in weather patterns and sea-ice cycles.One of the most important contributions of this book isto show that the Yupik knowledge of the sea ice is highlysophisticated, both comprehensive and detailed. All toooften the knowledge of indigenous peoples is labeled as“traditional,” indirectly establishing its different (infe-rior) status in relation to scientific knowledge, which isviewed as objective and accurate. What this book shows isthat this Yupik knowledge should be considered a science,as it is the result of systematic observations developedthrough generations of successfully dealing with the Arc-tic environment. As Igor Krupnik puts it, “native expertsusually have a very coherent and ‘fully scientific’ vision ofthe annual sequence of weather and ice regimes, migrationpatterns of major marine mammals, and how these twocycles are related” (p. 206). This knowledge has made itpossible for hunters to understand the codes of such dy-namic environments and accurately predict, for instance,wind shifts or ice breakups, which helps to minimize therisk of hunting on the sea ice. The Yupik knowledge is alsobased on accumulated experience of learning by trial anderror. An example of this way of learning is the telling ofstories about hunters’ being taken on the moving ice orbreaking through thin ice (see stories from the corpus ofYupik oral history in Part 3).These methods and knowledge have allowed the continu-ous use of an environment that outsiders may call harsh orunpredictable, but that, to the expert eye of an experiencedYupik hunter, appears a familiar and fertile place. It would besimply wrong (and plainly arrogant) to presume that so manyyears of accumulated knowledge could not add significantlyto what scientists know about sea ice and climate change.This book is a significant contribution to understanding thevalue of Yupik knowledge.This book will also be a valuable source of informationto younger generations of Yupik. Among the Yupik, as inmost Arctic communities, younger people often lack thetime and the context for learning some important aspectsof this environmental knowledge. The result is the deterio-ration and loss of certain techniques and terminology.Hunting, however, is still a very important activity in mostArctic communities, and impoverished environmentalknowledge could result not only in cultural loss, but alsoin risk to human lives. Documentation of oral knowledge,therefore, becomes vital, and this book is a great accom-plishment in its ways of both documenting this knowledge(most of the work was locally carried out, and it seems thatthe most relevant decisions were also locally made) andrepresenting it (by combining different oral and writtensources and providing drawings and photographs to illus-trate the data).I would like to make two observations. The first is tonote the absence of any type of cartographic material. Thereader would have gained significantly if shown a map ofthe study area, and perhaps some larger-scale maps pro-viding geographic context to Noongwook and Oozeva’sobservations. The second remark refers to the ice diction-ary. On page 27, we are told that the glossary comes fromConrad Oozeva’s observations, and that, in the originalversion of 1986, he had organized the terms into 16categories, such as Dangerous spots, Best to work on, andHard to walk on. It may have been interesting to see theterms organized according to those 16 categories. Fromwhat we can infer, the Yupik categories reflect an ap-proach that is significantly different from that representedby Western scientific categories (we could hardly imaginescientific studies describing a category of ice as Hard towork on). Beyond these two minor observations, the quali-ties of this book are far more significant.This book is excellent for several reasons, including thediversity of the data, the illustrated glossary, the quality ofthe drawings (simple but beautiful, and very informative),the description of Yupik methods of observation, and theinclusion of commented historical data. In sum, it is abeautiful book and a most valuable contribution to theunderstanding of Arctic environments.Claudio AportaDepartment of Sociology & AnthropologyCarleton University1125 Colonel By DriveOttawa, Ontario, CanadaK1S 5B6claudio_aporta@carleton.ca

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Watching Ice and Weather Our Way: Sikumengllu Eslamengllu Esghapalleghput, buy Conrad Oozeva, Chester Noongwook, George Noongwook, Christina Alowa, and Igor Krupnik

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