The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal And Survival in the High Arctic - Hardcover

McGrath, Melanie

 
9781400040476: The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal And Survival in the High Arctic
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400040477 ISBN 13: 9781400040476
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Arriving in the Inuit community of Inukjuak, on the east coast of the Hudson Bay, in 1920, Robert Flaherty set about filming his influential film Nanook of the North. After finishing his filming, Flaherty would leave never to return, but the son he fathered, Josephie Flaherty, would remain behind to suffer with his community as they were forcibly moved hundreds of miles north by the Canadian government some 30 years later, not to receive any form of redress until the mid-1990s. This book both describes the making of the movie and the influence it had on perceptions of the Inuit and the fortunes of Robert Flaherty's Inuit descendants as they coped with exile and hardship. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Melanie McGrath’s first book, Motel Nirvana, won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. Her third book, Silvertown, was short-listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, and the Evening Standard and has produced and presented television shows for Discovery Channel and the UK’s Channel 4. She lives and works in London.

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Chapter One

In the early autumn of 1920, Maggie Nujarluktuk became a woman with another name. It happened something like this. Maggie was sitting on a pile of caribou skins. She had a borrowed baby in her amiut, the fur hood of her parka. A man was filming the scene. His name was Robert Flaherty. Maggie was about to pull the baby out of the amiut and set him to play beside a group of puppies as Flaherty had instructed, when looking up from his camera, he said, “Smile,” grinning to show Maggie what he was getting at and told her, through an interpreter, that he had decided to change her name. She laughed a little, perhaps conscious of his eyes, blue as icebergs, then lifted the baby into her arms, placed him beside her and pulled the puppies closer to keep him warm.

“Well, now, Maggie,” Robert said. He winked at her, wound the camera and lingered on her face. She watched his breath pluming in the chill Arctic air.

“How’s about Nyla?” He allowed the name to roll around his mouth. “Yes, from now on you are Nyla.”

If Maggie minded this, she didn’t say. She already knew she had no choice in the matter anyway.

Maggie Nujarluktuk was very young back then (how young she didn’t know exactly), and very lovely, with a broad, heart-shaped face, unblemished by sunburn or frostbite or by the whiskery tattoos still common among Ungava Inuit women. Her thick hair lay in lush coils around her shoulders and her skin and eyes were as yet unclouded by years of lamp smoke or by endless sewing in poor light. Her lips were bowed, plump but fragile-seeming, and it was impossible to tell whether her smile was an invitation or a warning. Beneath the lips lay even teeth that were white and strong, not yet worn to brown stumps from chewing boots to make them soft. And Robert Flaherty had just renamed her Nyla, which means the Smiling One.

Robert Flaherty’s movie had begun in something of a rush. Only three weeks earlier, on 15 August, the schooner, Annie, had dropped anchor at the remote Arctic fur post of Inukjuak, on the Ungava Peninsula on the east coast of Hudson Bay, and a tall, white man with a thin nose and craggy features had come ashore with his half-breed interpreter, introduced himself to the local Inuit as Robert Flaherty, and announced his intention to stay in the area long enough to make a motion picture there. The film, he said, was to be about daily life in the Barrenlands.

The stranger moved into the fur post manager’s old cabin, a peeling white clapboard building on the south bank of the Innuksuak River and hired a few hands to help him shift his things from the shoreline where the Annie’s crew had left them. Among the expected baggage of coal-oil lamps, tents and skins were the unfamiliar accoutrements of film-making, lights, tripods, cameras and film cans, plus a few personal belongings: a violin and a wind-up gramophone with a set of wax discs and three framed pictures, one a photograph of Arnold Bennett, another of Flaherty’s wife, Frances, the third a little reproduction of Frans Hals’ Young Man with a Mandolin. The number of possessions suggested that Robert Flaherty was settling down for a long stay. Within a day or two of his arrival, he had hung his pictures above the desk in his cabin, lined up his books along a home-made shelf, rigged up a darkroom, setting several old coal-oil barrels outside the door to serve as water tanks for washing film, and found three young men he could pay to haul his water and supply him with fresh meat and fish. By the time a week was up, the cabin looked as though it had always been his home and Flaherty was busy assembling his lights and cameras and running tests. In the evenings, he could be heard humming along with his gramophone (he was particularly fond of Harry Lauder singing “Stop Your Ticklin’ Jock”) or playing Irish jigs on his fiddle.

The local Inuit were not much used to white visitors, and the new arrival turned the little settlement of Inukjuak upside down. No one knew quite how to place Robert Flaherty. His particular brand of whirlwind energy was new to them. Nor had they ever come across a qalunaat, a white man, with such sturdy warmth and rushing good humour. The fur traders they had encountered were glum and troubled and fond friends of the whisky bottle. News of the stranger spread, and the Inukjuamiut, as the people living around Inukjuak are called, began coming in from outlying camps to inspect this new addition to their world. Flaherty greeted them all with smiles and gifts of ship’s biscuits and this, too, felt out of the ordinary. A few wondered, darkly, what the strange qalunaat wanted from them and drifted back out to their camps, but more stayed on, intrigued by the stranger and eager to audition for a part in the movie he said he was about to make.

Flaherty was soon holding try-outs on the river bank in front of the fur post manager’s cabin. To play his leading man he picked a strong, good-natured fellow in his thirties called Alakariallak, who was renowned throughout Cape Dufferin for his hunting prowess. Flaherty renamed him Nanook, meaning “bear.” To play one of Nanook’s wives Flaherty chose a local woman called Cunayou, to play the other, Maggie Nujarluktuk.

This was not Robert Flaherty’s first attempt at making an Arctic film, but it was almost certainly his last chance to get it right. A few years later, when he had become famous, a journalist asked him why he had persisted back then, after so many setbacks and difficulties, and he replied, as he often did, with an aphorism, saying that “every man is strong enough for the work on which his life depends.” In 1920 Robert Flaherty believed his life depended on this movie. And, as it turned out, he was right.

Flaherty had first pitched up in the Canadian Arctic ten years previously, looking for iron ore, in the employ of Sir William Mackenzie, a Canadian mine owner and railroad baron whom Flaherty had met through his father. Mackenzie had invested considerable capital in a transcontinental railway across Canada and he was planning to lay track as far north as Churchill, Manitoba, a bleak Barrenlands settlement on the west coast of Hudson Bay. Mackenzie’s goal was to link the railway with a new shipping route across the bay and thereby create the shortest navigation between the wheat plains of Manitoba and the flour mills of Europe, which were then connected overland and by sea through the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic. There were additional benefits, which Mackenzie, being a good businessman, had not ignored. It was well known that Hudson Bay’s seabed was rich in iron ore—for centuries whalers had reported compass interference whenever they sailed there—and some enormous iron ore lodes had been discovered on the east coast of the Bay in the Ungava Peninsula just north of Labrador. Mackenzie reckoned there might be money to be made extracting the ore and shipping it to Europe.

His geologic interest focused on the Nastapoka Islands, a cluster of granite nubs lying just off the east coast of Hudson Bay at 57° North. The Nastapokas had figured in some prospectors’ logs as being worthy of exploration. Inuit had been living in the area for thousands of years but the place was only scantily mapped and virtually unknown to white men. Mackenzie needed someone young and ambitious with courage and flair, even a little recklessness, to blaze a route through. In 1910 he chose Robert Flaherty. The railroad baron had employed Flaherty’s father, Robert Flaherty Sr., and knew the family from the old days, when the American frontier was still open and the Flaherty family had helped to settle it. At...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400040477
ISBN 13 
9781400040476
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
268
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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