In the Empire of Ice Read Online Free Page A
Author: Gretel Ehrlich
has rotted into gray rounds that drift out as the tide changes.
“The Earth possessed us,” a woman from the village of Shishmaref once said. Ice shaped the Inuit mind and society, the ecological imagination, and the ethnographic landscape. Ice is womb, home, and hearse for every Arctic species. Food, shelter, clothing, spirits, shamans, masks, drum dances, watercraft, and dogsleds were elements that bound life together on the ice. To say that Inuit people and Arctic animals “adapted” to ice is to miss the point. They co-evolved with ice. Without it, humans, walruses, seals, polar bears, and whales will die. When I first began traveling in the Arctic, the sea ice was up to 14 feet thick between December and May. Now it is often no more than six inches thick in the coldest months, barely strong enough to hold a human or a polar bear.
Sea ice is dynamic, always changing. Bering Strait’s pack ice grinds and gyrates, pulling away from shore toward Little Diomede Island, flowing north along the coast toward Point Hope, then pushing south again, its stacked pressure ridges visible and audible from shore.
Pack ice is the platform from which walruses make shallow dives to scratch at sand for shellfish, the platform on which polar bears travel, hunt, and rest. Bearded seals and ringed seals haul out on its floes to catch spring sun. Pack ice is the staging ground for human hunters as well.
Seasonal sea ice is a villager’s highway, a hunter’s path in spring to the ice edge where bowhead and beluga whales, walruses, and bearded seals can be found. As the ice recedes and breaks up in what are now chaotic weather patterns as a result of warming temperatures, both the hunters and the hunted in this high Arctic ecosystem are threatened. According to one Inuit hunter, “The weather is so strange it can no longer be understood. That’s how much it has changed.”
I HAD MET MY GUIDE, Joseph Senungetuk, and his wife, Catherine, in Anchorage, where they live. I’d noticed them in the crowd at the local bookstore, and, feeling lonely on a book tour, I invited them to dinner. A native of Wales, Alaska, a tiny Inuit village on the Seward Peninsula, Joe jumped cultures early on and went to the San Francisco Art Institute. Since then, his artwork has been collected by museums. Like many Inuit people I’ve met, he’s a man between. His book Give or Take a Century chronicles his childhood in Wales. After reading it, I invited Joe to be my guide and interpreter on a trip to Wales during my 2007 circumpolar journey.
The night before we leave Anchorage, we visit an old friend of his, Herb Anungazuk, another Wales native and now a National Parks anthropologist who has the privilege of studying his own culture. That evening we go to his two-story house on a cul-de-sac. “I don’t want office talk—I want to talk about the old days,” Herb says. Slight of build and jittery, he is also in his 60s and happy to see his old friend Joe. We nibble chocolate cookies. “It used to be very cold in the wintertime in Wales,” he says. “We always had 25-foot drifts. Remember how hard it was getting to school, sliding down drifts from the second-story window? Now it’s windier and the storms are fiercer, with more south winds occurring in wintertime,” he says, looking out the window as if from a village house that faced the frozen sea.
“We had good ice most of the time from December until the third week of June. Now, by mid-April or May the ice goes out, and we have years when there is almost none at all. Melting ice changes the salinity of the sea, and it’s affecting the phytoplankton and fish, and that in turn affects the migrations of birds and bowhead whales, walrus and seals, and little auks and eider ducks.”
He knows an old woman from Little Diomede Island, directly across the Bering Strait from Wales, who said, “Our land is changing like an old woman changes. Things don’t work right anymore.”
Herb lowers his
“The Earth possessed us,” a woman from the village of Shishmaref once said. Ice shaped the Inuit mind and society, the ecological imagination, and the ethnographic landscape. Ice is womb, home, and hearse for every Arctic species. Food, shelter, clothing, spirits, shamans, masks, drum dances, watercraft, and dogsleds were elements that bound life together on the ice. To say that Inuit people and Arctic animals “adapted” to ice is to miss the point. They co-evolved with ice. Without it, humans, walruses, seals, polar bears, and whales will die. When I first began traveling in the Arctic, the sea ice was up to 14 feet thick between December and May. Now it is often no more than six inches thick in the coldest months, barely strong enough to hold a human or a polar bear.
Sea ice is dynamic, always changing. Bering Strait’s pack ice grinds and gyrates, pulling away from shore toward Little Diomede Island, flowing north along the coast toward Point Hope, then pushing south again, its stacked pressure ridges visible and audible from shore.
Pack ice is the platform from which walruses make shallow dives to scratch at sand for shellfish, the platform on which polar bears travel, hunt, and rest. Bearded seals and ringed seals haul out on its floes to catch spring sun. Pack ice is the staging ground for human hunters as well.
Seasonal sea ice is a villager’s highway, a hunter’s path in spring to the ice edge where bowhead and beluga whales, walruses, and bearded seals can be found. As the ice recedes and breaks up in what are now chaotic weather patterns as a result of warming temperatures, both the hunters and the hunted in this high Arctic ecosystem are threatened. According to one Inuit hunter, “The weather is so strange it can no longer be understood. That’s how much it has changed.”
I HAD MET MY GUIDE, Joseph Senungetuk, and his wife, Catherine, in Anchorage, where they live. I’d noticed them in the crowd at the local bookstore, and, feeling lonely on a book tour, I invited them to dinner. A native of Wales, Alaska, a tiny Inuit village on the Seward Peninsula, Joe jumped cultures early on and went to the San Francisco Art Institute. Since then, his artwork has been collected by museums. Like many Inuit people I’ve met, he’s a man between. His book Give or Take a Century chronicles his childhood in Wales. After reading it, I invited Joe to be my guide and interpreter on a trip to Wales during my 2007 circumpolar journey.
The night before we leave Anchorage, we visit an old friend of his, Herb Anungazuk, another Wales native and now a National Parks anthropologist who has the privilege of studying his own culture. That evening we go to his two-story house on a cul-de-sac. “I don’t want office talk—I want to talk about the old days,” Herb says. Slight of build and jittery, he is also in his 60s and happy to see his old friend Joe. We nibble chocolate cookies. “It used to be very cold in the wintertime in Wales,” he says. “We always had 25-foot drifts. Remember how hard it was getting to school, sliding down drifts from the second-story window? Now it’s windier and the storms are fiercer, with more south winds occurring in wintertime,” he says, looking out the window as if from a village house that faced the frozen sea.
“We had good ice most of the time from December until the third week of June. Now, by mid-April or May the ice goes out, and we have years when there is almost none at all. Melting ice changes the salinity of the sea, and it’s affecting the phytoplankton and fish, and that in turn affects the migrations of birds and bowhead whales, walrus and seals, and little auks and eider ducks.”
He knows an old woman from Little Diomede Island, directly across the Bering Strait from Wales, who said, “Our land is changing like an old woman changes. Things don’t work right anymore.”
Herb lowers his
Readers choose
Sky Masters (v1.1)
Larry Kane
Grace Dent
Jill Mansell
David Bishop
Michelle Bellon