‘The Eskimo Will Become a White Man’ : Tomorrow Slowly Encroaches on Harsh, Scenic Arctic

The picture that hangs in the town hall here looks like a class portrait from the Stone Age.

The faded photograph, dated 1909, captures a band of Arctic hunters, long-haired Polar Eskimos, just a few years after their first encounter with the white man. In the front row, a small boy stands, clad in sealskins, cheeks smeared with blubber, eyes wide with awe.

The boy savage, Qarqutsiaq, is 86 now. He favors mirrored sunglasses and neat cotton parkas and lives in Qaanaaq, a settlement at the top of the world that plugs into the global village via helicopter, telephone and satellite television.

“Life is changing,” the rotund old bear hunter told a visitor. “Soon there won’t be any hunters, and the Eskimo will become a white man.”

Contest Not Yet Won

Soon, but not yet. Across the Arctic, among the planet’s northernmost citizens, the contest between prehistory and tomorrow has not yet been won.

In their remote and breathtakingly beautiful land, a place where pearly icebergs the size of cathedrals drift down the horizon, the Polar Eskimos still paddle kayaks and drive dog sleds to the hunt, and harpoon walruses and narwhals for the larder.

Under the summer’s midnight sun, this town of 500 humans and 2,000 dogs echoes to the howl of huskies, the call of the wild. And life is still lived on the edge. Hunters do not always make it home from the ice.

But in Greenland and in a great Arctic ring stretching over northern Europe, through Siberia and into North America, tomorrow is encroaching.

Oil Debate

The U.S. Congress is debating opening up a last Alaskan frontier to oil development. In Canada and on this huge Danish island, Arctic military bases are being upgraded. In the vast and rich Soviet north, railroads and pipelines penetrate the frozen wilds.

Mightier icebreakers, sturdier oil rigs and hungrier economies are pushing back the borders of the impossible.

The natives are being pushed too. Before World War II, they predominated in the Arctic. Now an estimated 9 million immigrant southerners, mostly in the Soviet Union, outnumber natives 10 to 1.

The original northerners include the Nenets, Yakut and other ethnic groups in Siberia; the Lapps in Scandinavia; Indians in North America, and 100,000 Eskimos, who call themselves Inuit (the people). Their settlements cling to icy coasts from easternmost Siberia, to Alaska, to Canada and on to Greenland, where the Polar Eskimo tribe, in the island’s northwest corner, leads the most traditional life.

Between 2 Worlds

Everywhere they live, the Inuit today are caught between two worlds, losing the old ways, not learning the new.

These nomads were originally gathered into settlements to combat epidemic and famine. But two generations later they remain poorly educated and often unemployed. Many have sunk into alcoholism and petty crime. Suicide is common.

Under the influence of southern TV, young Inuit disdain the hunter’s life and even their Inuktitut language. Those who do hunt fear that the prey that fed their fathers will be wiped out by the ships, noise and spills of an Arctic industrial age.

But, though often unschooled, sometimes drunk and occasionally incarcerated, the Inuit are still tough and resourceful. And they are determined to protect Nuna, their land.

“They took the Indians’ land. Now they are trying to take ours,” Aqqaluk Lynge, a Greenland Inuit legislator, told a reporter. “We will never allow it.”

The land is mostly a frigid desert.

In the long, dark winter, temperatures plunge to minus-50 degrees Fahrenheit. In the short summer, despite 24-hour sunshine, the temperature rarely rises above the 40s. And much of the Arctic gets no more precipitation than Arizona, although the snow that does fall stays.

The ground underfoot is frozen as far down as 1,000 feet--a cracked, brown, treeless tundra that forces man to adapt. In Greenland they drill graves with jackhammers.

Few Animals Flourish

At the core of the northern ring stretches the Arctic Ocean, 5 million square miles of black water capped with a white, 10-foot layer of ice in constant movement.

Few animal species flourish in the extreme north: among them seals and whales, caribou and musk oxen, and the half-ton polar bear, the world’s largest meat-eater.

Man, the world’s smartest meat-eater, ventured northward with the retreating Ice Age in Asia 10,000 years ago. Early Inuit crossed over to Alaska 6,000 years ago and reached Greenland 2,000 years later.

Out on the ice, watching the bears, they learned to hunt seals. They taught themselves to hunt the bears and to survive by making the most of very little--fuel from seal fat, tent supports from whale ribs, thread from caribou sinew.

The Inuit became a model of human adaptability. But eventually even weaker men learned to live in the north.

On the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen, travelers today can find a monument to adaptability--the ruins of Smeerenburg, a whaling town where 1,200 Dutchmen, eager to make fortunes on whale oil, lived and worked in the 1630s a mere 800 miles from the North Pole.

Oilmen are now back on inhospitable Spitsbergen, drilling deep into the frozen shores in search of petroleum. Alfred Henningsen, an enthusiastic Norwegian, is one of them.

“This has the potential to be bigger than anything in the North Sea,” said Henningsen, whose Tundra Co. is searching for natural gas on the island’s glacier-bound southern coast.

New Icebreaker

Getting liquefied gas out through the icy sea would be a challenge, he said, but “the Russians are building a new kind of icebreaker. Perhaps we could have year-round shipment through the ice.”

The Soviets are pioneers in Arctic development, driven by a quest for self-sufficiency.

In tapping the gas and oil of frigid northwestern Siberia, they have proved wrong U.S. predictions of the 1970s that they would be importing energy by now.

Siberia holds almost three-quarters of the Soviet Union’s known mineral and fuel resources, and development is moving steadily northward. In the 1990s, Soviet crews are expected to be pumping gas at the edge of the Arctic seas on the forbidding Yamal Peninsula, where winter temperatures drop to minus-70 degrees Fahrenheit.

The mining city of Norilsk typifies the Siberian boom. At a latitude where the biggest North American settlement-- Barrow, Alaska--supports just 2,800 people, almost 300,000 Soviets live in a metropolis of high-rise apartments, vegetable greenhouses and sunroofed playgrounds.

Icebreakers are a key to future development. The Soviets shipped crude oil by tanker along their Arctic coast in 1985, in what analysts believe may be a forerunner of regular northern sea route tanker traffic in the 1990s.

The Finns, who have built many of the Soviets’ 36 icebreakers, now have plans for a 200,000-horsepower super-ship that could batter through nine-foot-thick ice and ensure year-round navigation.

The Canadian government also is planning for all-season shipping. The 102,000-horsepower Polar Eight icebreaker will make year-round navigation possible from such Arctic sites as Polaris, a lead and zinc mine just 900 miles from the North Pole.

The Cominco Corp., now installing the industry’s most advanced computer system to run the 5-year-old Polaris operation, is scheduled to start production within three years at a similar complex in Arctic Alaska, the Red Dog Mine.

Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay now produces 20% of U.S. oil. Geologists estimate that the North American Arctic holds an additional 30 billion barrels of undiscovered, recoverable oil and 300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas--equal to 18 years of current U.S. gas production.

Arctic petroleum exploration has slowed because world oil prices are relatively low. But prices and energy needs are bound to rise, specialists say. Gulf Canada has already resumed exploration in the Beaufort Sea off Canada’s Arctic coast.

The energy giants are confident enough to be lobbying the U.S. Congress to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploitation. A major battle between environmentalists and industrialists is taking shape, since the land, on Alaska’s Inuit-populated Arctic coast, is an important caribou calving ground.

Joint Venture Urged

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev says that Arctic development should be a joint venture.

He recently called for Western cooperation in tapping Siberia’s energy wealth and said that Soviet icebreakers might open the northern sea route to Western shipping. He also proposed scaling back the East-West strategic buildup in the region.

But increasingly, the Age of the Arctic has a military side.

The Soviet Union’s Kola Peninsula has become an Arctic fortress of naval installations. Ice-covered northern seas are now important hiding places for Soviet and American missile submarines. The United States and Canada are expanding the North Warning System radar network, and the U.S. radar base in Thule, Greenland, has been upgraded.

Cultures Drowning

All this development, economic and military, can have a profound effect.

Although outsiders seldom get a close look at the northern Soviet natives, specialists believe the flood of immigrants from the south is drowning northern cultures. Canadian government analyst John Hannigan reported after a Siberian visit last year that minority children were losing their ancestral languages.

In Scandinavia, generations of southern immigrants have largely erased the Lapps as a distinct population. In the latest blow, radioactive fallout from last year’s Chernobyl nuclear disaster contaminated thousands of reindeer, threatening the last link Lapp herders have to tradition.

The Inuit, all across their homeland of boundless ice, are torn between a need for jobs and a yearning to follow their ancestors--to turn back the invasion.

In 1983, the Greenland Inuit helped block a Canadian plan to ship liquefied gas from the Arctic islands via icebreaker supertanker, an operation that might have driven off the narwhals, walruses and other quarry the Inuit have hunted in Baffin Bay for centuries.

Across the 250-mile-wide bay, in Canada, the Inuit of Pond Inlet also fought the gas project. But in that tiny settlement of 800 Inuit, set among the steep-sided fiords of Baffin Island, the people are clearly troubled.

“Hunting for narwhal is important for us,” Mayor Elijah Nashook told a visitor. “But jobs are important too.”

Pond Inlet perches between the rocky edge of North America and the gleaming ice of Eclipse Sound--and between the old and new.

‘Muktuk’ and Madonna

At the Hudson’s Bay Store, the sons and daughters of northern nomads can buy frozen pizzas and Madonna tapes. But they also still wear sealskin boots, retreat by snowmobile to family hunting camps and relish muktuk , a blubber-and-skin delicacy from the single-tusked narwhal and other whales.

The Canadian government gathered the Inuit into settlements in the 1950s, moving them into box-like wooden homes with central heating, electricity and indoor toilets. Only the old-timers now remember how to build a snow igloo.

Widespread starvation was ended, tuberculosis was controlled and schools were built. But living is far from the southern standard.

The government housing is perennially short. A Northwest Territories legislative investigation found as many as 11 people living in leaky two-bedroom bungalows.

Inuit health, though dramatically improved, remains relatively poor. Inuit infants die at five times the rate of infants in the rest of Canada. The nearest doctor is 662 miles from Pond Inlet.

Per-capita income in Pond Inlet is half the Canadian average of $6,300 U.S. dollars, and the cost of living is twice as high. A quart of milk is $2.75, and 10 hot dogs cost $3.20 at the Hudson’s Bay.

Introduced to the white man’s ways, the Inuit must depend on the white man’s generosity to pay for it. Two-thirds of them receive social assistance payments.

Canadian Inuit hunters once earned $700,000 a year selling the skins of adult ringed seals. But because of conservationist concern over the slaughter of baby harp seals in Newfoundland, the market for all sealskin garments has collapsed.

Wage-paying jobs are scarce. When the territorial government sought 10 men for last summer’s house-building project in Pond Inlet, 200 applied--almost all the able-bodied men in town.

Just a generation away from a life in which they hunted for 72 hours at a stretch and rested for 72 more, the Inuit have not taken to the 9-to-5 routine. The Polaris Mine opened in 1982 with 70 Inuit among the 250 workers, but the number of Inuit has dwindled to 20.

In Pond Inlet, Joatamie Kilukishak, 24, said he quit his job at the Nanisivik lead/zinc mine, 150 miles to the west, to go hunting this spring with his father, Gamailie.

The elder Kilukishak, born in a sealskin tent 55 years ago, unhappily traces the upheaval in Inuit life to the building of the Pond Inlet school in the 1960s.

High Dropout Rate

“The white man freezes to death in the Arctic if he is alone,” Gamailie said, his half-swallowed Inuktitut words translated by Joatamie. “Since the school arrived, there are some Inuit who have frozen too because they didn’t learn the Inuit way of life.”

Alice Panipakoocho, the Pond Inlet social worker, said that many Inuit schoolchildren drop out at age 13 or 14 “because their parents don’t support their education, and they don’t want them to go away to school.”

Last year in the Baffin region, home to 8,000 Inuit, only 13 were graduated from the regional high school in Iqaluit, a bleak town at Baffin Island’s southern end.

“They don’t know how to hunt, and they’re not educated to work,” Panipakoocho said. “They do nothing. They’re mixed up.”

“They don’t even know how to cut up a caribou,” young hunter Eric Idlout said disparagingly of his fellow Pond Inlet teen-agers.

Even in the old days, Inuit were often driven to despair by the dark, harsh Arctic winters. Now that they must also cope with a white man’s world, the idle and aimless men, young and old, drift into alcoholism, drug use, theft, wife-beating and suicide.

The problems are driving Inuit back to the land. The population of outpost camps in the Baffin region, secluded spots where families return to the traditional hunting life, has doubled to 330 in the last 10 years, regional officials say.

At the Baffin Correctional Center in Iqaluit, inmate Noah Kopalie, 24, told a reporter he had been caught “carrying a little dope,” but his real problem was drinking.

“My parents now have gone to live in an outpost camp,” he said. “They did it just to save the whole family. They had a drinking problem too.”

Inuit are struggling to take control of their lives.

At the Iqaluit Jail, young prisoners are periodically taken out “on the land,” given rifles and taught traditional hunting techniques.

Up in Pond Inlet, a community panel now must approve each purchase of liquor. Other settlements have imposed total prohibition. And the Pond Inlet school has begun teaching 10th grade, allowing Inuit teen-agers to stay with their families one extra year before deciding whether to journey to Iqaluit to high school.

Political Gains

The Inuit have made political gains too.

In 1971, Alaska’s natives received $963 million from the U.S. government in a historic land-claims settlement. Greenland, whose population of 50,000 is four-fifths Inuit, won limited self-rule from Denmark in 1979.

Canada’s Inuit also have a dream of self-rule. They want to turn the tundra, 750,000 square miles of the Northwest Territories, into their own semi-autonomous territory within Canada, to be called Nunavut (our land). It would take away much of the control distant white bureaucrats have over land, education, language and the use of public revenues.

“We don’t want people . . . telling us what to do. We want to do it ourselves,” reads the bluntly worded manifesto of their 1985 constitutional conference.

But the negotiations for Nunavut have stalled. And whatever their gains, Inuit leaders admit that they are too weak to stop the southern encroachment.

A taciturn, poorly organized people, they took a bold step in 1977, establishing the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which brought the Inuit of Alaska, Canada and Greenland together into one political body.

The ICC’s new “Draft Principles for an Arctic Policy” proclaims the Inuit’s right to protect the Arctic environment and their own culture. “Northern development must refer to more than economic growth,” the document states.

But the ICC’s Canadian president, Mary Simon, sounds frustrated.

“As more and more development takes place without our involvement, our options become more and more limited,” she said. “Unless drastic changes are made, we won’t have any say--a people who occupy a vast part of the world.”

Here in remote Qaanaaq, the Polar Eskimos create their own options.

A local hunter and community leader, Ussarqak Qujaukitsoq, took a visitor out into the great Inglefield Fiord for a sample of the hunting life his people still pursue.

Ussarqak, in polar-bearskin pants and sealskin boots, bellowed the age-old command “Huk! Huk!” --”Go! Go!”--and his team of nine huskies, high-strung and hungry, lurched out onto the ice. The 12-foot wooden sled glided over the frozen glitter of the sea, through puddles, over cracks and around ice-locked icebergs. Ussarqak’s quick eyes scanned the horizon for black dots--seals.

‘Hunting Is My Life’

Later, as the dogs rested and he made coffee atop the four-foot-thick sea ice, Ussarqak spoke, in halting English, of Inuit life.

“I like this, looking for animals,” the 39-year-old hunter told his companion. “Hunting is my life. Animals are our life. I think it will stay this way.”

He explained that the 1,000 Polar Eskimos scattered around Inglefield Fiord have adopted their own rules: no snowmobiles, limited use of motorboats in hunting, and narwhals and walruses must be hunted with harpoons.

Motorized hunters with high-powered guns would mean that “there would not be walruses and narwhals for all the days,” Ussarqak said.

This middle-aged hunter is himself poised between old and new, between spirits and semiconductors. He has a 72-year-old father who assures visitors that he once saw angels in the air, and he has teen-age sons who play computer games.

In the 1950s, after living among the Polar Eskimos for 14 months, French ethnologist Jean Malaurie concluded, “Their way of life . . . is doomed.”

But they have endured and, as always, they are adapting.

In Alaska the Inuit now use satellite photos of ice patterns to plan their bowhead whale hunt. Here in Greenland, they called on U.S. Air Force planes to transport musk oxen from the east to a new habitat in the northwest.

“In 12 years, we can begin hunting the musk oxen,” said Ussarqak, as sure-handed in foreseeing the 21st Century as he is in skinning a bear. “The musk oxen have a very good future here.”

The outer ice was breaking up that day. The trip was cut short--no seals for the dogs and the larder. But Ussarqak kept his hunter’s optimism.

“Now is the time for the narwhal to come into the fiord,” he said. And he could already taste the muktuk.