The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic

245 Pages·2007·1.29 MB·English

by  Melanie McGrath

Praise for Melanie McGrath's
THE LONG EXILE
“Vivid. … Through ambitious research and interviews with survivors, McGrath
acquaints the reader with this horrific, but important, social history.”
—The Providence Journal
“McGrath is a gifted, passionate and sensitive storyteller, and through her the authentic
voice of the Arctic … rings loud and clear…. Fresh, illuminating and heartbreaking.”
—The Sunday Telegraph (London)
“Adroit, informed storytelling.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Meticulously researchedMcGrath lived among the Inuit for a timethis is an engaging
and poignant read.”
—New Scientist
“McGrath … has a wonderful feel for landscape and so the Arctic itself assumes the life
of a character…. The language is lovely. Modulated, lyrical and beautiful as the stark
nature it describes, it makes McGrath's book more than a fascinating and instructive
read. It makes it a joyful one.”
—Evening Standard (London)
“Biting cold jumps off of these pages.”
—The Flint Journal
T L E
Melanie McGrath HE ONG XILE
Melanie McGrath's first book, Motel Nirvana, won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. Her
third book, Silvertown, was shortlisted 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.
ALSO BY MELANIE MCGRATH
Motel Nirvana
Hard, Soft & Wet
Silvertown

An Eskimo lives with menace, it is always ahead of him, over the next white ridge.
—ROBERT FLAHERTY

PREFACE
THERE HAVE BEEN many books written about the Arctic, mostly tales of explorers and
derring-do. This book isn't one of those. It is rather the story of a movie and the legacy
left behind by its maker. The film is Nanook of the North, which has been described by
filmmakers as diverse as Orson Welles and John Huston as one of the greatest pictures
ever made. Its Irish-American director, Robert Flaherty, arrived in the small settlement
of Inukjuak on the east coast of the Hudson Bay in 1920 to make it. He filmed it in a
year, but was haunted by it for the rest of his life. The movie's success helped colour the
Western view of Inuit life in the Arctic for generations. It does so today. Flaherty never
returned to the Arctic, but he left a son there, who grew up Inuit. More than thirty years
later, a group of Inuit men and women were removed from Inukjuak by the Canadian
government and taken hundreds of miles north to the uninhabited High Arctic. Among
them was Robert Flaherty's son. This book is as much about Josephie Flaherty and his
family as it is about his father's movie.
It is often said that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow. While this is true it
doesn't tell the whole story. The Inuit do have many words to describe snow, but they
also differentiate between various kinds of snow those of us who don't live in the Arctic
would see as being essentially the same. It's not so much that the Inuit have dozens of
words for snow, as that, in the Inuit world, there are dozens of different kinds of snow.
There are also emotional differences in the way Westerners and Inuit view the world.
Until very recently, emotions like envy or sexual possessiveness were so perilous to the
equilibrium of the Inuit living as they did in family groups, often separated from each
other by thousands of square miles of ice and tundrathat they were vigorously
discouraged. There was a time when expressing rage, lust or ambition was considered so
threatening to the group's survival that persistent offenders were ostracised from the
community and sent to their deaths on the tundra; some were even killed outright, often
by their own families. For thousands of years, these threatening emotional traits were
suppressed to such a degree that they were rarely felt among the majority. Other, more
helpful traits crept in to take their place: modesty, patience, acceptance of group
decisions and a sense of being not just bound to the group, but being an integral part of
it, a vital organ in the family body. These are more common and more valued character
traits among Inuit even today than they are among people living in large cities in the
West.
Although it regularly occurs, we are not necessarily aware of a similar process of
emotional editing taking place in our own lives. It's not hard to recall feelings those of
us living urban lives have allowed to wither: a wonder and respect for nature, a feeling
of being at one with the land, an inexorable identification with home and family, a
sense of belonging. We may regret the passing of these feelings; indeed, if our appetites
for nostalgia are anything to go by, we certainly do, but few of us would want to go
back and live as our great-great grandfathers and grandmothers lived; nor must we in
order to feel respect, even awe, for what our ancestors endured and the kind of people
they were.
It is easy to feel disconnected from human beings to whom we are neither related by
blood nor fate and with whom we share few cultural connections; people whose range
of emotional expression and personalities may feel very different from our own or from
anyone we know.
And so, when you read this story, bear this in mind: however many kinds of snow
there are and however many words for them, they all, in the end, melt down to water.