Maps are misleading. Few people should be more aware of that than me, but still, when it comes to the Arctic, I make some rookie mistakes. In my mind, Baffin Island is as far north as people (at least, people who aren't researchers, meteorologists, or military personnel) live - because if you look at any of our common map projections, the Qikiqtani (Baffin) Region looks like it's the furthest "up". Victoria Island, on the other hand, looks like it's "lower". Illusion? Yep, because we center our small scale maps on the middle of North America - so the Arctic Circle is actually "lower" - ie. further towards the bottom of the page - in the central part.
Holman is in the southwest part of Victoria Island, and my map impression notwithstanding, it lies at almost 71 degrees north. That makes it 925 km north of Yellowknife. Which, by the way, makes it a rather chilly place to visit in early April. How far north it really is wasn't the only thing I hadn't really processed.
Holman is pretty. Really pretty. There are these gorgeous bluffs around it and the community is built in a crescent around a bay, including out onto a pensinsula - the Diamond Jenness Peninsula, which juts out into Amundsen Gulf. In Innuinaqtun, Holman's name is Uluqsaqtuuq, which apparently means "where there is copper" - I of course think it also has something to do with the Ulu (the traditional woman's knife) - maybe where there is material for making Ulu, and Ulu here was made of copper? After all, this is the area of the Copper Inuit. I dunno...
They're the Copper Inuit, but we're in Inuvialuit here. Tiny little geography lesson: Canadian Inuit can be found in four land claim regions: Inuvialuit, Nunavut, Nunavik, and Labrador. All but Nunavut are part of larger provincial/territorial administrative units, but with a substantial degree of self-government - so Inuvialuit administration is centred on Inuvik, but the entire region is within the Northwest Territories. "Inuvialuit" translates to "real people" (as opposed to "Inuit", which is just "people"). The finer distinctions of this are lost on me - but I do know that you refer to someone as Inuvialuit, not Inuit, in these parts.
Inuvialiuit, like Inuit, did not historically live in villages. Throughout the Canadian Arctic, you can find towns dating to as early as the 1920s - but really, these were just trading posts with maybe RCMP stations and missions. Settlement in towns did not occur until the 1950s and 1960s, at the instigation of the federal government for purposes of schooling and health care (of course, resettlement was not exactly voluntary). In some cases, such as at Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, the people who were settled in the towns were not even from the surrounding area, and in many cases people were re-located to other parts of the Arctic even if there was a village close to where they were. It's complicated. The people in Holman traditionally come from the west side of Victoria Island - Minto Inlet, Prince Albert Sound, Read Island. Of course, there is substantial movement - often through marriage - from other Inuvialuit and Inuit communities, especially the other Copper Inuit villages of Kugluktuk and Cambridge Bay. However, there is also a presence of Inuvialuit from further west, which introduces another dialect to the community.
At this time of year (early spring), the community hosts a series of "sport hunters" - big game hunters, primarily American, who buy one one of the community's allocated polar bear or muskox tags along with an outfitting package and travel to the Arctic to hunt. In Inuvialuit, you must have a dog team with you to shoot a polar bear, and there are five teams in the town - but this seems a bit gimmicky, since many hunting parties simply load the dogs into the komatik and pull them out with snowmobiles, treating the dogs (like the sporthunter) as so much cargo to be hauled over the sea ice. In this way, though, the hunting trips are not very long: the polar bear hunters were back with their two bears in three days, the musk-ox hunters were gone for only one night. It's a lot of money (well over $20,000) for a night's entertainment, but the sport hunter also gets the hide of the beast along with the appropriate export permit. This is particularly important for Americans, since their own import regulations do not allow a polar bear fur to come in unless it was shot by the person importing it himself, from a designated (by the Americans) geographical area, with all the matching documentation. Which is a roundabout way of saying that the U.S. government does not trust Canadian resource management and conservation strategies. I'll let you reflect on the irony of that one yourself (ANWR?).
Even though it was (to my southern bones) bitterly cold, I went for a few walks. I was pretty fascinated with the snow: you can walk on it, even stuff that has only recently fallen. Though, of course, the snow that fell while I was there was accompanied by 60-80km/hr winds - making my glasses ice up right away, and my face mask come in handy - so I can sort of see why the drifts are so hard. Snow like that, it's easy to cut into blocks with a snow knife. And the schoolkids had had an igloo-building session with some of the elders through school the week before. Ok, so it's not the greatest igloo ever, but... they're in primary school!
The tundra is even more starkly beautiful than in the summer, if such a thing is possible. It amazes me, that animals can live on the few grasses there are, and yet there are herds of musk-ox, arctic hares, wolves, foxes, caribou... I went out with Mel and Winnie on snowmobiles, and Winnie, when she wasn't flying over the tundra, lake ice and sea ice to catch air, found musk-ox tracks. We didn't see the beasts, though.
They took us out to their camp, which was a cabin plus a fish drying rack and a spot where Winnie sets up her tent in the summer. It's right on the shores of Amundsen Gulf, but there are lots of lakes too. We looked at both lake ice and sea ice - the lake ice was like glass, clear, and 8-9 feet thick (I was told). If I'd dusted off the bit of snow on it, I'm pretty sure I could have skated on it. The sea ice, on the other hand, is an eerie aquamarine colour, and has lots of pressure ridges. Around points and further out, toward Coronation Gulf, it gets really rough (something the people riding in sleds behind snowmobiles could no doubt tell you about).
I wasn't there for very long - but long enough to remember why I'm fascinated with the Arctic in the first place. I think it's a beautiful place to be, but not an easy place. The not easy doesn't just apply to the harsh physical environment, but to the whole thing: the isolation, the lack of services, all the problems of northern resource-based towns, the balancing of traditional and southern ways... I think, though, that all of the challenges together contribute to how compelling the place is. Maybe. I haven't really wrapped my head around it yet, even though this was my third visit to the far north and I've had plenty of time to mull it over.
But not right now... a few days ago, I was at 71 degrees north. In two days, I will fly to 33 degrees south, to come face to face with another map misconception: Chile is east of Toronto. Santiago is nine degrees closer to the prime meridian than I am right now. Why did I always think it would be closer to LA than Miami?