Remote Work

In September 1921, the ethnographer Knud Rasmussen left Nuuk, Greenland, and sailed west across the Davis and Hudson Straits aboard the Søkongen. He and six Inughuit (Inuit from the island’s northwest), four Danes, and one Kalaaleq (West Greenlander) made up the Fifth Thule Expedition, out to prove that Inuit had come from inland and later developed a marine culture. They failed to confirm their theory, as the historian Kenn Harper explains in Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs, but that’s not why Rasmussen and his outing are remembered.

Born in 1879 in Jakobshavn (the western Greenland community now known as Ilulissat), Rasmussen grew up driving dogsleds, speaking Kalaallisut, and adoring stories about elders. When he was twelve, his parents sent him to school in Denmark. Eleven years later, he travelled to the northwest of Greenland, where he first encountered Inughuit. He returned twice, in 1909 and 1910, to establish a mission and then the Thule trading post, which bears the name of Inuit ancestors. From there, he organized seven trips — his Thule Expeditions — to document traditional ways of life. The first four took place around Greenland between 1912 and 1919. All the while, “he held fast to a dream — to visit the most isolated Inuit in North America and document their beliefs and experiences before their lives were irrevocably changed by an influx of missionaries, traders, and adventurers.”

On the Fifth Thule Expedition, Rasmussen realized that ambition. Both separately and together, he and his crew of eleven ventured out from their base on Danish Island, near present-day Naujaat. They journeyed south to Chesterfield Inlet and Baker Lake, north toward Pond Inlet and Iglulik, and west through Bathurst Inlet and Kent Peninsula, collecting legends, stories, and geological samples. But it took two months before Rasmussen encountered any Inuit in Canada: hunters returning to camp from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trading post in Naujaat. By his account, he was so enthralled “with the excitement natural to a first meeting with human beings in these wilds,” that he leapt from a moving dogsled to embrace a stranger. Amiimiarjuk, one of the hunters, later recalled, “Distrustful, the men of our group had prepared themselves for any eventuality. But lo and behold they weren’t dangerous people at all.”

The ethnographer did have a knack for making friends, the most consequential being Aua, a shaman from Itijjariaq. Once, when pressed to explain certain Inuit taboos, the exasperated elder took Rasmussen out into a storm. “In order to hunt well and live happily, man must have calm weather. Why this constant succession of blizzards and all this needless hardship for men seeking food for themselves and those they care for? Why?” When his new friend had no answer, Aua said, “You are equally unable to give any reason when we ask you why life is as it is.”

In the spring of 1922, Rasmussen left Aua to venture inland —“the main focus of his expedition.” But he cut the trip short, returning to headquarters in August for some unknown reason. (Harper suggests that starvation may have been why, since Rasmussen noted the “careless mind and great capacity for resignation” of Inuit he encountered and because the outing occurred during a famine.) Meanwhile, two others, the archeologist Therkel Mathiassen and the explorer Peter Freuchen, headed to Baffin Island. There they unintentionally became the first outsiders to document the adoption of Christianity by Inuit of Melville Peninsula. The Danes knew if a camp’s inhabitants had converted, because they would sing hymns for visitors and shake hands. Even the dogs wore wooden crucifixes. Umik, a “liberal” prophet originally from Pond Inlet, had introduced to the area “a version of Christianity” that restricted work on Sundays but permitted polygamy.

The Fifth Thule Expedition left its base in March 1923; Rasmussen then spent some fifteen months mushing 6,000 kilometres west to Alaska and sailing to Siberia, where the Soviets promptly turned him around. The entire journey lives on in a 5,500-page report, which contains songs and lessons not recorded elsewhere. Harper argues the group’s work “should rightly be regarded as salvage ethnography, documenting some aspects of Inuit traditional culture at the last possible moment.” This material is at the centre of Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs — just as Rasmussen, who died in 1933 after contracting pneumonia on the Seventh Thule Expedition, would have wanted.

In Give Me My Father’s Body, from 1986, Harper notes that the American explorer Robert Peary considered Inuit he lived among and relied upon during his eight Arctic expeditions to be inferior. “They are too far removed to be of any value for commercial enterprises; and, furthermore, they lack ambition,” Peary once wrote. Except he did find a commercial purpose for them in 1897, when he took six Greenland Inuit to New York to be gawked at on a ship, for twenty-five cents per visit, and studied by the American Museum of Natural History.

Peary pops up a handful of times in Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs, though Rasmussen and his near contemporary are far from comparable. Indeed, Rasmussen is almost the antithesis of an explorer like Peary. He vowed to travel by dogsled and to meet Inuit “as comrades.” He befriended Inughuit so that, as the Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup put it, “the Polar Eskimos were no longer being studied but studying with him.” Rasmussen once said that “it is the Eskimos that own my heart,” and in the introduction to Across Arctic America, from 1927, he wrote that “the Eskimo is the hero of this book.”

In that same book, Rasmussen made a foreboding prediction: “Before many years are past, their religion will be extinct, and the white man will have conquered all, the country and its people; their thoughts, their visions and their faith.” It’s difficult, Harper writes, to comprehend that someone so committed to Inuit culture would also advise the Canadian government, as Rasmussen did, to “give the primitive people, in their minds and character, a death which is as merciful and gentle as possible.” Indeed, Harper says, Rasmussen believed that carefully bringing development and outsiders to the Inuit homelands would mean a brighter and more affluent future for those whose lives, like Umik’s and Aua’s, were already changing.