The Last Speaker of Bear: My Encounters in the North by Lawrence Millman

Author:Lawrence Millman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trinity University Press

MAKING CONTACT

During the 1980s, I made several visits to Angmagssalik (now Tasiilaq), East Greenland, to collect ethnographic lore from the locals. At one point I asked a hunter if he’d ever encountered any Erqigdlit, a race of doglike people who reputedly lived on or near the Greenland ice cap. Might they be dying out now that the ice cap was melting? I wondered.

The man said he’d never met any Erqigdlit, but he had once gone hunting on a fjord just north of Skjoldungen and found a recently abandoned campsite that had tent rings, discarded skins, and a rock that seemed to be shaped for flensing. This, to him, indicated a group of people still living like their ancestors.

Another local said he’d been to the same place and found a map carved from driftwood that looked exactly like the maps his people carved before the arrival of Europeans.

Why do you think that it was a map and not simply a much-damaged piece of driftwood? I asked him.

“Because it showed an exact outline of the fjord where I found it,” he said.

Suddenly a lightbulb went on in my mind. An uncontacted group of people living on a remote fjord in southeast Greenland! I decided I would travel down there and try to locate them myself. In the brightness of that same lightbulb, I had an image of a rough-hewn hunter-gatherer staring at me, a visitor from a different era, as if I came from outer space.

I mentioned the prospect of uncontacted Greenlanders to a Danish friend in Angmagssalik. He was no less excited than I. He said the two of us could travel down to the fjords north of Skjoldungen in his motorized fishing boat and search for what he called “these Stone Agers.” The media, he added, would be really excited if we found them.

Upon hearing the word “media,” I began to have my doubts. These doubts increased when I found myself talking again with the man who’d told me about the driftwood map. “Those unknown people, you must leave them alone,” he said. “Let them live or starve, as they choose. Attuniannaguk! Please don’t touch them!”

I now found myself with cold feet. Not the sort of cold feet that a person with the wrong footwear might get in these parts, but a feeling that it wouldn’t be a good idea to contact the “unknown” people. To quote zoologist Konrad Lorenz: “To kill a culture, it is often sufficient to bring it into contact with another culture, particularly if the latter is higher … or at least regarded as higher.”

In addition to the killing of cultures, contact can literally kill the people in remote cultures. For example, the Sadlermiut in the Canadian Arctic were a more or less uncontacted group of Inuit who were visited by a British whaling ship in 1902. One of the whalers had a case of influenza or perhaps typhoid fever, and he passed on the disease to the Sadlermiut. Only one woman and four children survived this “contact.

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