Bloody Falls of the Coppermine by Mckay Jenkins

Author:Mckay Jenkins [Jenkins,McKay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307430724
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

As in all great narratives, history, geography, personal adventure and mysteries intertwine. There are misadventures, murder, and starvation, to be sure, but spiritual powers and every kind of humor mean that even the worst is part of being in the best possible place, in one’s own land.

—HUGH BRODY, The Other Side of Eden

WITH SINNISIAK AND ULUKSUK IN CUSTODY IN EDMONTON, and Koeha, Ilavinik, and Patsy Klengenberg free to wander the city’s streets, the regional press had plenty of opportunities to observe these strange men at close hand. A reporter for the Calgary Daily Herald remarked on “these representatives of a pre-historic race” who were “clothed in their native habiliments of cariboo skin trimmed with rabbit skin.”1

To the Eskimos, the city hosting the trial was unfathomably large. The seventeen-year-old Patsy said he had never dreamed that so many people could exist in one place. Where did they hunt enough food to feed all these people? Indeed, two days after they arrived, the Edmonton Morning Bulletin boasted in a headline that the local phone book now had eleven thousand names—fully six hundred more than the year before. Another front-page article quoted a local professor extolling the benefits of graded “earth roads,” made of clay mixed with ash and sand, which, he argued, would cost $150 per mile to build and $30 per year to maintain.2

The prisoners told their captors they were amazed by the white man’s technology. Police officers took them one day to see a “moving picture.” Another day, Ilavinik was taken to see a ballet at the Pantages Theater. Reporters focused their attention not on the performance but on the Eskimo’s reaction to it. Ilavinik “evinced a lively pleasure in the performance until the ballet came on, upon which he modestly put his head down on his arms,” one paper reported, “the sight of the naked limbs of the damsels offending his ideas of what a Christian Eskimo ought to look upon. Whether he did the Peeping Tom act or not can only be conjectured.”

Denny LaNauze, who by now was all of twenty-eight years old, could not help but notice the precipitous drop in the self-confidence of his charges. These were people who could survive months of thirty-below weather on little more than seal meat, and here they were in an urban center, surrounded by extravagant amounts of food and shelter, and they were virtually helpless. “It was almost pathetic how they would stick to the patrol as if it was their only connecting link between their past and present life,” he wrote. “Their confidence in us was childish; in us who had brought them so far on our stern errand of justice.”3

AS THE CITY prepared for the trial, newspaper reporters scoured the city looking for “experts” to help make sense of the Eskimos. “Death Is Only Penalty Eskimo Knows; Most Primitive of Races,” ran one headline. A man named William Thompson, credited as an author, traveler, and famous ethnologist, offered this: “More primitive than any race of people

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