Crow Never Dies by Larry Frolick

Author:Larry Frolick [Larry Frolick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781772121445
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press

James Itsi at work in his salmon smokehouse in Old Crow, YT.

THERE ARE THREE basic knife forms traditionally made by local craftsmen in the Arctic: the curved woman’s knife or ulu; the men’s all-purpose hunting knife, called the pilut by the Inuit of the Eastern Arctic; and the large snow knife or pana used exclusively by the Inuit. Owing to increased communication by air travel, there has been an ongoing cross-cultural transmission across the north of these different forms, along with the arcane knowledge of their manufacture since the Second World War.

Dwayne DeBastien, a Gwich’in from Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories, recalls learning how to cut an ulu from an old saw blade in his Grade 2 shop class back in the 1970s: “I really liked making ulus. Our teacher showed us how. I made a lot of them when I was seven or eight and gave them away to family members.”

A forest-dwelling people, the Gwich’in historically did not use ulus as they had more pressing needs for axes and fish-gutting knives. But today some families find them highly useful in the kitchen for chopping meat and vegetables. The Inuit use six or seven types, including the basic kitchen ulu, which is about nine centimetres wide; the smaller hunting ulu; the little, four-centimetre, “personal ulu,” for shaving and eating; the snow ulu; and the larger sealskin-scraping ulu. Within these basic functions lie hundreds of regional and individual variations.

As master ulu-maker Anthony Manernaluk of Rankin Inlet in the Eastern Arctic says, everyone has a personal preference for things they use every day, and he obliges them with his custom designs. “My ulus are all over the world now. People phone me up at home and ask, ‘Are you the ulu-maker?’ I say yes, and they ask me to make them ulu as they like. I don’t even know these people who buy my knives.”

Anthony was born on Baffin Island in 1936, in a remote Inuit community of eleven people, including a fur trader. “No candy, no pop. Just tea and flour.” At seventy-six he is still going strong, smiling frequently and showing off a full set of teeth as he switches adeptly from English to Inuktitut, depending on his audience. His well-organized work table holds a dozen ulu blade patterns cut from cereal cardboard; a vise; a grinder; a half-dozen handmade chisels, files, and rubber mallets; and sheets of stainless steel. He studies the leftover bits of sheets, frugally working out how to get the maximum number of blades on order from his remaining stock. He also economically shuts his lamp off whenever he takes a blade outside to polish, saying that he can properly see what he is doing only in full sun: “Work is best in daylight.”

The first job is to assign the right blade to the right person. As he surveys his stock of patterns, he tells a story about hunting:

You have to get up before the day begins and go out, straight out to where the caribou are waiting.

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