The Walrus Arctic Dialogues: a series of conversations on board the Lyubov Orlova, crossing to Greenland

First Dialogue: John Huston, culturalist and filmmaker—son of Arctic curators the late James and Alma Houston, John was a child at Cape Dorset, Baffin Island. He has made numerous award-winning documentaries about Inuit culture and is fluent in Inuktitut.

MBF: What’s the best thing that has happened in the Arctic in the past twenty years?

JH: The creation of Nunavut in 1999, not for what it has already brought but for what it promises—a greater measure of self determination for Inuit, and self-esteem.

MBF: Why do you mention self-esteem…

JH: Because self-esteem fights suicide. Self-esteem can stop the erosion of a great culture.

MBF: What’s the worst thing?

JH: So many elders going to their graves without leaving their legacy, something recorded so that it can be promoted and preserved. I don’t mean just archived; I mean that the ideas that they have been hosts to should be made available, so that they can continue to live and move. Then they can be preserved, so that content is not lost, but preservation is the secondary thing.

MBF: What would you most like to see happen over the next twenty years?

JH: My Arctica 20/20 project. A virtual Arctic,  a learning environment, with great depth. So…streaming video clips,  which are first-hand testimonies of elders. Not what I call “elder lite” which you see now—a poem here, a snippet of a story there—but really rich primary resource material. And then also technical and scientific papers from…let’s say forty years ago, made available for researchers. Like the stacks in a library, but also a very alluring, beautiful site.

MBF: Yesterday at Pond Inlet, we heard an elder,  Martha, talking about her life, answering questions through a (superb) translator in a building resembling a sod house.

JH: Yes, I thought that was wonderful,  she was so forthcoming. When my group was there she said how happy she was to share her stories.

MBF: And such an intimate setting, with the seal oil lamp lit, and a kettle hung above it. And Martha sat so straight, hands folded in her lap…[She wore a head scarf, a traditional dress and boots, and large glasses.] Did you happen to notice the old mantel clock on the shelf above her head, with the stopped hands?

JH: Yes. One of the subjects I’m working on right now is the Inuit idea of time and space, how the flow of time has changed, how space is organized differently.

MBF: When I was there, someone asked her about changes in the weather over time. She said there were many, but one important thing is that because spring comes so much earlier, and the air is already warm, even in March I think she said, the sealskin [for clothing] doesn’t have time to dry properly, it dries too quickly. So it never gets that pure, almost blinding white colour that it should be.

JH: That’s a perfect example, in really organic terms, of how time moves differently, and what it means to daily life.

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Posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 10:59 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.