Melanie McGrath - The Long Exile - A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic

Word spread and soon people from all over the city were flocking to the Capitol Theatre. Pathé hastily expanded its distribution and, before long, Nanook was playing in theatres as far away as Tennessee and Nebraska. By September 1922, three months after its first release, Flaherty's ‘adventure picture’ had crossed the Pond and was playing to sellout audiences at the new Gallery Kinema in London and at the Gaumont Theatre in Paris. From there it went on to Bangkok, Peking and Moscow, picking up ecstatic audiences everywhere. Nanook was fast becoming a huge, global hit. Confectionery manufacturers began turning out ice creams with Alakariallak's face printed on the wrappers and, before long, he was unwittingly advertising everything from chocolate bars to cleaning fluid. In Los Angeles, a three-man team of songwriters whipped up a popular song about him, with a chorus which began ‘Ever-loving Nanook/Though you don't read a book/But oh, how you can love/And thrill me like the twinkling northern lights above …’ Thousands of miles away, in Malaysia, Nanook entered the language. Even now nanuk in Malaysian means a strong man.

And so Alakariallak and Maggie gradually became famous. But it was an odd kind of fame because neither Alakariallak nor Maggie knew anything about it. What little mail reached Inukjuak came once a year on the annual visit of the Hudson Bay Company supply ship and almost all of that was for the post trader. The Inukjuamiut rarely received any news from outside Cape Dufferin, and when they did, it was often so garbled that it made little sense to them. Eventually they heard that Nanook of the North had opened in New York City and that it had gone on to England, France, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand and China, but all these were places they knew nothing about and had a hard time imagining. Even their own country, Canada, seemed so remote to them as to be the stuff of dreams, or, rather, of nightmares, since they knew it principally as the place in the south to where Inuit people were sometimes transported when they were ill and from where, generally speaking, they never returned.

Four years after the film's first showing, Robert Flaherty's charming, violent depiction of the lives of Alakariallak and Maggie Nujarluktuk in the Barrenlands had grossed US$251,000, five times its initial cost, and Robert Flaherty had become a household name. He was taken out to fancy dinners and asked to speak at meetings and conventions. Louis B. Mayer called, as did Irving Thalberg and an assortment of other producers, agents and managers. Everyone wanted the same thing. Another Nanook .

Flaherty took his new-found fame in his stride. He was already 38 years old and from a very early age he had marked himself out as having some special place in the world. Now others were simply confirming his opinion. After ten years in the Arctic he felt he had earned his reputation.

Of the legacy he had left there, he knew very little. News of Inukjuak reached him only rarely. When he left, Maggie Nujarluktuk had been five months pregnant so Robert could not have been in any doubt about her condition, but sex was different up on Cape Dufferin and it was custom, sometimes, for a woman to sleep with more than one man. Flaherty may well have told himself that the child was not his. And if it was his, well, then, he may have thought that his wilderness baby was best left up in the Barrenlands.

If he did think of his bright-eyed, smiling Inuit girl from time to time, if his heart occasionally hollowed for her, then he kept the feeling to himself. In any case, he was not given to introspection. The plain fact of the matter was that he already had a wife and daughters back home and they were where his heart ultimately lay.

Alakariallak continued to hunt and Maggie Nujarluktuk took care of her baby. The winter of 1923 was brutal. Sea currents broke the ice into floes and the prevailing westerlies turned to the north, roaring across Hudson Bay and pushing the floes together into monstrous pressure ridges which rose like great walls from the sea. For a time, hunting seals became impossible and Alakariallak was forced to take his dog team inland in the hope of finding caribou, but after days of sledging he failed to come across a single animal. He turned back west towards the coast and began to make his way home but he and his dog team were caught in a blizzard. They carried on as best they could but at some point the dogs must have grown hungry and exhausted. Although they were now only a few days' travel from the coast, they stumbled and began to die, until there were no longer enough dogs left alive to pull the sled. Alakariallak, too, was spent. As the blizzards blew up again, the great hunter and – though he didn't know it – international movie star set about making himself a snowhouse for a shelter, then spreading his sleeping skins inside he lay down to die.

A few miles to the southwest of Alakariallak's lonely grave, on the coast at Inukjuak, Maggie Nujarluktuk pulled a little half-breed boy from her amiut and set him down on a pile of caribou skins beside her.

In 1902 the geologist A. P. Low had wintered at the mouth of the Innuksuak River and named his campsite Port Harrison after the director of the mining company he was working for at the time. To the Inuit the place had always been Inukjuak, which means ‘many people’ or ‘great people’ or, sometimes, ‘giant’. The elders could remember a time before the whalers came when beluga whales had congregated in the little bays around the river estuary to breed and Inuit had come in from their camps all along the eastern shoreline of Hudson Bay to hunt them. They still spoke of that time with a longing and sometimes with a dread born of the memories, which had never quite left them, of bad seasons which had pushed their families so near starvation they had had no choice but to brick their babies into tiny snowhouses and leave them there to die.

No one knows exactly when the first Inuit arrived on Cape Dufferin. The earliest occupation is marked by rock circles and, here and there, by the crumbling remnants of ancient huts. The men and women who built them, people the anthropologists now call the Dorset Culture, arrived from the northwest some two or three thousand years ago, having made the long, bleak trek across the Canadian Barrenlands from Asia by foot and by sled. The Dorset people were nomadic hunters, moving with the herds of caribou which then populated the tundra. They lived in small houses half buried in the shale and kept no dogs and although they spread through the Arctic their culture was, relatively speaking, short-lived. When the climate began cooling, around 500 BCE, their populations dwindled. They were followed, or pushed out, no one knows which, by the Thule people, named after the site in northern Greenland where, in the early 1920s, Therkel Mathiassen first unearthed their remains. The Thule arrived from the west around 400 CE, when the Arctic climate became drier. They lived semi-nomadically, settling for short periods near the coast, erecting huts from mud or slabs of sod and living off the great whales they hunted from their kayaks . A single 40-ton bowhead whale could feed 5 families, between 25 and 50 individuals, for a year. The Thule were one of the great early human cultures, as wondrous in their way as the Aztecs or the Babylonians, their technologies so beautifully adapted to the terrain that they were able to survive and to prosper in a place no other people had been able to settle. Where they encountered Dorset people, there were sometimes skirmishes, which the Thule, with their superior technologies of tailored skin clothing and bow and arrow, the metal arrowheads fashioned from scavenged meteorites, usually won. In the eastern Arctic, the Thule reached as far north as Ellesmere Island at the 80th parallel and as far south as Labrador at the 50th, a distance of some 1,800 miles. The Inukjuamiut were their descendants. They were, and remain, the Arctic's most successful colonisers.