Holly Dobbins
Canada
May 2004

See previous submission from Holly Dobbins

Toonik Tyme

As I write, the annual Toonik Tyme celebration is taking place: a time to celebrate spring, the return of the light, and the coming together of community.   To some, perhaps, it might not seem to bespeak “spring.”   Highlights are sea ice golf, dog team races, ice sculpture competitions, igloo building competitions, feasts of caribou and seal meat and a lot of music and laughter.  

It is hard for me to realize that this is the midpoint of my time here.   In some ways, however, it is also the end.   Thanks to the support of Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (the Inuit Land Claim Organization), I will spend the better part of the next half traveling to communities across the North.  I am excited and I am grateful, but I will miss Iqaluit.  I am greeted everywhere I go, and everyplace is familiar to me.  Somewhere, back in the United States, lies my “real” home, but it seems such a distant memory.  Living in the North is intense in a way that I cannot yet really describe.  There are different realities here -- different things are important. I have hauled water in
-70°C when our waterlines burst, helped to lay in supplies when storms were coming and have even undergone a physical conversion as my winter garb has been replaced with warmer but lighter (and more beautiful) Inuit clothing. 

With regard to my research, sometimes I feel that I have not spoken to nearly enough people who were part of the negotiations that I am researching; at other times I think I need to track down more documents from the period to better understand the events that I am asking people about.   Where to concentrate my energy?   The more I learn, the more I learn that there is to learn -- and the more is expected of me. 

My biggest challenge is one that I am very happy to live with.   It is passing the tests set for me by each new person that I meet.  The problem is not in being American; most people don’t know or don’t care about that.  It is in not being Inuk[1].   Inuit, as with indigenous peoples everywhere, have been much abused by social scientists.  As one person put it, “I have an uncle who has created at least five ‘doctors.’  Not one of them has ever acknowledged him for it!”   The story that I seek to tell is not my story; it is theirs.  Sometimes I am asked to share my story first, or to answer why, “Why one more interview? Why with you?”  It reminds me each and every time just how much trust is being placed in me with this project as I tell somebody else’s story.  An Inuk woman mused to me just yesterday, “I am very curious to see what voice you are going to use when you write this.”  My answer was, “So am I.”

Taima (that is all)…