Echoing Silence: Essays on Arctic Narrative

Echoing Silence: Preface

Echoing Silence: Preface JOHN MOSS Nellie." Graham Rowley, thirty-some years my senior, although I'm a grandfather, was equally casual. Rudy Wiebe, whom I've known since before he won the first of two Governor General's Awards,was characteristically informal. Nellie spoke not as the premier of the Northwest Territories but as an Inuk on the values in collecting the elders' stories; shewas followed by Graham, after whom a district of Baffin is named, who related to us his experience as an Arctic explorer between the Wars, when it still seemed there wasan unexplored Arctic; and Rudy completed the panoply with a wonderous conflation of historical document and the literary imagination . This was the opening session of the Symposium on Arctic Narrative held at the University of Ottawa in the spring of 1995. Variant authority and casual eloquence anticipated the program to follow, in which from the apparent silences of the Arctic we could hear echoing among us the words of its innumerable stories. It is important to acknowledge that this book began as a social event. The essays gathered here were shared first in oral presentation, many of them having been conceived for oral delivery. Their arrangement now, as it was then, is orchestrated to generate and convey maximum resonance . Through the course of a highly charged weekend, proscriptive limitations inherent in the contemporary academic version of oral tradition were again and again challenged by the power of spoken language, from such a broad variety of perspectives, to gather listeners into a spontaneous community. Disparities of opinion or ideology, race or sex, resolve to the ear in a waythey cannot when read—not in harmony but, through tolerance, in symphonic diversity.The reader must listen to this text, if it is to be appreciated as more than a document of passing common interests. h e H o n o u r a b l e N e l l i e C o u r n o y e a s a i d , " c a l l m e T 2 Consider the closing stories by Mary Carpenter. The first is expository , words of her own experience as an Inuk woman in the modern world, a song in praise of memory, when the elders dance like shadows in front of you; the second and third she relays, her voice a medium, from deep within her cultural heritage. She tells of Skeleton Woman, a disarmingly grotesque love story, and of Nuriviq,a variation of Sedna, the woman of the sea whose long hair must be combed by shamans to have her bounty released for the survival of the people. In Mary'swords, recorded and transcribed, you can hear the cadence, the sounds of a landscape inseparable from the stories of its inhabitants. As Sean Kane tells us in Wisdom of theMythtellers, the very nature of story transformswith our changing relationship to the environment. What once was a means of relating to the natural world became an account of separating from it, subduing it to our purpose as visitors who are passing through. From making connection, story came to establish difference. This shift, in what Shelagh Grant decribes below as a movement from narrative informed by spiritualityto narrative informed by imagination, coincides with the transition from orature to literature. The oral tradition and the literary tradition articulate fundamentally different conceptions of reality; that is, realityitself is a different experience in what Kaneidentifies as hunter-gatherer and agrarian/post-agrarian cultures. In the Arctic as a context of landscape and historical event, these tworealitiesaddresseachotherinsometimesdelightful,sometimesdis-maying,ways.Ascontent,theArctichasbeenstoryintheWesternworld since Pythias wrote of it for the ancient Greeks, and in the memory of indigenous peoples since the times before time began. And time began with history,with the arrival of text into what outsiders perceived as frozen waste and what was, for the people living there, their home. What we know of the Arctic now, even of the oral tradition, is largely filtered through a screen of literacy, so that the Arctic of scholars, adventurers, and to some extent of the Inuit themselves, is a literary construct. Yet as we experience it through story, barriers crumble, boundaries blur; we can, if we listen, hear ourselves breathe. Story is narrative—which is a good word to designate something that has already happened—a recounting, the conveyance of a sequence of events, real or imagined. But story is more. Story refuses to lie still as a noun. It is action, an...