Page 257 - The Secret Museum

THIS WAX CYLINDER IS A piece of intangible cultural heritage. Hidden inside it is a

beautiful song, sung by a man named Angivranna in 1915. He is the man in the
photograph, sitting holding his drum. He is no longer alive, and many of his people
also died, soon after first contact with the white men who came to their land in search
of furs to make themselves rich. Those that lived had their lives totally transformed
by contact with the outsiders. So this song will never be sung in the same way again.

The wax cylinder is stored behind the scenes at the Canadian Museum of
Civilization. It is too fragile to display and risk damaging the unique, irreplaceable
song that it contains.

‘Song 21’ is one of 137 songs collected by ethnologist Diamond Jenness while he

was part of the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–18. Others on the expedition
spent the years looking for new lands and new species. Diamond Jenness,
meanwhile, made contact with the Inuit, and was adopted by an Inuit family for two
years, in order to learn as much as possible about how they lived.

His new mother was called Icehouse, or Higalik; his father, Ikpuck; his brother,
the Runner; and his little sister, one of the happiest girls in the Arctic, Jenny
Sunshine. He wrote a wonderful book, The People of the Twilight, about his time
with the charming, funny, welcoming family and their extended tribe.

At first everyone watched him closely. ‘They remembered the legend which said
that Eskimos, Indians and white men were originally brothers,’ Jenness wrote. ‘Their

mother was a beautiful woman who rejected every suitor until her father’s dog
metamorphosed into a handsome young man, visited her and won her love. She
herself went down to the ocean floor to preside over the waves, the fish and the sea
animals; but her children scattered in all directions. Only the Eskimos remained
human; the Indians kept their human forms but became like wild beasts at heart; and
the white men degenerated into monsters even in outward appearance.’ His adopted

mother asked him whether white men had arms that trailed to the ground and whether
his real mother had hair.

Over time, he earned the family’s trust. He shared his food, they shared theirs; he
traded his things – fish hooks, needles, pans and, later, bullets and guns for hunting –
for theirs: lamps, pots and clothes and, later, for stories and songs: his ‘specimens’,
which are now in the museum’s collection. After six months, his adopted mother,
having come to love her son, told him, ‘You white men are just like us’. She still
couldn’t be sure about white women, because she’d never met one.

Diamond Jenness loved to record Inuit songs on his Edison phonograph. At first,
they were nervous of the machine: ‘The first man who sang into it shivered with

apprehension when he heard his voice come back to him out of the horn, and asked in
an anxious whisper, “Is there a spirit concealed in the box?” Nothing would induce
him to sing again, and for a time I feared this first record of their music would also
be my last.’