Page 260 - The Secret Museum

had heard her son had married and longed for a picture of the strange white woman

who was now her daughter. She also wanted a big bowl.

Three years later, his Inuit father sent another message. ‘Jenny, your sister, is
married and has a son. But I am growing old. Come back and stay with me once more
before I die.’ Jenness knew the Arctic was changing, mostly for the worst. The
caribou herds had been devastated by guns and the Inuit were catching diseases they
had no name for and working for wages rather than to support the tribe. ‘Whither will
it lead?’ he asked. ‘Were we the harbingers of a brighter dawn, or only messengers
of illomen, portending disaster?’

In the heart-wrenching epilogue, written in 1958, Diamond Jenness answers his

own question. His mother died of influenza, brought into her homeland by the white
men. His father died while hunting caribou. His sister Jenny Sunshine had caught
tuberculosis; it had already killed her tiny son and later killed her husband too. Her
generation’s life was changed forever, as ‘the commercial world of the white man
had caught the Eskimos in its mesh, destroyed their self-sufficiency and independence
and made them economically its slaves.’

Today, Nunavut is a native-ruled territory. Its creation in 1999 was a landmark
moment for the Inuit, granting them self-governance. It is one of the most remote

places in the world, with a tiny population of 31,000. The northernmost permanently
settled place in the world is there: Alert.

It’s so sad, knowing all that, to listen to this song. But it’s wonderful that we can.
The fact it has been recorded means it is still part of what anthropologist Wade
Davis has called the ‘ethnosphere’: ‘the sum total of all thoughts, dreams, ideas,
beliefs, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the human
imagination since the dawn of consciousness’.