Tradition in the Dark

Tradition in the Dark

Culture in Sachs Harbour

Only a few more than 100 people presently live in Sachs Harbour, the smallest and in many ways most isolated Inuvialuit community, situated alone on the giant Banks Island, itself a bird sanctuary. Each person could claim almost 1,000 square kilometres of the island’s space to him- or herself, should everyone spread out perfectly. For each person, there are roughly 650 muskoxen on the island.

Even getting in and out of the hamlet can be a struggle. The one-hour flight between Sachs and Inuvik is often delayed or cancelled due to weather. It is a true Arctic land, complete with an unforgiving climate and treeless geography.

Activities in winter centralize in the recreation centre, while weekend bingo always brings out a crowd. At Christmas, the school gym easily hosts most of the community. A feast of turkey, cupcakes and all manner of sides warms everybody up before Santa and his elves, who look suspiciously like the local RCMP officers, give each child and elder a present, as relatives take pictures and applaud.

In other seasons, the town can be barren, as hunters, fishers and campers leave to chase their prey and live on the land. Hunting geese is the star of spring, while summer has brought a new catch to shore: beluga whales have started visiting the island in recent years. Polar bears are frequent visitors, for which residents keep a watch, and after rare weather occurrences, foxes have been known to overrun the town. Winter rain can freeze shut the homes of their prey, the lemmings.

A child in Sachs is a child of the community. The family trees are so outstretched that it is difficult to find people with whom you have no relation. Though painful, tragedy brings people together like nothing else, for it affects everyone in some way.

Not much is for sale. The local Co-op holds the basics, including the always-popular slushies, and the rest of the town’s economy is enough to get by, stay warm and keep the water running. Those born here are forever connected, for there is very little privacy and one person’s business can quickly become everybody’s.

Social pressures exist, as they do everywhere. In Sachs, relief is found in maintaining important relationships and the freedom of the land.

One of the matriarchs of the town, born and raised, Donna Keogak is hard at work every morning over the holidays cooking and baking for Christmas, her children still sleeping for several hours.

She left Sachs to go to school in Inuvik for four years, but that was it. While mixing her cookie batter, Donna talks about her home.

Donna Keogak

I feel safe here. You live a traditional life here. On top of that, it’s home. That’s all I can say. It’s home.

In other communities, there can be drugs and alcohol and kids running around. Here, our kids could be running around, but you always know somebody’s going to be watching them. Our community might be divided in politics sometimes, but if something happens, the whole community pulls together.

One thing that’s really important to the community is children. Everybody looks after the kids. It’s not just one person or one parent. Everybody takes care of the kids. Any child could come into a house and warm up or sit around and visit, and they’ll feel safe. That’s how I grew up. I was always welcome in any house in the community. I didn’t have to worry.

Sure, there are wild animals that come around. That’s when you notice the parents and community really watch out for the kids. They make sure nobody gets hurt. There’s almost no crime with our youth, except the odd one here or there.

When I was a kid, we had no electricity. We had no skidoos. We stayed in houses, but the heat was only from stoves. If we wanted to go visit somebody, I remember my parents hitching up the dogs and putting us all in the sled to go across town and say hi for Easter or Christmas.

The kids at the time, all of us, we lived outside, not like the kids today. A lot of kids stay inside, play computers, watch TV or sit on their electronics now. I know more and more adults are doing that too, but when we grew up, we never had that. It was something when we actually seen a TV.

I didn’t even know what a TV was until I went to Inuvik and stayed with my aunts and uncles.

We live for the seasons around here. In the winter, most of the time we stay home, sew and work around the house. After winter comes the spring. That’s when all of the kids go out on the land with their parents. That’s how all my kids grew up. Every spring, starting in March or April, we start going to the camp. We fish the lakes until the geese come. Then we go to the river or farther up north to hunt geese.

After the spring, we wait until the ice goes, and then in summertime we go out hunting seals, and now we’re starting to get whales, so we go hunt belugas. After summer is fall, where we go out and set nets at our cabins and we travel around the land. That’s what I mean we live for the seasons. Spring to fall is family time. Wintertime, there’s not very much to do, except for long ago my dad and them used to trap during winter.

Today, there’s not much trapping. There are a few people who still do it but not many anymore. My neighbour, Norman Anikina, still traps.

All my kids know how to put up tents, set up camp and go hunting. They might not be the perfect shot, but at least they’ll hunt!

Our culture is staying strong in our community. For a while, we noticed it was starting to go, but it’s been getting stronger over the past few years. A lot of the younger kids didn’t know how to sew, so we started a sewing class. A lot of the girls in the community know how to sew for their whole family now. Everybody knows how to live off the land, because it’s how everybody in this community grew up. We used to have to shut down the school because this place is a ghost town in the springtime, when the fishing and geese hunting comes.

My key to happiness is grandchildren. As long as the family’s close together, I’m happy. I’m lucky I’ve got most of my brothers and my sister here. I’ve got another sister in Inuvik, one in Norman Wells and one in Whitehorse, but most of my other brothers stayed here. We’re a very close family.

Left to right: Leigha Keogak, Andrea Keogak, Hailey Kuptana, John Keogak, Donna Keogak, Emery Keogak, Angella Keogak and Jasmine Keogak.

Our dad taught us a lot of things. One thing is to make sure we stay close together, and that’s what we’ve done over the years. He showed us how to be strong. We go through hard times, but if we stick together, nothing’s going to change. It’s just going to get better. When my dad passed away, our whole family got together and we started travelling. We have a family trip every year where we travel somewhere different on the island.

We didn’t grow up with our language. Most of the kids don’t know our language. That’s one thing that hurts, because we can’t understand a lot of the elders. But it was the choice that our parents made, because they went to residential school. Them being only able to speak their language was really bad for them, so they chose not to put us through that.

My most exciting hunt was the first time we got a whale as a family. We were camping over at Kellet Point. There were my family and two of my brothers and their families. We watched the whales come in, so the guys went out and chased them. The women were at the beach trying to tell them where to go. We seen all these whales and then they were lucky to get one. When we were younger, we never had whales around here. It’s just over the past few years we got belugas.

My advice for young people is stay strong. Not only in your life, but your culture and heritage. Value your family, friendships and your community as a whole. That’s one thing we have to do is get together as a community as a whole. We were a stronger community at one time. Over the years, it has slowly dissipated. But like I said, if something happened, we would come together.

As Donna cooks, her husband, John Keogak, naps on the couch. He was up at 2 a.m. tinkering with the skidoo and doing odd jobs around the house. Donna’s morning pancakes put him right back to sleep.

He gets up, with a coffee, to talk about his love for the land.

John Keogak

I was born in Aklavik, 1958. We lived in the Delta for most of my childhood. My mother wasn’t going to put me into school, as I was the only boy and my sisters were in school. Every winter, I’d be with her all alone while the girls were in school. She wanted me to be a trapper.

Mr. Holman, the administrator for Stringer Hall, talked to her when she went to pick up the girls for summer break. He told her I wasn’t going to be a trapper all my life and things are going to change. Reluctantly, she put me in school.

My mother passed away in 1966. I was adopted to Peter and Shirley Esau in Sachs Harbour in 1967.

When I first moved here, I fell in love with the place. There were no trees. You could see as far as you could. Being born in the Delta, you saw a lot of willows and trees. Moving up here in ’67 was paradise. Nice clean gravel, no trees in your way. I just fell in love with the place and have been living here ever since.

I trapped for about five years after moving here. Then everything started coming in, telephones, TVs. Trapping just sort of lost interest. Everyone started working. I found a job working in the hamlet here hauling water with Wayne Elanik. It was tough some days but it was work, and it paid.

We worked together for a while and I stuck with the hamlet for a few years and worked for the health centre. In 1992, I decided I wanted to be my own boss. Like being on the land, you’re your own boss and can do what you want. I started a business in ‘92 and still have it today. We just do maintenance jobs, odds and ends, contracts. I always wanted to be that way, ever since I started trapping, to be independent.

It was not always a happy life. There were struggles along the way. I was homeless for a year or two growing up, travelling around for a few years until I started working for Dome Petroleum (Canadian Marine Drilling). From there, everything picked up, working on the drill ships. I worked for three years and then got back into my business after making a few bucks.

Now that we’re all settled, I’m at my age now so I’m looking for retirement. Hopefully I’ll live out on the land, raising up my grandchildren, whom I adore. I think they’re going to be the ones who keep me going from now on. I look forward to that.

The job I do is just on-call maintenance, not an eight-hour-a-day job, contracts you can do any time. It allows me to do what I want in the summertime and wintertime, travelling-wise anyway. I hire people around here to work for me. That way I have more time on the land.

I live on the land. That’s my life. We take every opportunity to do our hunting each season. Springtime we do our spring hunting, fishing; falltime, we go out seal hunting, get stuff ready for winter like oil and dry meat, dog food; summertime, we like to travel and explore. We try to do an annual trip every year with family, go somewhere and just enjoy the land. That’s the big part of living up here. It’s such a great place. We’re isolated and things move with the time, the plane schedules and the summer barge, but those are things we’ve learned to live with. We just make our own living up here and try to do our best.

There are so many hunting stories up here. Everything is exciting when you go out. You can’t just pick one. Everything is just totally awesome when you’re out on the land. It’s just a great experience. It’s something we were born with, raised up with. Back in the day, that’s all we did. We had to hunt and trap to survive. It’s always been in our blood and it’s something that we cherish now, in this time anyway where everything is technology.

When we first got our whales a few years back, that was exciting. I had hunted whales before but not up here. The last whale harvest was way back in the early days and the whales never did come by here before, not this close anyway.

18We knew they’d go up to the end of the island somewhere, but why we never saw them around here, I don’t know. Now it seems like there are more of them around. I don’t know what’s driving them up here.

I grew up eating muktuk. It’s a delicacy. We try to get it from the Delta, Tuk, that area, but now that we can hunt them ourselves, it’s exciting. It’s fun, something to look forward to every summer, something different.

No one’s really hunting seals anymore, except for maybe doing samples for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans or whoever. We do a bit of hunting just for our dogs. A few seals will get them through the winter, which is good because there are not many muskox close by anymore.

There are not many young people interested in living on the land. Sure they like going out hunting and that, but actually living out on the land is tough. It’s a lot of work. If you enjoy the work, you love what you’re doing. Kids nowadays, even my kids, are not as interested as we were when we were growing up. It was our life. There was no TV, no phones, no nothing. That’s all we did. Growing up we played outside. We pretended we were hunting or building something. Nowadays, there’s nothing. All you see is a hand and a phone and people talking to themselves.

There was one time we went out polar bear hunting on a white day, fresh snow, snowing. I pursued this polar bear and I went through the ice. Well, it wasn’t ice. It was just slush, like a big open pond. It was covered in fresh snow and you couldn’t tell if it was open or young ice. You couldn’t see the dark area. Soon as my skidoo went on it, it sunk. I had my rifle on my back and we were maybe 20 feet from the ice in the water. I blacked out. I knew I was trying to keep myself up. I blacked out and next thing I knew I was sitting on the ice. I looked and I could see my trail crawling off the ice.

I think I was saved that day, because there was no way I could’ve got out of that slush. It was just snow over the water. But I crawled out of it. I was looking at my tracks and I was sitting on the ice and my partner, Floyd Lennie, came over and asked me where’s my skidoo. He thought I was just sitting behind the ice waiting for the polar bear, and he realized I lost my skidoo and I was in the water. Only my feet got wet. We ended up coming home, put a pair of mitts on my feet. That was a close call that time. I think I was taken care of. There’s no way I could have crawled out of that slush. How I got on top of it, I don’t know. But I know who.

Another time, it wasn’t hunting, but I was in Inuvik and we came in on a charter and we crashed. Coming in for a landing, one engine quit. We were just high enough that when the engine quit, it hit the ground on the wheel side. The wheel went through the wing and we skidded to a stop. If we were any higher, I think we would have flipped right over. That was another close call. We just skidded about 60 feet or so. There’s a propeller part in town someone found, I think that’s probably from the plane.

Hunting-wise, we were always taught to be safe, not take chances. There was one scary moment in the summertime. Me and my brother-in-law, Richard, we were out hunting in our boat and we landed on a chunk of ice that we shouldn’t have, because it wasn’t stable. It cracked and cracked and went so far, then stopped and we backed out of there. After we got out, the ice just rolled over. That was a scary time. Never again. After that, we always land on flat ice.

I think now is the time to teach kids how to live out on the land, because who knows what’s going to happen with how the economy is going. We’re looking at something that could be bigger than the Great Depression. If the whole economy shuts down, we’re going to have to live off the land. It’s going to be tough. It’ll make it look like our ancestors had a holiday compared to what we’re going to go through, I think. They should know it just to keep the tradition, too. But it’s hard. You might as well talk to the phone instead of the person. Technology now has totally taken over everything.

Living on the land is my philosophy for happiness. You get the land in you and it’s like being part of the Earth. Surviving day to day and being happy is how we were brought up. Always think happy, be positive and help each other. That’s the best way to live.

Fifty feet away is Norman Anikina’s house. He’s relatively new to town, having moved to Sachs Harbour in 2008 after growing up in Tuktoyaktuk, and is one of the few around who still traps. He still remembers his first time out on his father’s line.

Norman Anikina

It was April, when it’s time to finish your trapping season. I remember the first trip was so cold. I was young then, five or six. Even though I was small and really cold, I couldn’t wait to see the next trap. When my dad would stop to fix one, I would run around to warm up. There’s something about trapping. It’s a way of life for me. I could work. I could go to college or school. But for me, trapping, I just love it.

Trappers are a dying breed nowadays. There are not many around. It’s a cold and tough life. You dress up in the morning in the dark and you’ve got to go out. You travel a long ways and endure the cold. Sometimes, you get frostbite on your face. There’s just something about it I like. It’s something different, I guess.

When I was growing up in Tuk, I used to sell my catch to be able to buy more materials – gas, shells, bullets. I always spent the money I had for more trapping or hunting gear. I never bought a house or truck or boat. I always wanted some extra gas for the next trip.

My life growing up in Tuk was really good. I started going out on the land with my dad in Grade 5 or 6. From there on, I continued hunting and trapping with him. I don’t think I went back to school until I was 21, when I went back to get my education. I still maintained the trapping, hunting and fishing. I wanted the best of both worlds. I wanted to do my trapping and hunting, yet I had to have a job to survive.

I moved away in 1986 when I got married. I went to a Bible college in Pangnirtung for two years. I didn’t finish the program. I moved with my wife and family back to Tuk and then to Fort Smith, where I went to college and worked for 11 years. I still maintained my hunting and trapping. In 2008, after about 20 years away from the North, we moved to Sachs Harbour, where my wife, Sharan, is from.

I love the outdoors, but it’s a hard life. You can’t just go out and expect to catch animals. You have to learn it. It starts just like kindergarten and you work your way up. You never stop learning out on the land. Even today, I’m still learning after 40 years.

Norman Anikina

Living off the land is freedom for me. It’s a peace I can’t explain. There are no worries out on the land, but you’ve got to know it. There’s so much that can go wrong. If you break down, you have to have your spare parts or something to fix your machine. If you get caught in a blow, you have to have a tent or shelter to stay in until the blow’s over and you can get home. You have to know the land and the places to go. There are good places to hunt, fish or trap, but you have to know the trails, the valleys, the lakes. There are some rivers or creeks with open water and you have to know where they are. You have to know where the big cliffs and hills are.

It wasn’t trapping, but one of my closest calls on the land was at work when we went out on the land for 10 days. We were on the Firth River in northern Yukon. It had rained for four days in Ivvavik National Park and the water level came up, which made the rapids really turbulent.

My partner and I were going down the river in a raft and got to one really bad spot. We stopped and assessed the river to see how bad it was. We figured we could shoot it with the raft. My buddy was on the oars and I was in the front of the boat. As soon as we went down the rapid, I got thrown off. My buddy is still on the oars trying to control the raft while I’m hanging onto the bowline in the water. I’m getting swirled around this way, that way, hanging on. For dear life, I hung onto that boat. Couldn’t breathe.

The canyon walls were right there and I had to pull myself under the boat so I wouldn’t get squished between the boat and the wall. Then I looked around and let go of the boat when we had passed that big whirlpool. I was able to bob down to a little eddy and my buddy came down to pick me up with the raft. I was 26 or 27 at the time.

Up here in Sachs Harbour, there are not too many people, which is good. You can go out and get your animal. In Tuk, there are lots of people and lots of competition. Sometimes you go out and might not get anything because other people beat you to it. But here, there’s lots of wildlife, lots of caribou, muskoxen, fox, geese in the spring, plenty of fish. A person can survive on this island.

I always look forward to winter, when the fall starts to freeze. I get excited because I love trapping. I don’t have a big line. I have several traps that keep me busy and going. Then there’s geese hunting in the spring, and fishing in the spring and fall.

I skin the foxes I trap and sell the hides. My wife, Sharan, she makes fur hats and mitts out of the hides. It’s how we make our money. Some people might just buy the pelt for fur or hanging on the wall. I have four boys who live down south, and I have tried to instil the culture in them as my father did for me.

Our way of life, trapping and hunting, is on the decline. I see for the young people, it’s always their phone or their little gadgets. It’s sad to say. But for me, to maintain our way of life is to keep on doing it and don’t stop. I try to teach some people how to trap. There are several young fellas I’ve tried to teach in town.

I’d advise young people to stick to your college, stick to your school, because our trapping and hunting way of life is a thing gone by. But if a young person is really keen on learning the way our ancestors did, then I can teach them what I know. Even I don’t know much. There are a lot of people who know a lot more than me, but I try my best out there.

Each person has his own happiness. For me, the key is to be content with what I have. I may not have a lot, but I’m content with the basics. I try not to covet or wish for any other stuff. It’s no good to wish, because it just spoils it. I work hard and try to get what I need.