When the discovery of the HMS Terror , one of the two ships lost in the Arctic under Sir John Franklin’s command, was announced on September 12, 2016, the British newspaper The Guardian was the first to run the story with a link to the video tour made by Adrian Schimnowski , the operations manager from the Arctic Research Foundation (ARF) , a charitable organization founded by Canadian entrepreneur Jim Balsillie (www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sept/12/hms-terror-wreck-found-artctic-nearly-170-northwest-passage-attempt). The article quoted Schimnowski’s description of the crew’s first glimpses of the ship’s interior: “We have successfully entered the mess hall, worked our way into a few cabins and found the food storage room with plates and one can on the shelves … We spotted two wine bottles, tables and empty shelving. Found a desk with open drawers with something in the back corner of the drawer.” These traces of human habitation, relics of exploration awaiting the tourist gaze, marked the underwater resting place of the HMS Terror and reunited it with its sister ship HMS Erebus which had been found in 2014.
As visual representation, the ARF video could not have differed more from “Great Canadian North,” a glossy Government of Canada (GOC) advertisement that was broadcast in the months leading up to the 2015 federal election. The GOC led by the Conservative party commissioned the minute-long video inviting Canadians to join in the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Confederation. The video begins with an aerial shot of ice floes on a vast and otherwise empty ocean. Faint throat singing can be heard in the background. There is a close-up of an Inuit man looking up at the sky, while another off in the distance shades his eyes to scan the horizon. In the next shot, two Inuit clad in sealskin clothing walk along carrying kayaks on their shoulders as the voiceover begins: “170 years ago, the inhabitants of the Arctic encountered explorers from another world embarked on a quest to find the Northwest Passage.” The scene changes to a view of two nineteenth-century vessels, perhaps the Terror and the Erebus, sailing in water scattered with ice while instrumental music plays in the background. We see a sailor ringing the ship’s bell as the captain looks through a brass telescope out to sea, and the voiceover continues: “Sir John Franklin’s expedition was lost. But his disappearance launched an era of exploration unparalleled in Arctic history.” Names like “Baffin” gradually appear on a sepia-colored map. In the next scene, a bearded white man wearing sealskin clothing is seen speaking to a young Inuit boy, an Inukshuk in the distance, as they are joined by an Inuit girl who looks out and points the way. As images of a bush plane, a snowmobile, a research station, a satellite, a helicopter, and a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker follow, the voiceover concludes: “Franklin’s legacy is one of perseverance, discovery, and innovation that lives on today and has helped to keep our True North strong, proud and free.” The last image shows two divers underwater, the Parks Canada logo clearly legible on their suits as they shine a flashlight on the ship’s bell and the narrator invites viewers to celebrate the anniversary of Confederation and “our great legacy of discovery” (www.Canada.pch.gc.ca/eng/14353195587305).
The history of the Arctic presented in this video follows a linear progression from ancient times to the present mapped by changing technologies of travel and communication as each scene offers a more recent mode of exploration. The kayak is superseded by sailing ships: the bush plane soaring overhead leads to the satellite circling the earth, the snowmobile and the icebreaker follow. Although machines are the protagonists, the human figures play the stereotyped role of Explorer. Inside the bush plane, a grizzled pilot surveys below; another male pilot looks out from the helicopter, his face mostly obscured by glasses, helmet, and microphone; the Coast Guard captain, like Franklin and the anonymous Explorer, is bearded and in uniform. Inuit characters occupy the moment of contact, dated arbitrarily at “170 years ago,” and return to guide another bearded, white, male Explorer figure before vanishing from the narrative. John Franklin and the anonymous sailor are mirrored in the members of the Coast Guard and Parks Canada who carry on the work of discovery.
The symmetry of these scenes is created by images of vision: first an Inuit man looks skyward as another scans the horizon; Franklin looks through his nineteenth-century glass; the member of the Coast Guard lifts a pair of binoculars, and the two underwater divers use a flashlight the better to see the newly found Franklin relics beneath the sea. By representing discovery and exploration through images of looking, seeing, and searching, and those technologies that improve and enhance vision, the video emphasizes it above other senses even though, perhaps ironically, the discovery of the ship it celebrates was achieved with technologies that used sound to explore the seabed. The emphasis on vision, however, makes the short video the kind of “Arctic spectacle” that Russell Potter has shown was a popular theme in the visual art and panoramas of the nineteenth century. The Franklin expedition itself was equipped with a camera, the very latest in technology, and the searches for Franklin were depicted in numerous visual forms. In literal and figurative terms, vision characterizes the role the Arctic played in the Victorian imagination and now plays in Canadian culture for “it was principally through the technologies of vision that the Arctic was most keenly and energetically sought” (Potter 2007, 4).
If the identification of “perseverance, discovery, and innovation” with the Franklin expedition seems an unlikely one, it was not an unusual move for the Canadian government adept at bending historical narrative to its own purpose. The Franklin expedition was last seen in 1845, 22 years before Confederation, making its connection to the 2017 anniversary tenuous at best. In symbolic terms, the Franklin expedition , long regarded as the epitome of failure in technological and scientific progress—the limit reached by Modernity —seems an unlikely story for national celebration in Canada whereas in Britain, it served a particular national and imperial narrative of sacrifice. The Government of Canada attempted to graft the British legacy of heroic male sacrifice unto Canadian history, to write over the Canadian literary history of demythologizing exploration and discovery, and to recast Indigenous people as accomplices in the heroic narrative of Arctic exploration. As it had during the War of 1812 celebrations, the Conservative-led government’s historical revisionism combined an excess of memory with strategic forgetting. It was a strategy that had served to identify the government with patriotism and heritage in those circles keen to see themselves as inheritors of British institutions and traditions (see Hulan 2015). By cherry-picking useful details, the public commemoration could be used to reflect the sort of Canada that the Conservative-led government wanted to promote as it campaigned for reelection. After the 2015 election, however, the video was taken down from the internet (www.Canada.pch.gc.ca/eng/14353195587305).
The Explorer and the Dog Children
When they first encountered European explorers, some say the Inuit were astonished by the hairiness of their faces, and the Inuktitut word, Qalunaat , has been variously translated as referring to this response. Sheila Watt-Cloutier defines it as “the Inuktitut plural term for white people. It derived from qallunaq, which describes the bones on which the eyebrows sit, which protrude more on white people than on Inuit” (Watt-Cloutier 4). The glossary to Sanaaq: An Inuit Novel by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk indicates: “White man, literally ‘big eyebrows’” (Nappaaluk 216). The epigraph to Mini Aodla Freeman’s Life Among the Qalunaat defines “Qallunaaq (singular)” and “qallunaat (plural)” as “literally ‘people who pamper their eyebrows’; possibly an abbreviation of qallunaaraaluit: powerful, avaricious, of materialistic habit, people who tamper with nature” (Freeman np). In Qalunaat! Why White People are Funny, Zebedee Nungak describes ‘qalunaat’ as more of an attitude or worldview. What may at one time have been the description of a characteristic of some non-Indigenous people, maybe even an insider’s joke at their expense, is now understood as the relative and relational term Emilie Cameron uses in Far Off Metal River (13–17). As Cameron explains, the Inuktitut word “qablunaq” was never associated with skin color and therefore is inaccurately translated as “white person” though it is often used as such, as in Nungak’s film; instead, it emerges from and encompasses Inuit experiences of encounter with non-Indigenous people through history from early traders and explorers to corporate and government officials. As such, it conveys the power relations defining colonialism.
While it is certain that the meaning of Qalunaat is not static and that it is only made meaningful in context, there is an intriguing connection between the legendary hairy-faced Europeans and the story of Nuliajuk . Also known as Sedna, Tullayoo, Uinigumasuittuq, she is the Mother of the Sea Beasts and of human beings.1 The story continues to be told throughout the circumpolar world by Inuit including the young artist Ruben Komangapik who incorporates a QR code in his beautiful sculpture Tigumiatuq held by the National Gallery of Canada. The code takes the viewer to a video in which he tells the story of Nuliajuk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL2g8Sj0jRQ). The story has also been recorded many times by qalunaat visitors, and these versions have circulated throughout the world in written form. Komangapik’s online telling is very similar to the one recorded by Franz Boas in The Central Eskimo on Baffin Island:
This Sedna is lured into marriage by the deceitful fulmar. When her father comes to rescue her and to take her home, he kills the fulmar-husband, angering the rest of the flock who whip up the seas around the boat:Once upon a time there lived on a solitary shore an Inung [Inuk] and his daughter Sedna. His wife had been dead for some time and the two led a quiet life. Sedna grew up to be a handsome girl and the youths came from all around to sue for her hand, but none of them could touch her proud heart. (qtd, in Petrone 42)
In some versions, Sedna then sinks to the bottom of the sea where she presides over the sea beasts; in this version, she is lifted into the boat and later revenges herself against her father by having her dogs attack him as he sleeps. In others, Sedna-Nuliajuk refuses to marry, so her father marries her to his dog. Knud Rasmussen also records several references to Sedna in volumes of The Fifth Thule Expedition later popularized in his book Across Arctic America. Traveling the Arctic in the early twentieth century, he documented the fear her name inspired. In his film Nuliajuk: Mother of the Sea Beasts, Canadian art dealer John Houston narrates a scene in which Rasmu...In this mortal peril the father determined to offer Sedna to the birds and flung her overboard. She clung to the edge of the boat with a death grip. The cruel father then took a knife and cut off the first joints of her fingers. Falling into the sea they were transformed into whales, the nails turning into the whalebone. Sedna holding on to the boat more tightly, the second finger joints fell under the sharp knife and swam away as seals … when the father cut off the stumps of the fingers they became ground seals. (qtd. in Petrone 42)