In the Empire of Ice by Gretel Ehrlich Page B

were removed, no blood was visible.
    Joe remembers only a single qasig, perhaps the last one to exist here, made of driftwood, walled with sod and lined with sealskin and caribou or reindeer hides. As in all the houses, a seal-gut or walrus-gut window let in light and could be removed to let smoke out when a fire was built inside or to let in fresh air. In the summer, people came and went through that top hole.
    Much of the village activity occurred in the dance room. On a winter day like this, when the snow was blowing hard and it was impossible to hunt, stories were told and the shaman was busy healing the sick and appeasing Sedna—also called Nerrivik, the goddess of the sea—if she was angry and withholding marine mammals. The shaman traveled through mountains and under the ice to the bottom of the sea to entreat the powerful spirits there to release animals to the hunters and to ask for good ice and good weather.
    In earlier years the qasig was the domain of men. No women entered except to bring food during dances. Later, the ceremonial house doubled as a guest and community room where walrus hides were split and sewn, ceremonial masks were made, walrus ivory was carved, and the Bear Dance was held. “Enormous quantities of meat were cooked and taken to the qasig on large wooden platters,” Charlie Johnson, an Inuit polar bear biologist from Nome, wrote. “The hunter sat in the middle of the room with the bear’s head before him, as people feasted. An improvised song was sung about his courage and the bear’s ferocity. The balloon of a seal’s bladder was burst to mark the hunter’s turn to dance. He leapt and shouted as if in a struggle with the bear. His wife danced with him. When she became tired, his mother took his wife’s place, then an aunt, until everyone wore out. Then the bear’s skull was thrown into the sea.”
    Joe remembered celebrations that lasted a week. “Time was bigger then,” he said. Time was elastic, measured by migrations and seasons, light and dark, dancing and rest, hunger and satiation. Before they lived by the white man’s clock, inserted into the culture by missionaries to remind people to come to church on Sunday, the minute and hour hand didn’t exist. No calendars hung on the kitchen wall. Time was told seasonally, by snow and sun and the arrival and disappearance of bowhead whales.
    Joe and I are still walking. The wind begins to howl as Joe scrutinizes the tiny, caved-in houses. He looks puzzled. “I don’t know which one was mine,” he says solemnly. “Did I ever really live here?” he asks. “This is the dilemma of modern man facing backwards. Can we go back? Where is forward?”
    A Bering Air plane lands. It’s possible to order a pizza in Nome and have it delivered in Wales when the plane makes its daily scheduled run. Yet there’s almost no food on the shelves of the general store. When I ask why, Joe shrugs. “I guess the people running it aren’t doing a very good job. Didn’t pay their bills. Now the wholesalers won’t deliver food.”
    Joe sees the scarcity of store-bought food as part of the general poverty that infects the villages of the Seward Peninsula. “Despite the wealth brought in by the oil companies, this village is below poverty level,” he says. “No insulation in the houses, no food in the stores, and no flush toilets. We still use honey buckets like always.” Material wealth is a kind of poverty. “We don’t need white man’s crap,” Joe says. “So it’s important to redefine poverty. For example: It’s true that in the old days, before white men arrived, we had no doctors and not much in the way of formal education, but we were rich in food and imagination, and something else we don’t see much of, which is gratitude.”
    The people of Wales invented and made everything they needed, Joe tells me. They made kayaks, umiat, harpoons, bows and arrows, soapstone stoves for heat and light; used skins for clothing and shelter; had