Artifacts, Buffet, College, Drum Dancing, Elders, Fashion, Games, Hubbard, Inuk vs. Inuit...

Our first task this morning was to gather supplies for today's Elders Feast, a celebration of the elders in Cambridge Bay. We were responsible for bringing games, so we decided on musical chairs, a hula hoop relay and a balloon popping relay where teams run to chairs and sit on balloons to pop them. The elders were surprisingly nimble! The feast was excellent. Before we ate, Pia, a student who works at KHS, asked what was being served. Brendan answered, "Oh, I'm not sure what else is up there, but someone brought in polar bear." I chuckled and added, "Yeah, and there's some narwhal too!" Then, I realized he wasn't kidding.

After we ate, some elders treated us to drum dancing and singing!

Drum dancing

Notice the style of the parka the woman in the picture is wearing. The Copper Inuit (the Inuit of Cammbridge Bay and Kugluktuk region) women traditionally wore parkas with large hoods in the back to carry their infants and wide, pointy shoulders to protect them from the cold. However, when a trader brought his Inuvialuit (an Inuit group from the western Arctic) wife with him to Cambridge Bay, this "mother hubbard" style parka became popular. They are now made with fabric and are worn by people of all ages.

Brendan and I finished up our last day at Arctic College today. The students finished gluing and sanding their artifacts and are beginning to paint them. I am excited to have a copy of an ancient Inuit cooking tool artifact, but I have yet to figure out how I will use it in the future. : )

After work and a quick Ramen dinner, I headed back "out on the land" to see muskox feeding on Mount Pelly, a giant ridge which is the closest thing that comes to a mountain in the Arctic tundra. Of course, we weren't able to get too close to the muskox (they'll charge!), but it was wonderful to be able to see them in their natural habitat. While we were out, we stopped to rest, and I realized that it was the first time I had been on a frozen lake. I was a little worried when we were ski-dooing across the cracked ice, but I was assured that more cracks in ice means it is stronger ("soft" ice will bend with weight, not break).

Mount Pelly from a distance. Notice the cracks in the ice!

A beautiful example of the sporophyte phase of a moss life cycle from Mount Pelly

Today's tip for blending in to an Inuit community: The term "Inuit" (pronounced in-oo-it) refers to a group of people. Therefore, one should not say "an Inuit person." To refer to one person of Inuit descent, you say "Inuk" (in-ook). Another interesting fact about the Inuinnaqtun (in-oo-in-nahk-toon) language is that it uses the letter "h" in place of the letter "s." However, more modern words, like the word for ski-doo, have "s."