Exploration
In the summer of 2023, three women set out on the 16-metre sailboat Que Sera on an expedition aimed at writing Inuit women into the exploration history of the North
Centuries before it was drawn on a map, Canada’s Northwest Passage was a place of desire and empire. Hoping for a western route between Europe and Asia, England sent John Cabot to search for it in 1497. Following in his wake went explorers the likes of Martin Frobisher, William Edward Parry and John Franklin, who was declared missing, along with his two ships Erebus and Terror and his crew of 129 men, in 1848. Norwegian Roald Amundsen finally navigated the Northwest Passage over three winters on his ship Gjøa, arriving in Nome, Alaska, in 1906, five years before becoming the first to stand on Antarctica’s South Pole.
But the Northwest Passage existed long before its boundaries were declared by European explorers. Every expedition attempting its channels encountered Inuit. The more successful ones relied upon the knowledge and work of Inuit women, who sewed clothing, cooked food and provided advice on how to survive conditions unimaginable to Europeans. Their stories have gone largely unrecorded in the official histories of the Northwest Passage.
In the summer of 2023, three women set out on the 16-metre sailboat Que Sera for a different kind of expedition. The Beyond Her Horizons expedition would not look for shipping routes or resources for extraction or toeholds for land and sovereignty defence.
Instead, the women onboard would attempt to write Inuit women into the exploration history of the North, while also collecting data on the changing sea ice, an issue that is already affecting Arctic communities and will have an even greater impact in the future.
Okalik Eegeesiak, former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and Jessica Houston, a Montreal-based artist, began their journey in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, stopping to speak with women in Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and Tuktoyaktuk for their insight into surviving in a harsh climate. They shared their knowledge on everything from the land to the animals and about traditional women’s skills such as sewing and keeping the qulliq lit.
They also talked about women’s contributions to the success of explorers during early contact. McGill University PhD candidate Noémie Planat joined the expedition in Tuktoyaktuk and sailed to Nome, Alaska, measuring the salinity and temperature of the Alaska Current.
As with any Arctic expedition, the participants had to grapple with sea ice and wind, and life on a boat. This one also faced logistical challenges when Canada’s worst forest fire season on record forced the evacuation of Yellowknife and the closure of its airport, interfering with planned crew changes.
The following are excerpts of what the expedition heard from the women of the Northwest Passage.
As told to Jessica Houston, Okalik Eegeesiak, Mariah Erkloo and Abbie Ootova.
Aaju Peter is an Inuk lawyer, activist and sealskin clothing designer and a member of the Order of Canada. Born in Greenland, she moved to Nunavut in 1981 and lives in Iqaluit.
Unless we go to the Elders directly, it’s hard to get our story. It’s always told from somebody else’s perspective. I listened to a series on the radio in Greenland about [Greenlandic-Danish polar explorer and anthropologist] Knud Rasmussen’s travels from Greenland to Canada. It would have been nice to also hear it from the Inuit who encountered these outsiders, because we talk about different things.
I firmly believe that our Inuit way of being is so important. Our Elders say you have to respect the environment, you have to respect the animals. Everybody is accorded the same respect and the same space. It took me many years to learn that. In the Inuit community, it’s always us. What I learned in Denmark [where she was sent on her own to school at age 11] is me first: me, me, me, then everybody else.
I have always thought Inuit women are so powerful. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Mary Simon, and the woman who went with Knud Rasmussen on their explorations. During the changing of our culture — being moved into communities, and our autonomy being taken over or run by outsiders, we women learned to survive.
I remember when one of the Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated presidents stood up in parliament and presented the Inuktitut name for the Northwest Passage, which is Tallurutik. This is the word for a woman’s chin tattoos. The Northwest Passage looks like chin tattoos: huge, huge mountains going right down to the ocean. I’ve sailed the Northwest Passage a few times, and I remember my pictures being taken, with my tallurutik. That was a proud moment, looking at the horizon, and the mountains going down like the lines on my chin tattoos. That, to me, was amazing.
Miqqusaaq Bernadette Dean is the great-granddaughter of Siusarnaq, also known as Shoofly Comer. Dean is from Southampton Island at the entrance to Hudson Bay, where she grew up hunting, fishing and harvesting. She has worked closely with Elders and youth on cultural program development, as well as culture camps for Inuit youth and women.
A lot of early explorers wouldn’t have survived without Inuit women. My great-grandmother Shoofly was a very good seamstress. I’ve seen her work at the museum. Her stitches look like tiny pencil marks. That’s how intricate her sewing skills were. I saw a picture of 20 or so whalers who wintered four winters in a row, and they’re all clothed in caribou clothing. And there’s a picture of the crew of Neptune, which was a government expedition in the early 1900s, and they’re all dressed in caribou clothing. There’s almost 40 of them, I think. They wouldn’t have been able to make the clothing themselves; it would have been Inuit women. Families would go travelling together and go inland to harvest skins for clothing.
When [my great-grandmother died], the Hudson’s Bay post manager wrote in his daily journal that whenever there was a catch of fish or seals or a harvest of animals, she always made sure that the Hudson’s Bay boys got a share.
Tookoolito [also known as Hannah] and her husband Ipiirvik [also known as Joe] worked with Charles Francis Hall on the Polaris Expedition. A group of them — including maybe eight German guys, scientists, a Greenlandic family of five, Hannah, Joe, and their daughter — got separated and drifted away [on an ice floe]. Hannah had a qulliq [lamp] and Joe built snow houses, even two or three times transporting them from thin ice to thicker ice. [The Polaris Expedition (1871-1873) was an American attempt to reach the North Pole. The ship was abandoned during an ice storm, and many crew, including Tookoolito, her husband and their young daughter, were left marooned for six months. They drifted about 2,000 kilometres south before being rescued off Labrador.]
We have such an unwritten history. I’ve been to Hannah’s grave in Groton, Connecticut, twice. I brought her little bits of Arctic cotton and Arctic heather, a needle and some sinew. The second time I brought her roses.
Those Inuit women could have been considered explorers, but they didn’t get that title or recognition.
Mary Muckpa grew up on the land around Pond Inlet. She is a seamstress, retired teacher and respected Elder.
Back in the day, we worked to survive. [My ancestors] made kamik [boots] for their travels on the mainland. They would walk long distances on the land to the point that the soles of their kamik would get holes. They would have brought sewing supplies, bearded seal skins, for their travel inland, to be able to make repairs during their journey. That was how they lived.
There were times life on the land was hard, although we remember them as being happy times. The only times that seemed hard were when the weather was not cooperating in the summertime, when things became wet, and we weren’t able to dry them out — when the sealskins had to be dry and the weather was wet with rain and drizzle. We tried to be prepared. We preserved what we harvested. We collected heather: we would keep it in our bedding to keep it dry and then use it for fire on wet days. We had to keep it dry so it would be ready to be used for heating and cooking.
We were not worried about difficult times then, or even stressed. It was how we grew up, and it was a way of life. I don’t think people thought their way of life was hard or about how complex it was. I think we would find it difficult to live in those circumstances now.
Mariah Erkloo is a Pond Inlet resident and a sociology student at University of British Columbia. She has sailed through the Northwest Passage as a cultural ambassador and works with Oxen Network, a non-profit that aims to connect northern communities with the cruise industry through various programs.
All these islands and channels in the Northwest Passage, they have English names. Growing up, I only knew the names in Inuktitut. And there’s a special twist to how Inuit named places back then. They were not named after people who “discovered” them. Names just describe what the land provides or what it resembles.
Qikiqtaq is Mount Island. And Qikiqtarjuaq, which means Big Island. These names are all around the Arctic. The water channel above Bylot Island, it’s called Tallurutiup Imanga, the water belonging to the mountain. There’s a mountain over there and it creates a V shape, like chin tattoos, so it’s called Tallurutik.
Land is not something we own. It’s something we work with and respect. There are a lot of stories about the Arctic, and they’re all true. But it’s more wholesome when the local community is involved in the storytelling.
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