Pack's Harbour and Newfoundland island, Labrador

16 July 2012.
There really is a small island named Newfoundland in Labrador, not far from Cartwright, the last place accessible by road going northwest up the coast. Dr Lisa Rankin, in the Department of Archaeology at Memorial University is carrying out a dig here this summer as part of a five year project researching the history of the Inuit-Metis of southern Labrador. Her students came aboard for a much needed shower and lunch, and then returned to the dig site.

Click to see larger. Newfoundland island is north of Huntingdon island.

Earlier we hadn't been able to visit Gannet Islands because the heavy swell made it too difficult to get into the Zodiacs. The ship's crew were unable to find a sheltered spot. Gannet islands are named after HMS Gannet, and many auks breed here including 5000 pairs of razorbills, but not gannets. We saw swarms of birds flying around the islands.

Four of the Arctic College Environmental Technology students held an impromptu Q&A session as the ship moved on. 

Daniel and Kerry

Kerry from Rigolet, Labrador, enjoys the friendliness of her small community of 300 people. She likes wild food: fish and ptarmigan, and her favourite is boiled trout with mashed potatoes. She learned fishing from her father and sewing (moose-hide slippers) from her mother - her favourite activities. She spent two weeks working in Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics and was at school in Fredericton NB. She's been using the internet since she was 15. Her mother was at residential school so her first language was English. She loves being outdoors and would like to work at Torngat National Park.

Joanna

Joanna from Clyde River, Nunavut, was raised "very Inuit" by her grandparents, eating country food, often fermented, and speaking Inuktitut and English. They camped all the time, had 24 hour daylight in the summer and from November to January no daylight. Her favourite food is seal boiled with potato and onions. Her favourite traditional activities are narwhal hunting with her father, which requires less patience than seal hunting, crowberry picking with her mother, and collecting heather for fuel. She has travelled to BC and to Botswana as a volunteer. She uses a Blackberry and loves GPS for tracking and locating.
Amos's parents speak Inuktitut and he learned English later. His favourite food is roasted musk ox or caribou. He has travelled to Alaska to play hockey. He loves living in the Arctic and hunting.
Joseph from Pond Inlet, Nunavut, hunts caribou when there's snow, seal and eider ducks. He enjoys a traditional dinner of ring seal in the spring, with many families, as well as caribou - marinated for two days. (If caribou run you don't chase them, as they don't taste good if they have run.) His grandfather was a carver and was known to have repaired a snowmobile motor with a piece of soapstone. His mother is an artist. He likes to write fiction and drum dancing. His father is an anthropologist and Anglican priest, originally from Great Britain, which he has visited over ten times. He learned Inuktitut from his mother and English from his father. He's been all over Canada, to Portugal, and to Ottawa over 30 times - it's too hot in Ottawa. He likes GPS and satellite phones as they make it possible to hunt alone safely. He mentioned that TV in the 1980s led to a decline in Inuktitut use.

Elisapee

Elizabeth (Elisapee) from Pangnirtung is an Education student, and intern on the ship's staff. She explained that education is becoming more bilingual, but when she was at school K-4 was in Inuktitut and from grade 5 was in English. The curriculum is now more Inuit based, but used to be the Alberta curriculum.

Emma from Baker Lake is the other intern on staff.
Here she's making a sealskin purse as a gift for a friend.

We set off in Zodiacs to Pack's Harbour, another former salt-cod community, in the fine misty rain. At Pack's Harbour we had a welcoming committee, Chris Lethbridge and his son Chris, curious to see what we were up to. We stayed in the Zodiacs, bow on the rocks, three dinghies side by side. Chris senior knew the names of all the families who had lived there going back 200 years, and answered Sean Cadigan's questions as if he were the academic. Pack's Harbour is now a "summer place" and the Lethbridges work at Voisey's Bay.

Sean stands up in the Zodiac to talk to Chris on shore

Then off to the dig on Newfoundland island.

A family of eider ducks, and the dig on shore

Atlantic spiny lumpsucker found in toothed wrack seaweed

Jimmy, our driver, kept fishing things out of the sea to keep us
amused as we waited in line to beach the Zodiac. Kelp.

Headquarters for the dig.

By now the students were all muddy again, brushing soil into dustpans, then into buckets, before sifting this soil again to make sure nothing was missed. The site was a summer camp for Inuit with stone floor, and a raised platform for oil lamp. While we were there they found parts of soapstone oil lamps, part of a clay pipe and a child's toy lamp. Only broken things would have been left behind. These sites can be found by looking for saucer shaped hollows, and they are often greener than the surrounding areas, having more fertile soil from food waste etc. The rain became quite heavy, we left. This was the wettest we got on the entire trip.

Returning to the ship in the rain, a motor boat came alongside our Zodiac: Chris junior and his wife, who wanted to see the R.V Akademik Ioffe close up. We were an event in this community.

This is from the compilation slide show. Everything is wet.

In the evening People of a feather, an award winning film by Joel Heath was shown. Daniel Qavvik (one of the ET students, photo above with Kerry) is in the movie, and his father is the main character. In Sanikiluaq (Belcher islands) in Hudson Bay, the Inuit are reliant on Eider ducks for down and food. Recently there have been large numbers of Eider ducks dying off because of large releases of fresh water from James Bay hydro dams in the winter, when the demand for power is high, which dilutes sea water. Fresh water freezes sooner and has different properties to sea ice. If polynyas (open water areas) get too small, the ducks tire, cannot dive for food and return to surface, they starve, drown, and die. A moving, informative and interesting film. You can see the trailer at the link above.