Art from the Tundra and Inland Canada In ancient days, peoples called "Eskimos" (now known as Inuit) thrived in the Arctic along with Déne Indian peoples. While women made the clothing that kept their families warm, men hunted the whales, walrus, caribou, and moose that fed the families and provided materials for clothing; the best hunters were the village leaders. Survival was hard, however, and when faced with starvation, families sometimes left an infant girl on the ice to die.
Later, the decline of the fur trade nearly destroyed the men's traditional occupations. Now, as much as 70 percent of the economy of some villages relies on art, and many of the artists are women. Because economic prosperity relies on their work, these women have become leaders in their communities. Joanne McNeal, assistant professor in Virginia Tech's Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and director of the university's Reynolds Homestead, spent 10 years talking and working with women artists in three Canadian Arctic areas while teaching in colleges and conducting research for her doctorate. Most of the women she interviewed lived in the Northern territories of Canada, above the Arctic Circle, where people experience 24 hours of darkness in winter and 24 hours of daylight in summer. Two distinct cultures evolved in the Arctic, which is covered with ice or snow 10 months of the year. The Inuit live along the treeless Arctic coastline on permafrost, while the Déne live along inland rivers and lakes below the tree line in the sub-Arctic forests. The two groups have very different animals and materials for food, clothing, tools, and building even though they share a similar climate to that of Alaska. McNeal taught at Arctic College in Fort Smith, learning about the lives, families, and communities of her students, women who sometimes moved great distances to attend college. They didn't think they had ever seen "art," which they defined as "that stuff that hangs on rich people's walls." But they wore beautiful parkas, beaded mukluks (boots), and mitts made by women. Most of the elder indigenous women began sewing as young as the age of five. They lived "in the bush," in tents or in log or ice houses where there were no villages. "Sewing was important because the family had to have warm clothes," one elder said, "and a woman that didn't know how to sew wasn't considered a very good wife." Back then, one Déne woman said, "If you wanted a pair of shoes, you had to start out by going out and getting your moose." Because of dark winters, women made clothing bright, using bird bones, shells, and various colors of fur from seals and caribou for trim. Old-style fur parkas had a trim of geometric fur designs. As outsiders entered the region, the indigenous peoples incorporated their materials--calico, wools, and cotton rick-rack. They still adapt to new influences. "Last winter," one elder said, "I made a little pair of crow boots out of beaver for my granddaughter, and I put some velcro on it."
Now, the women also create carvings, wall hangings, and designs on clothing. "The images reflect what is important in their lives," McNeal says. They draw flowers ("because they're so precious," one woman said), birds, and animals, along with landscapes. McNeal noticed that the women's artwork "gave them a very powerful toolthey could exchange it at the store for groceries." Since materials were too costly to waste, the women learned to create what others wanted to buy. Some of the elders' daughters learned traditional skills by watching their mothers, but some learned different ways of sewing in residential schools where they were not allowed to speak their native language. Many members of today's generation, however, prefer to go to the store to buy clothing and are not as skilled in the traditional arts. They live in a time of massive change; the elders' grandchildren now use computers, speak English, and watch TV. Sometimes the elders teach beading, hide cutting and sewing, tufting, and pattern making in workshops at schools and in colleges. Some artists try to preserve the past. "Today," one woman said, "I enjoy painting different scenes of the Eskimo life of my forefathers. Igloos are a thing of the past, dog teams are on the way out, seal hunting has almost become a sport with my people, but the very fact that I paint those scenes reminds people that not so long ago, men lived that way and survived amidst hardship." The women's art is selling at co-ops, at stores, and at art festivals and galleries. Some women have opened their own galleries or shops or have joined a co-op. Museums commission their works, and visiting foreign dignitaries receive them as gifts. The women are becoming teachers, are negotiating land claims, and are voicing their opinions. One village elected its first woman chief. "They have learned that if they speak up together, they are powerful," McNeal says. McNeal, who is now helping plan the American Indian studies program in Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Tech and is designing and will teach a course on native North American art, made recommendations in her dissertation for the future of Arctic women's art. Some of her recommendations are being adopted. There is growing awareness of the need to teach younger generations the traditional skills and increasing understanding that these skills have become symbols of their indigenous cultures, she says. She continues her link to the Arctic through e-mail with former students. She also helps with the Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik each July and conducts seminars on the business of the arts for the artists. "Women used to sew warm clothes so their families could survive," McNeal says. "Now they use those same skills in a new way to help their families survive. Art is a powerful and positive force linking the past to the future and bridging Arctic cultures." Plants: A key to the Arctic's past and the planet's future
Scheckler spends every July, when the sun shines 24 hours a day, near the top of the world on Ellesmere Island next to northern Greenland and on nearby Melville Island. There, he and his co-researchers locate and collect fossils for studies with James Basinger, head of geological sciences at the University of Saskatchewan, which loans Scheckler fossils for research by him and his students. "It is important to study the Arctic because, climatically, it will change the most and that change will influence the rest of the planet in an accelerating way," he says. Even in the summer, the ground is permanently frozen, thawing only six inches deep at its warmest. Because the area is remote and desolate, no one can go there alone. The scientists must contact base twice a day or search parties will start looking for them. They live in tents near a source of water and store perishables in the thawed permafrost, hoping the foxes, wolves, and bears don't get them. "Foxes can smell cooking sausages 20 miles away," Scheckler says. The scientists never leave camp without a gun because of polar bears, but they cannot shoot unless their lives are in imminent danger. The scientists walk or travel by all-terrain vehicles 10 or more miles from camp daily to hammer out and bring back ancient fossils that sometimes resemble parsley or dill or fern but look odd because the leaves are small and dissected. The researchers look mainly along rivers that have eroded the permafrost, exposing the fossils. With funding from the National Science Foundation and the Polar Continental Shelf Programme and a partnership with Basinger, Scheckler is looking at plants and how they adapted when the continents shifted to different paleoclimates during the mid to late Devonian period. In this ancient world, plants were much more alike because they grew in tropical forests. As the continents shuffled around, the plants had to change or die, and Scheckler hypothesizes that they have been adapting ever since plants came into existence. "If we know the paleoecology of the ancient world, we can predict where there should have been tropical forests, frosts, and other such things," Scheckler says. "What we see as we recover fossil plants from these different locations in the mod ern world perhaps can help us understand how they adapted to different climates at that time." When Scheckler and his colleagues go to the Arctic, they look for fossils that pro vide one of two types of information--the identity, or the kinds of plants--the community of plants as compared to those from other places of the world, or the potential to reveal the biology of a plant--and how they grow and reproduce. Besides actual fossils, the scientists also bring back photos and field notes of their Arctic expeditions. "We're trying to understand the vegetation diversity of ancient times," Scheckler says. The scientists frequently find plants never seen before and can study how they are structured and what other plants they could be related to, information that can tell how the plants evolved and adapted to different areas. As plants moved into colder regions, they began to reflect more of their environment, Scheckler says. "If there's adequate rainfall, they will grow big," he says. "That way, we can tell when there was rain. If there was enough sun, they will have different kinds of leaves than they would have in a short growing season. We can tell how plants are adapt ing by how they are constructed. We can understand the steps needed for plants to specialize for diverse environments. The complexity of the roots, stems, and leaves tells us what the microenvironment was like and how they were covering the land." The scientists also study possible causes of extinctions, both animal and plant. If they can find fossils, they can add to the information used in debates about whether some extinctions are caused by traumatic events such as asteroids or whether other extinctions are a gradual process resulting from climate changes at a particular time and place. "We're looking at floristic changes to see what's been going on," he says. He thinks extinctions didn't happen all at once. "Something was going on before the asteroid. " Scheckler's work helps us un derstand how the Earth re bounds from big extinctions, which organisms are susceptible to extinction, and why. "People in the U. S. are beginning to track near--Earth orbiting asteroids in the solar system to see which will come near Earth's orbit in the next 50 years," he says. "The planet would be entirely different after than before an extinc tion." With model plants, the scientists also can develop ecological mod els of carbon cycling. Scheckler is looking at land where forests first appeared during a time when carbon dioxide went from high to low. "Now we're in the opposite scenario, the deforestation of land for agriculture or sale of wood or creation of living space. At the same time, many farms are being abandoned and vegetation and trees are regrowing, but they are deforesting faster than the land is replenishing. I predict that carbon dioxide will go closer to its original high," Scheckler says. Plants, animals, and Earth events form a delicate balance of creating and using carbon dioxide. "If we mess with one of the components, equilibrium can be higher or lower," Scheckler says. At present, in North Africa, China, North America, and South America, forests are being cut down. "We're fiddling with that equilibrium," Scheckler says. And if carbon dioxide in the air reaches 5 percent, "we'll all be unconscious." Even if his work had no relevance to current events, knowledge of fossils and of history is important, Scheckler says. "Before humans, the Earth had a history, and we're concerned about that history. The magic of creation is important. We're seeing the stages of the wisdom of life." |
Today's Inuit peoples don't talk much about that aspect of their past.
Different women and villages excelled at certain types of designs. Although they did not sign their work, the artists could be identified by the stitching. Déne women were known for floral beadwork and embroidery, Inuit women for seal-skin mukluks and fur clothing. Women became protective of their creations, but they shared their skills and often learned techniques from others as they took part in community celebrations or festivals such as the Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik that McNeal helped run.
Tiny tropical plants survived their continental-drift relocation to the Arctic by adapting to its harsh climate. Research into such adaptations of millennia ago, when ancient tropical continents drifted into frigid climes, helps us understand "the steps of wisdom of life," says Stephen Scheckler, professor of botany in Tech's Department of Biology.