A BRIDGE TO WHERE -
AND WHERE IS A HOME
An Arctic Memo
A BRIDGE TO WHERE - AND WHERE IS A HOME
An Arctic Memo
To: Do Ho Suh
From: Hugh Brody
October/November 2024
At 77 degrees north the light has intensity of both presence and absence. From the end of April until the beginning of September, the sun circles the sky -- high above the horizon at midday, looping down at midnight. But always there, pouring down its energy onto the ice or sea. From the beginning of November until the first week in February, there is no sun. Darkness is interrupted by twilight around the middle of each day - a brief gloomy opening of the sky in midwinter, a few hours long in November and January. The moon shines forth, and the aurora borealis often dances its flow of ghostly white and darting shafts of green and pale red. When the moon is thin or absent, the stars fill the entire sky -- nowhere is the milky way so thick and endless. You will be able to travel out of your home by these different kinds of illumination -- or in a surprisingly clear half-dark - at all times of the year. The sun and moon of the High Arctic will, I suspect, fill you with astonishment and awe.
At 77 degrees north and 123 degrees west, at the intersection of the bridges, where your perfect home will be created, the ice, too, appears and disappears. Through autumn, winter and spring, you will be living above a frozen ocean. The oldest ice, formed over many years and circling with the movement of the ice sheets, can be four metres thick; the young ice - formed at the beginning of the most recent winter – will be no more than one metre. But all of it, once it has formed the frozen crust of the sea, will be firm enough for you to travel out on its immense expanse. Routes can lead in any direction: in midwinter the ice to the north of you will stretch far beyond the pole, and then lead southward in the direction of the nearest tip of Scandinavia. To the south it can take you to and through the Bering Straits. Much of the sea-ice will be the colour and texture of the snow that has covered its surface. Ribbed and contoured by the wind; packed tight; firm and solid underfoot; good for cutting into blocks that you could use to make extra winter housing or shelters as you travel.
Then, in late spring and early summer – probably by the middle of June – the beating sun softens and melts the snow. The ice everywhere will be patterned by pools of water that can gleam in delicate shades of blue and green, with surprising dark patches and lines where a crack has opened. And as the ice breaks and moves – perhaps in mid-July (each year is different) – these pools become larger and their colours more startling. The edge of the open water will be coming closer; your home may well come to sit at a floe edge, where the broken pack meets the remaining limit of the fast ice. And in those years when the polar ice retreats to its summer minimum, you will wake up one day to find that the ice around you has gone. The floe edge will have moved off somewhere to the west and east. Wind, tides and currents will have pulled the huge rafts of broken pieces away into the distance, beyond the horizon. Your home will be surrounded by open water, the sea of the Arctic Ocean. Pieces of broken ice will drift by and, with changes in wind direction, the floe can return to surround you, as if seeking to reconstitute its fractured self. But not for long. By August, there will be no more ice – other than passing icebergs as they make their drifting way circling the ocean. In the past, there have been years when the ice hardly broke at all, and you would then have had no sense of being at a floe edge or a time of open water. In recent years, though, as the climate has warmed, the sea ice has contracted and the breakup has taken place earlier each year. Your home is likely to see more and more early summers when the ice around it breaks and disappears.
It will be cold – by the standards of Seoul, and even of winters in New York or London. Down to -60°C (-76°F) in midwinter; in summer it will not often be warmer than 0°C (32°F). But all year round the air is dry, and the sun, when it shines, will startle you with its warmth; it can burn your hands and face – the parts of your body that are not covered by clothing – into a dark brown suntan. There will be snowstorms, but very little rain. You will be in an Arctic desert – a region of the world with minimal precipitation: less than 6” per year. But each inch of this will mean a foot of snow. The porch and decks of your home will be buried deep.
In November, the ice will reform. First as a clear and strangely flexible skin, the frozen surface, moving with the flow of the unfrozen sea beneath it. Then deepening, as the new ice becomes solid – and may take all the bridge supports around you in its fierce grip. The force of this grip intensifies as winter deepens, crushing anything that cannot be pushed to and above its surface. In the days of whalers’ and explorers’ ships that were caught in the ice and forced to overwinter within the Arctic seas, this was a time of great danger. The entire hull of a boat had to be raised above the ice; failure to do so meant the hull would be crushed – like a walnut in a nutcracker. You will feel this immense power of sea-ice.
There will be storms, some of great force, lasting for days. In early spring and the beginning of winter, these can bring falls of snow that are taken up in the wind, much like a sandstorm in the Sahara, streaming across the surface of the sea-ice. When the gusts of wind and swirls of driven snow are at their most intense, you will be unable to see more than a few inches in front of you and will find it impossible to orient yourself. This is the famous white-out of the Arctic, the ultimate enemy of any traveler. But there will also be days of stillness when the weather pauses. Though most days, at all times of the year, a wind will blow. Making the air feel bitter, but, in a paradox of the far north, protecting you from the most extreme cold. This happens within sheltered dips in the land that allow the strange phenomenon of temperature inversion. As you will be far from any land, you will have only the wind blowing onto you and over you, chilling your bones but never allowing the deepest possible cold.
For much of the year, when there is neither the movement of water nor the shifting maze of loose ice, you may look out at an apparent eternity of snow-covered frozen sea and have a sense of lifeless and static infinity. But the world around you is more alive than it seems. At the base of new ice, frozen into the layer that rests on the unfrozen sea, lives a vast wealth of organic matter. Algae and phytoplankton: strange, photosynthetic organisms that, in the arctic ice, are microscopic in size but incalculable in number. They grow on the base of the ice, and when it breaks and melts, these algae are loosed into the newly melted surface – water that is very low in salinity (sea ice becomes fresh water as it ages) and are given energy by the sun that shines all day and night. They become the matrix for an explosion of life.
Phytoplankton grow and reproduce with astonishing speed. Like plants, they extract nourishment from the atmosphere through a form of photosynthesis. The mixture of elements – the fresh water, the sun, limitless nutrition – mean that the plankton are so abundant that whole patches of ocean change colour. At the same time, the movement of cold water down to the seabed causes another form of nutrient rich water to push up to the surface, giving even more nourishment to the tiny organisms that are growing in ever greater numbers. Then the krill arrive – small shrimp-like creatures that feed on the plankton. They become another mass of life swirling in the Arctic Ocean, wherever the ice has broken, melted and retreated.
This turns much of the unfrozen sea – especially where the water is shallow – into feeding grounds for multitudes of fish, seabirds, and a wealth of sea mammals. Two species of seal – ringed and bearded – will spend the whole year in Arctic waters, and deal with the icecap by creating and then maintaining blow-holes - places where they come up to breathe, thus disturbing the water enough to give them access to air. The other sea mammals cannot survive in a frozen ocean, but migrate north: as the sea ice breaks, they head for the vast sources of nutrition that the retreating ice leaves as its great contribution to northern life. Especially whales. Grey, fin and minke whales move through the Bering Sea up into the Arctic Ocean. Belugas and even narwhal also arrive – some apparently having travelled through the northwest passage, a journey that takes them from the Atlantic to the edge of the north Pacific. The largest and most numerous of these animals that head for the great krill bonanza are the bowhead. Many of them will have migrated long distances to be sure to arrive in the Arctic as the algae feed the plankton that in turn feed the krill. Each bowhead will eat many tons of krill before the new ice of autumn forces it to travel back to the south.
Your home will be some 700 kms from the nearest Arctic Ocean coastline, at the edge of the Chukchi Plateau and the Mendelev Ridge. These geological features mean that the depth of the sea at and near your home can be as little as 300 and as much as 3,000 metres. The bowhead whales, like all the other sea mammals, will move along the coast, following the edge of the ice floes that are attached to the shore and headdng out into deeper water only for safety. I do not know if you will have the excitement of whales passing below your home, but for sure they will be swimming and feeding near the supports of the bridge that are near to the mainland. And you may see birds – millions of waders, ducks and gulls also come each spring to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, feeding on the abundant life in the water and nesting on the very northernmost edges and islands of the Asian, European and North American Arctic coastlines. Perhaps some of these multitudes of birds will pass over your home. But the way for you to see and hear and wonder at the great explosions of life that will be taking place close to and on the lands enclosing the ocean will be to make journeys towards the south.
These journeys will bring you to the sea mammal hunters of the high Arctic: Chukchi of the Chukotka peninsula and the Inupiaq of Alaska. They have their homes – ideal, to them – in villages from which they can quickly and easily launch their boats and search for the animals they need. Chukchi and Inupiaq are the world’s great experts at hunting whales – and have been doing so, at the edges of the Arctic Ocean, in the Bering Sea and above the Chukchi Plateau, for a very long time. There is strong evidence that the Chukchi hunting tradition goes back as much as 9,000 years; the Inupiaq have been on the Alaska coast for at least 2,000 years. Many of the people of the eastern Canadian Arctic and Greenland are descended from hunters who were living in the area that is now the Bering Sea as much as 25,000 years ago. To the immediate south of your ideal home may be the original heartland and crucible of many Arctic cultures. In winter or spring, you will be able to visit them by travelling across the ice and they, if they are prepared to undertake an 800-mile journey by dog team or snowmobile, or in summer by boat, will be able to visit you. The Chukchi and Inupiaq will be your neighbours.
The Chukchi have developed two forms of economic life: reindeer herding in the interior and marine mammal hunting on the coast. The homes of these hunters, like those of many Arctic peoples, were circular domes made from sod, rock, and whalebone. Snow would pile up on them, creating an additional thick layer of insulation. These dwellingss could be kept warm with a lamp that burned sea mammal fat that was rendered into a thick liquid, absorbed by the moss that served as its wick. And when they were outside, moving around on a coastline or in boats where the air temperature would almost always be below freezing and often at -40, they relied on the magical properties of reindeer skin clothing. Waterproof boots and outer jackets, so important for people who would hunt from open boats, were made from sealskin. They built their boats by stretching walrus or bearded sealskins onto a wooden frame. And they made all their ropes and lines – vital for hunting sea mammals – by cutting sealskins into thin, long strips. These same mammals provided the materials for them to hunt the mammals. This circle of dependency gave them a sustainable system of life.
The language spoken by all Chukchi is closely linked to the languages spoken by their Siberian neighbours, including the Koryak, and Itelmen. Between them these constitute a linguistic family known as Chukotko-Kamchatkan. It is striking that this group of languages, and its family, have no linguistic overlap with the languages spoken by the Yuit, the Eskimoan people of easternmost Siberia, or their neighbours across the Bering Straits, the Yupik and Inupiaq. All are sea mammal hunters, dealing with the same Arctic Ocean environment, sharing many hunting techniques and shamanic religious beliefs, but they have originated along different lines of human migration to the north. The Chukchi are the most numerous of these Arctic peoples – about 16,000 in number and are one of a set of peoples for whom the Arctic coast is the only possible home, and, for them, the centre of the world.
The Chukchi have not lived easily or safely in their Arctic homes. From the 16th century onwards, Russian forces and agencies have sought to overwhelm or even exterminate them. A series of invasions, with genocidal intent, took place in the 18th century. Most extreme of all was a war launched in 1742 had as its declared and official objective that the Chukchi be “totally extirpated.” But these genocidal invssions were successfully thwarted by Chukchi resistance, with key Russian commanders being killed in battle.[1] It seems that the Chukchi were far more prepared for warfare, and, unlike other Arctic peoples, admiring of warrior types in their own communities. As a result, they maintained a strong cultural presence in the Chukotka peninsular, and both reindeer herding and sea-mammal hunting endured and flourished at the centre of Chukchi economic life and sense of identity.
After 1917, much was changed by the policies of the new Soviet government . In the 1920s, Stalinist determination to collectivise all parts of the Russian rural economy included the indigenous peoples of Siberia. At the same time, some of the so-called “small peoples” of the Russian north were deemed to be too few in number or of too little significance to be given a continuing right to a distinct identity. Others were amalgamated with neighbours. All were reorganised as collectives, but some were able to move, with their herds of reindeer, into the remotest parts of their territory, away from the demands and judgments of Soviet officialdom. At least one sizeable group of Chukchi reindeer herders were among those who managed to disappear into their land. As a result, they were much better able to maintain their heritage – language, spiritual beliefs, shamanic ritual and material culture, including reliance on tents and winter clothing made from reindeer hides.
However, for the Chukchi who were living along the coast, the sea mammal hunters, no such evasion proved possible. As a result, the communities that are living and still hunting on the shore of the Chukchi peninsula have suffered social and cultural changes that, in many ways, have subverted the strength of their indigenous systems. Boundaries between different peoples have been blurred by insistence on community fusion – people from the Koyrat, Itelmen and Yuit live, hunt and, to some extent, have intermarried with the Chukchi. This does not mean that coastal Chukchi have lost their sense of their own history and identity – many continue to speak their language. But, for an outsider, the Chukchi peninsular is a confusing mix of societies and heritage. United by a shared environment and keen to enjoy the benefits of sea mammal hunting – and united, also, by the struggle to maintain a way of life in the course of collectivisation and then its collapse – they are the modern inhabitants, the neighbours you will find to the southeast.
Chukchi who continue to depend on their reindeer herds live no more than sixty kilometres inland. And the links between them and the Chukchi on the coast have always been strong. Sea mammal hunters have been dependent on reindeer skins for clothing; reindeer herders have relied on seal and whale oil to burn in their lamps. Exchange of produce between the herders and hunters has been at the heart of the overall Chukchi system. And I have heard that many reindeer herding families welcomed the possibility of one of their daughters finding a husband among the coast hunters. This would be an acknowledgement of the interdependence of the two sides of Chukchi economic life.[2]
Modernity has of course spread into Chukchi homes – including Russian television and all the distractions and cultural pressures of social media. The language has also come under pressure – for about half the Chukchi population, Russian has become the norm. For the other half, and especially for those who spend time with reindeer or as hunters, Chukchi is the language of Chukchi life. But in the aftermath and shadows of modern change, the Chukchi, like many other Siberians, have suffered social and psychological breakdown. Feelings of overwhelming hopelessness seem to have taken root in the minds of many young people. I will return later to this – the darkest feature of your new Arctic environment.
The people of Siberia are famous for their shamanic beliefs and practices. The word ‘shaman’ itself comes from a Siberian people, though the term in Chukchi is Ilgich. Their form of shamanism is remarkable for its complexity and enduring importance. In Chukchi cosmology. The spirit world is omnipresent – any object can be allied to or occupied by spirits – in Chukchi, ke'let. And there is a degree of malevolence that can, at any time, threaten the well-being or even the lives of those who do not pay careful attention. Observance of taboo-rules, respect for any animal the hunters kill, understanding that success and failure of the hunt - these are dependent on particular spirits. It is said that, at their most dangerous, spirits of the Chukchi world can even want to devour humans.
The men and women who were likely to become strong shamans in Chukchi communities were people who were born with two ‘souls’, one of which has the capacity to transform into a non-human animal. Some of those writing about the Chukchi say that, unlike most other shamanic peoples, they have a history of using sacrifice to appease the spirits that control either reindeer or the sea mammals on which life depends. It is also said that the Chukchi have relied on a strong connection with deceased ancestors and use ceremonial feasting that aims to maintain contact with the dead and to provide nourishment for them in their afterlife. I have read that there are Chukchi beliefs that speak to the journey that the dead must undertake, a journey beset with challenges – including a dangerous bridge the newly dead must cross if they are to find their way from life to their territory after death.
Russian missionaries, in the aftermath of the unsuccessful military invasions of Chukchi lands, sought to discourage and subvert all shamanic beliefs and practices. From the early 1800s, Russian Orthodox Christianity began to be established throughout the Chukchi peninsula. I don’t know how successful these missionaries may have been – as in so many other parts of the far north, their ideas were probably welcomed: after all, if there are yet more powerful spirits who must be feared and respected, this time with the names of Jesus and God, then the shamanic mind could incorporate them into a widening but fundamentally uncompromised spirituality. Syncretism – the blending of Christian and non-Christian systems of belief – has been a well-documented feature of Arctic history. But Christianity does not allow for this blending of spirits: its commitment is to a resolute monotheism: in the missionary construction of shamanic spirits, if they are not sheer superstition, they are the representatives of the devil. Throughout the Arctic shamans were attacked as purveyors of falsehoods that were deemed to be naive ignorance or satanic evil.
In many places I have worked, the effectiveness of missionary assault upon shamanism has been reinforced by other outside and colonial forces. New diseases that the shamans could not heal, but the missionaries often could; traders who could offer material goods and hunting tools, especially guns, and who endorsed the missionary project; and, in due course, the representatives of remote but powerful authorities – the agents of the state – who condemned the shamanic mind as ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’. In the 1920s and 30s, Bolshevik and Soviet agents evangelised against shamanism (as also against Christianity), urging a ‘modern’, ‘secular’, and ‘socialist’ form of life. To what extent have the Chukchi been able to hide or modify or split off their own, shamanic cosmology and world view from all that the new forces have brought? This is a question that those who seek the decolonisation of Arctic peoples find themselves asking and answering in different ways. In many parts of northern Canada where I have worked, men and women have held onto their belief systems, burying them deep – in their minds, in whispered conversation, in practices when out hunting, far from the eyes and ears of the invaders. Now, feeling relatively free of the condemnatory judgments of the missionaries or ‘government’, they bring their own beliefs out of their hiding places. Some people seek to reconnect with their spirits, and rediscover ways of acting and thinking that will mean that such spirits give them success on the land, health to their minds and bodies. They show a profound strength when it comes to resisting the demoralisation brought on them by the destructive efforts of the different forms of missionary and modernity. But for many the shamanic world has been set aside in favour of Christianity in a very decisive manner.
Perhaps you will be able to visit your Chukchi and other neighbours on the coast of the Chukchi peninsular, and to travel the short distance across the tundra to spend time with the reindeer herders inland. You will then, of course, see and learn first-hand about the ways they live, think, and understand the far north. I am sure that you will find that they know their land as only those who have lived deep within it for many generations can. Perhaps as only hunters and herders can – that is, those who need their environment to remain the same, unchanged, and predictable. Within a world that can be known for all its reliable details, hunters create patterns of movement on their land and the sea where they find the mammals they depend on. Generation after generation follow trails at different seasons, use campsites and hunting places, building up a deep intimacy and sophistication of knowledge. All this, passed from person to person, and down the generations, is tested over and over again, refined, restated - becoming an encyclopedia of memories and stories and facts by which their home is shaped, and which are its timeless intellectual foundations. 1829 words Chuckhi/shamanism
A bit closer to you than the Chukchi are the Inupiaq communities of the Alaskan north coast. The village of Tikiraq, known in English as Point Hope, is directly to your south. Ulguniq and Utqiagvik, Wainwright and Barrow, are further to the east along the Alaska coast.
These are all centres of life and home for Inupiaq families, who, like the coastal Chukchi, are hunters and gatherers, with a primary reliance on sea mammals, especially the bowhead whale. Large numbers of these huge animals move through the Bering Strait and then travel east, following the floe edge and leads in the breaking and moving ice of late spring; they remain in these plankton and krill rich waters through the summer. The social, technical, and spiritual systems that the Inupiaq have developed for finding and killing bowhead have been the subject of many volumes of anthropology. There is a sense, in the literature if not in the minds of other Inuit groups, that these hunters of Alaska are connected to the very origin of the hunting peoples of the central and eastern Arctic.
Inuit who live inland, and most of the Inuit communities that spread across Canada and into Greenland, are not, or are no longer, reliant on whale hunting. Caribou and seals, for them, are the sources of large volumes of protein – as well as vital skins from which to make clothing. But all the languages spoken across the Arctic, from the Bering Straits to east Greenland, a distance of over 4,000 kilometres and a geographical area larger than the whole of Europe and Scandinavia combined, belong to the same language family – known in the literature as the Eskimoan. Inupiaq, like all the dialects of this language family, along with Aleut and Yuit, are closely related. Even across long distances, many of them are mutually intelligible. Inuit elders I met in north Baffin Island who had travelled all the way across to Alaska told me that within a few weeks of reaching places huge distances away from their homes, they would be able to understand and speak intelligibly.
Your bridge to the south-east of your perfect home will lead you across the edge of Victoria Island, part of the territory of the Inuinnait, the so-called Copper Inuit, and on to the land of the Netsilingmiut, and from there to the edge of Hudson Bay and the lands of the Iglulingmiut. Then, having crossed Hudson Bay, your bridge will lead you to James Bay, where the Ungava Inuit border the lands of the northern Cree – and only then will you leave the vast zone of the Inuktitut speakers. Each of the Inuit groups has a distinct dialect and style of clothing that are very much their own. All are superb hunters, inventors of the toggling harpoon, experts with dog teams and builders of snow houses. This complex of peoples is thought to have spread across the Arctic about 800 years ago, constituting the culture known as the Thule, and having had their starting point in the region of the Bering Strait, as hunters of whales. The Cree, whose lands your bridge crosses as it continues to the southeast, speak an Algonquian language – as different from Inuktitut as Hungarian from English.
Thus, the Bering Strait, the route through which life pours each year in the direction of where your bridges meet, is both a cultural crucible and a cultural divide. In ancient times, however, before sea levels rose in the aftermath of the last ice age, there was no such connecting sea route. And even now, with the appearance of that neck of water some 12,000 years ago, the Siberian Yuit live no more than fifty miles of sea from the Alaskan Inupik. Yet the Chukchi, and all the Siberian peoples to the west and south of them, speak languages that have no discernible connection with the Eskimoan linguistic family. And Siberia has been the homeland of many cultures, occupying lands that spread around the north, all the way to the Saami, the reindeer herders of Finmark and throughout northern Scandinavia. Each of these northern cultures had, and still has, its own ideal home and its own fund of knowledge about the land and animals and spirits where they lived. For each of them here was the centre of the world.
In pre-colonial times, before the Russian and British empires existed, the peoples of the Arctic lived at the centres of their worlds, making journeys across their territories to hunt, fish and visit their neighbours. Each was its own domain, its own jurisdiction. These communities of hunters must have experienced hardship, but their lives may have sustained a degree of continuity and integration that it is hard for us, living in the aftermath of globalisation and at the heated centre of the digital revolution, to comprehend. There is no such thing as a society that does not change, nor any ultimate cultural isolation. For all of human history people have experimented and explored; but continuity of occupation of a territory and the relatively unbroken practice of a way of life has meant that people have had a sense of permanence reaching back into the mists of time. A deep occupation of their lands that they made explicit in their myths of creation and emergence, and the very shaping, in their minds, by their stories, of the features of their land.
If you can visit and spend time listening to these stories, you will glimpse an astonishing depth of both history and poetry. All around you, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean and beside your bridge as it reaches the mainland of Asia to the west and North America to the east, you will be able to visit the lives and hear the voices of indigenous cultures. Or all that survive. You will also hear about the other extreme of Arctic experience – drastic and painful loss of self-belief, especially among the young, and the related harming of self that, in many Arctic societies, including Chukchi and Inupiaq, has become an epidemic of suicide.
Seeming to be at the edge of the world you may find that you are discovering some parts of its economic and political core. The implications of the youth suicide numbers across the Arctic are one example of this. There are others. In our history Siberia was given central importance – moral as well as political – because it was the site of some of the worst camps of the Gulag, located in the Russian far north-east. Between 1932 and 1962 some two million prisoners are thought to have been taken to the Vorkuta camp alone; across Siberia at least 1.5 million prisoners died in the camps. This use of the edge of the Soviet Union revealed what was taking place in its centre.
On the Alaskan side of the Arctic Ocean, the centre reveals itself in another way: oil and gas. The hydrocarbon industries of the USA now look to the high Arctic for some of their most extensive and reliable supplies. Forty percent of the country’s most valuable oilfields are on the North Slope. Pipelines take oil and gas from Alaska down to the American heartlands. Siberia is also a source of vast oil and gas developments. The potential and actual value of its oil and gas, accompanied by other possible resources, has led to focus on the Arctic as a zone of vital strategic importance to both Russia and the USA. Which has led to startling levels of militarisation: Russia has stationed most of its nuclear weaponry in and around the Arctic Ocean, and sees the far north as the centre of its long-range missile tests. At the same time, the USA has been expanding its network of military bases on the rim of the Arctic Ocean, while NATO has been transferring military sites and operations to the far north. Other nations, including China India and Germany, also have been involving themselves in a looming confrontation over Arctic resources.
Thus it is an irony, or a corollary, that the ‘remote’ edge of the world where your home will be the place to witness both the build-up of global military confrontations as well as a new phase of oil and gas developments. But it way be that the region where your bridges meet is at the centre of the world’s greatest potential crisis: vivid and measurable climate change.
Thus, it is an irony, or a corollary, that the ‘remote’ edge of the world where your home will be is also the place to witness an especially vivid and measurable evidence of climate change. The polar ice is shrinking every ten years by more than twelve percent. Average temperature in the high Arctic is rising by more than double the rate anywhere else in the world. The indigenous people of the Arctic – including your neighbours – have been pointing with alarm at the disappearing or unreliable ice, the changing shoreline, the strange warm summers. You will inevitably be another of the crucial witnesses. And perhaps the bridge, and the home placed away from other and previous homes, is already a statement about this climate crisis: you make a way of reaching the place to see, yet a home where you choose to live away from all the engines that gave rise to this crisis and drive it ever further towards uncontrollable and unmanageable change.
The brutality and mindlessness of colonial destruction of indigenous forms of knowledge and belief is among the great crimes of our history. Yet the hunting peoples of the north have not been defeated, exiled or erased from their lands; they still live in the places of their ancestors, and they hunt the animals and eat the food that their people have always relied on. Despite the transformations and difficulties, many Chukchi and Inupiaq continue to tell one another about the movements of the ice, the arrival of the whales, and to set out in their boats - some of them made with walrus skins – among the moving ice and to the open sea. For all the pain they have known, the shoreline of the Arctic Ocean is their home.
This brings me to questions I would wish to put to you.
I understand the Bridge Project, or find my way of understanding it, by imagining your need to leave the entrapments of your cities, or even of your beautiful Korean home, and enter the world that is beyond anything you have known. Or, to imagine you thinking your way towards another possibility: to build a flow of work, that transcends the damaged earth and the disempowered mundanity of life in the old places. Which is to respond to the threats to those places, and to the world itself. So, the bridge travels through the ecological zones of much of the world - escaping and linking at the same time. And it does so in response to the ecological dangers that the world faces. So you build bridges that lead away from the disasters we are facing, yet they also lead towards them. The bridges are both of and beyond the world. As Rania Ghosn writes, in her piece about the project, you are inscribing your world onto the earth’s surface, “earth writing as it were.” Yet you leave the mere surface of the earth - to some degree in response to your realisation that the earth is in danger. So, I want to ask: is the bridge a refusal of the specifics of place, a throwing of long linkages across the globe, as well as a route to a real, ideal home - sitting at the meeting point of your bridges, in the Arctic Ocean? An engagement with the globe as a whole thing, as well as a design for living at the perfect intersection of your escape routes? Are you leading us to think about the dangers the world faces as a whole, just as much as about the possibility of escaping those dangers in the safety of our home?
Which leads to another kind of question – about the nature and meaning of bridges. Looking at and imagining the thinking within your work, I have realised that much of my own life has relied upon bridges. To get across many kinds of divides, to deal with the chasms of both distance and difference. Thanks to these connections that have been put in place - in the form of road systems and airlines - I have been able to reach communities that, from my Eurocentric position in the world, are remote, and to meet with people whose ways of being are profoundly different from anything I had known. This is the anthropological project – its adventure and, perhaps, an important part of its motivation: to find bridges that cross over to where other kinds of society can be reached. And then to look for bridges that can take me to where those societies have their heartlands – their understanding, their meanings. To reach the hunters of the Arctic I needed bridges put in place by colonial expansion – the journeys of missionaries and traders, the systems of communication, however basic and unreliable, set up by southern governments. And then the bridge of a language, which must be learned, and the bridge that can lead to immersion in people’s lives, which must be accepted and allowed to take their course. Crossing over the chasms of possible mistrust and inevitable misunderstanding.
Your project has made me think anew about the nature of these different kinds of bridges. Are they wide enough to carry more than just the single traveller? Or must they always have lanes along which an invasion might have been mounted? And if they were built in order to invade; can I somehow separate myself from the invaders? Can I, apart and alone, oppose them – while still relying on their forms of connection?
You do not seek to bring change to the zones you cross or to the point where you arrive. But has there ever been a bridge that did not bring some form of change? Each bridge has the potential to let us in - and to open a way for others to come out. Can a bridge exist quite apart from colonial purposes, albeit deeply hidden? Is there a bridge, anywhere, that is without some interest to smugglers?
I also wonder if all bridges go in both directions. Perhaps I can cross over – but have no sure way of returning. Thus the familiar sayings – build your bridges, don’t burn them. Does the anthropologist risk, or even seek to rely on, bridges that will turn out to have been destroyed by the experience of the places to which they lead?
You can see, from these questions, that your Bridge Project resonates with layer upon layer of my work and thoughts. The kind of anthropology and film making that has shaped so much of my life deals in many of the purposes and challenges of your bridge. It also looks to find (and perhaps to get away from) the meaning of ‘home’. The homes I have found - in remote places at the edges of ‘our’ world have been at the centre of a way of life, a territory, a landscape, shaped by generations, perhaps millennia, of use and occupation and, above all, endless depths of knowledge. A home that is at the centres of the world that are ‘theirs’ is, almost by definition, ideal: it is the only real and possible place where a home can be. Yet these homes of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic are threatened by climate change, and the rights of those peoples are still in need of full recognition. These issues are, of course, of special significance in the Arctic, where the consequences of rapid global warming are most visible and especially destructive. Your bridges lead to these questions too.
There is a remarkable passage in Ursula Le Guin’s famous book The Left Hand of Darkness, first published in 1969. The idea that inspires and drives the narrative centres on a human traveling as an emissary of Earth to distant planets, where he encounters people for whom his fundamental concepts are alien - including both gender and the meaning of truth. The traveler from earth reflects on the nature of the journey:
I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there’s more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual… Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical.
Is this how you understand the places to which The Bridge Project might take you?
And I wonder, of course, how any of this might apply to your bridges, your journeys to that intersection where you create the ideal home. Are you connecting the points of possible homes? Or a network of exile?
After my first long period of time living with hunting people in the Canadian Arctic, in communities where almost no one spoke English, and where I had to learn, as if I were a small child having to be raised and educated and socialised all over again, I found that I could not easily adjust to the place I had thought was home. I had worked hard in order to cross over, relying on one bridge after another. But, returning, using some other parts of the same bridge, in reverse, I found there was no real or sure return. Thereafter, I have had a sense of living in exile, wondering what Home could or should be. Or is exile itself a kind of home – the space within which to take a deep pleasure in the bewilderment, the poignancy and even the creative and intellectual freedom of an ultimate homelessness? Home can represent an unwelcome identity, a sense of being a person you are not; so, exile from all that is home can release you into an identity that is not the one you inherit, but is a freedom both to choose and to change your mind.
I have been looking at your images that show the construction of the bridge. They evoke the deep longing to cross divides and all the ingenuity needed to make a bridge possible. They cause me to remember the first time I realised that return journeys - from a distant experience back to home - had become very difficult. Something more than difficult: a sense that I had returned to a terrain that I no longer could see, or that had been reconfigured by all that had happened to me when away from it. And I remember a particular moment. It was a few days after getting back to England after the first long period in the Arctic. I had left the Inuit family I had been living with at their late spring hunting camp, and crossed to the settlement where I could hitch a ride in a small plane. This was the rather unpredictable bridge that connected an isolated Arctic community with an airbase that was reached by scheduled flights a few times each week. In this way I could take the more predictable and long bridge from the Arctic islands to Montreal. From there the even longer bridge that was a flight to London Heathrow. And on, by road, the network of land bridges linking everywhere to everywhere in the urban south, and on up to the Derbyshire countryside.
I was walking there and looking out over the green and patterned land that I had always thought of as the beauty of England. But now, as if with a sudden realisation, it did not seem beautiful. Rather, I seemed to be looking at it through a sheet of glass on which some other kind of land was etched as a misting, dreamlike alternative to all that was in front of me. And when I did focus on the fields, hedges, and woodland, across a valley that spread off into the distance, they constituted a problem: something that had gone wrong. Instead of beauty there was a world that had been trapped and deformed, as if in a net. My idea of a perfect environment no longer included the land I had thought of as home. Later, when I took my Inuit adoptive father and teacher to see the English landscape, he became sad and anxious. “Sanasimajualuk.” he said. “It’s all been built.” I was now seeing through other eyes: I did not see anything natural, just the construction sites of agricultural history. And, like the Inuit elder, I grieved for what had been extirpated, for all that was not to be seen.
This was a change in my consciousness that has never disappeared. And there were others. I was not able to return across the bridges that had led me so far away, and thanks to which I had been able to immerse myself in a different set of realities, and ways of building reality, I could not return to the home I had left.
In due course I would make many journeys back and forth, travelling those bridges to distant places. Thanks to the wealth of the society I came from, where institutions handed out grants and salaries so that people like me could travel, do anthropology, help with projects and processes called ‘research’, ‘land claims,’ and documentary film. The people who live at the farthest reach of the bridges across the world were not able to travel in this way, in and out of their homelands: they did not have the wealth. The cost of a return ticket from North Baffin to Montreal was many thousands of dollars. They could only watch the planes landing and taking off, bringing the rich and powerful outsiders - government officials, construction teams, doctors, tourists as well as the occasional anthropologist. In so far as they might wish to travel, they - especially the young - could well think of themselves as trapped at a margin of all that might have intense appeal. Bridges are, in effect, wide open to some and closed to others.
The families I knew and learned from in the Arctic pitched their tents and built snow-houses in order to live in the different parts of their lands. They had a set of homes, or a way of creating a home wherever they needed to be. So, the seasonal round, the territory they relied on was the locus of home. At the time I lived in those homes there were no such things as mobile phones. I had never seen, still less used, a computer. Entering and leaving those territories, the bridges that had to be crossed then were long and challenging. That was fifty years ago. Now, we all might say, the bridges are shorter and far less daunting. But I wonder. Might there not be something much deeper and more elusive than the practicalities of distance? Along the shorelines of your perfect home, at the juncture of your bridges, there are aspects of the human mind and forms of knowledge that are as difficult to reach as ever. Perhaps more so.
So I wonder how these questions may feature in your thinking, as you make your journey towards the converging points of your bridges and settle into the perfect home. As you look out at the vast spread of sea ice, with its wind-shaped spread of snowdrifts, or the sea itself, with the islands of floe ice drifting past you. As you watch the fierceness of light and of weather, and the glow of northern lights. And as you experience the astonishing explosions of life as phytoplankton, algae, krill, and all the millions of birds, fish, and sea mammals make their connected explosive appearances. I imagine you being there, in the heart of that far north, which is its own heart. Will you find that the bridge has changed its meaning? Will you think of your perfect home on the bridge as a resolution to the problem of exile, a new opportunity? Will your mind be changed, as mine was, in ways that make the return journey difficult or even impossible? Might the bridge that leads back to your former homes bit by bit, segment by segment, disappear?
The spans of your bridge have made me think about shamanic flight. With the power of their minds and the intensity of their beliefs, Arctic shamans, in all the hunting communities of your neighbours, would use trance-like states to leave their bodies to make journeys to elsewhere. Perhaps to make contact with a spirit who had been offended by someone breaking a taboo, and who must be heard and placated. Perhaps to make a journey into another time - to the past, to understand how life had changed, or to the future, to see what dangers might lie ahead. Or the shaman might summon a spirit into himself, becoming the embodiment or the voice of the supernatural, bringing awe and fear right into someone’s home. All these forms of shamanic transcendence relied on intense concentration of mind and the unquestioned focus of creative energy.
This brings me to a final question about your bridge, and even your perfect home, suspended as it will be, a part of the bridge. What supports the bridge? What flux might take it across the ocean, and what are the struts that can carry it over the crevices and chasms that so divide the world? Your wonderful drawings and designs of all the component pieces, including floating systems of support, are a powerful and important part of your answer to this kind of question. But I wonder if there is another dimension to the demands of a bridge, the forces it will have to rely on in order not to crumble and fall or disappear. A strength of belief, a conviction, that must be generated over and over again. Maybe a form of resolve that comes from and always must depend on your creative energy. In this, you are the shaman, making connections that fly above anything so ordinary as the contingencies, mundane practicalities, and all the limitations of ordinary life.
And as you fly, or as we are given to understand the creative journeys you undertake, we cannot but wonder about what will happen to you, and to the bridge and home you are building.
[1] from wiki: The first attempt to conquer them was made in 1701. Other expeditions were sent out in 1708, 1709 and 1711 with considerable bloodshed but little success and unable to eliminate the local population on the large territory. War was renewed in 1729, when the Chukchi defeated an expedition from Okhotsk and killed its commander. Command passed to Major Dmitry Pavlutsky, who adopted very destructive tactics, burning, killing, driving off reindeer, and capturing and killing women and children.[18]
In 1742, the government at Saint Petersburg ordered another war in which the Chukchi and Koryak were to be "totally extirpated". The war (1744–7) was conducted with similar brutality and ended when Pavlutsky was killed in March 1747.[18] It is said that the Chukchi kept his head as a trophy for a number of years. The Russians waged war again in the 1750s, but a part of Chukchi people did survive this extermination plans on the very far North East.
[2] Much of the detail here relies on the experience and insights of the wonderful Arctic photographer, Bryan Alexander, who has spent time with both coastal and inland Chukchi over the past 35 years.