End of March

It is late March and we are working away. We finished our 280th interview today, and have given out over 800 referral vouchers. We usually expect about a third (or sometimes one half) of the referrals to result in interviews, so we are pretty close to what we expected. With almost 300 done, we are breathing a sigh of relief. The method worked, more or less, and we are starting to feel like the minimum threshold has been crossed.

I took much of the day off thursday, just to catch up on things and to stay out of the office. Josh is back from Montreal, where he want for a couple of days to give a paper at McGill and get a little R and R. The husky dog (above) is Uppik, the dog that Josh is planning to adopt. Uppik means "bake apple", a kind of berry like fruit that grows low to the ground that folks here like for jams and sauces. On my day off I went out walking for a couple hours....to take some pictures and get a bit of exercise. In town, quite a few people are back from caribou hunting. The folks above got 7, which they were butcher when I walked by. They will freeze some, eat some, and give alot away....which is one of the things we are tracking in the interviews: who shares hunted meats with whom.

I walked up the hill behind town, and got up above the tree line, which is less than 100 meters above sea level here. Even though we are at a low lattitude, the geography of eastern Canada makes this a sub-arctic zone. The actually tree-line...the lattitude beyond which no trees will grow, is about 12 miles north and east of here, meaning that the climate is about the equivalent of the northern Coast of Canada around the Mackenzie Delta on the Arctic Ocean. Today, walking to work, the wind chill was still around -30 degrees. So much for March going "out like a lamb".

This last picture is looking down on the village from the hill, about 100 meters above the tree line. you can still make out the houses if you click on the picture and blow it up to a larger size. The wind up there was pretty strong, which made the snow a kind of ice sheet, and hard as a rock. The under packing is actually still pretty fresh, the surface has a harness that seems more the result of pressure than temperature. I have quite a few photos from the walk, but this seemed about enough for the moment. Today we are finishing up interviews for the week, and taking tomorrow off. If it gets a bit warmer, we may go for a ski...if not, I will find a book to hide out with. No gardening on the schedule for a while yet.

Spring is here?

Well, it turns out I'm not very good at blogging. I had meant to keep up more regularly, but the time goes by pretty quickly.


It's spring here, sort of. It was still -15 C last night, and is quite crisp still this morning. But we have had alot of sun, and folks here are glad for stretch of cold, clear weather. The caribou have come a bit closer to town, and the ice is still pretty good for folks who want/need to go off hunting. Four skidoos have been lost so far...all to poor ice conditions, but it looks like the ice will hold a while yet--which is good for the food situation. And the mood is upbeat. A friend told me that he got more than 100 partridges on his last outing, which he spread around his extended family. This seems to be a big year for partridge, with lots of folks getting them close to town, usually while out "woodin". The picture above is of caribou ribs hanging out to dry--resulting in "niku", caribou jerky. I've had it a couple of times, and its good. The recipe is simple...leave it out until it is dry, the result of a freezer-burning process that "cooks" the meat with cold dry air.


One thing that is probably different than in the past is that there is a market for self-produced foods and resources here these days. Some folks sell meat and wood, more of the latter than the former. My sense is that there has been some sale of meat here for a while, though usually to outsiders (I've been offered to buy country foods many times since I've been here). But these days there is more of a market even for those who live here full time and grew up here. This upsets folks, but is usually chalked up to the fact that there are jobs here now and people can't "go off on the land" as often as in the past, and those with jobs can afford to pay. More troubling to many people is the fact that money has entered into family exchanges. Here it is less a question of selling openly, but more a growing expectation that even family exchanges often involve expectations of cash reciprocity....money for gas and bullets in return for meat. There are lots of social science terms for this process, most of which imagine a pre-captilist era when kinship dominated the logic of exchange. I'm not sure about this, though. Kinship works so differently here than anywhere I've been in the past. But at this point I can't really say how.

The upside of the good spring weather is that we are starting to put together plans for a trip....3 or 4 days out on the ice and up north to the Hebron area for some hunting. It will have to be soon, maybe later this week, while the ice is good. More on that soon too.