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My father has always had an interest in Inuit art, but he took me by surprise one day when he suggested we pay a visit to Canada’s far north. His initial motivation in going there was to see the Inuit stone carvings. Later, however, he became more and more curious about the Inuit culture in general. I agreed; I thought it might be nice to get a glimpse of Canada beyond the usual Montreal-Toronto-Vancouver circuit. So after looking at tourist brochures, speaking to travel agents, and attending a fair on tourism to the Arctic, I decided we would go to Cape Dorset.

The town of Cape Dorset lies on Baffin Island in Canada’s Arctic Ocean. Politically, the island is part of Nunavut, a recently formed Canadian territory governed by natives. Cape Dorset, located in the southern part of the island just across the Hudson Strait from northern Quebec, is internationally renowned for its soapstone carvings, many of which have been exhibited throughout the world. As well, over 90% of the town’s population is Aboriginal, ensuring we would get a true taste of Inuit culture.

So on Monday, August 20, 2001 we started out on our journey. We first flew from Toronto to Ottawa and from there to Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut. On the latter flight we sat beside a ten-year-old Inuit girl who talked to us about her recent visit to Toronto’s Wonderland (an amusement park just outside the city), life with her family in Iqaluit, and caribou hunting expeditions with her grandfather. Afterwards my father laughingly remarked that she was a very sweet little girl — except when she described shooting the caribou.

A few hours later we took a small plane (so small in fact that we could see our luggage piled in the back) to Cape Dorset. When we arrived at the town’s airport, the owner of the hotel I had booked was there to greet us. Both he and his assistant, a woman from Alberta, were White, but most of the people we met, including the other hotel staff, were Inuit.

Though the Inuit are often lumped together with native Indians as Canada’s First Nations, physically they resemble East Asians more than they do Amerindians (while both the Inuit and Indians originally came from Asia, the former are believed to have migrated to the Americas later than the latter did). I wondered whether I might have crossed paths with any Inuit in Toronto in the past. If I had, I concluded, I had probably mistaken them for East Asians.

During our week in Cape Dorset my father and I did a number of things. Both of us purchased soapstone carvings — for at least half the price we would have paid in Toronto. I bought several stone polar bears. I told the woman selling them that while some girls were boy crazy, I was bear crazy. My father bought among other things a carving of a woman giving birth, with another woman standing behind her to "catch" the baby (it reminded me of a book entitled Midwifery is Catching).

One aspect of the trip, which still stands out in my mind, is the fact that this was my first experience ever of being a minority. I was one of the only Whites in a sea of so-called "others." At first I felt self-conscious; I imagined (mistakenly, I’m sure now) everyone was staring at me. But the friendliness of the people soon put me at ease. In fact, when an old woman carver — incidentally, the mother of the artist who had made the piece of the woman giving birth — told my father and me she’d seen us the day before in the area, I was almost flattered someone recognized me. If I hadn’t been a "minority," I would have gone unnoticed.

My father and I had come to Cape Dorset to learn more about Inuit culture. We quickly found out, though, that the Inuit had inevitably been affected by contact with Europeans and their descendants. The Inuit were after all part of Canada. Most of them were Christian (in this town, either Anglican or Pentecostal), and indeed, they seemed to take their religion far more seriously than the average Anglo Canadian did. As well, much of their food was imported from elsewhere in Canada, food which I must admit was not one of the high points of the trip — though we did have some delicious Arctic char (a type of salmon) one night.

Yet many Inuit did retain some of their traditional customs. For instance, we saw caribou hides outside people’s houses. Mothers often carried their babies in the hoods of their parkas (how the women did this without choking still puzzles me). Perhaps even more significantly, the majority of Cape Dorset’s inhabitants still spoke Inuktitut, the Inuit native language, which has official status in Nunavut, even if for the most part they knew English as well and frequently had English first names.

The people’s contact with Whites was apparent not only in their religion and food but also in the Caucasian features of some of the town’s inhabitants. I noticed a number of blond-haired children, for example. I remembered some years earlier I was dating a Mexican man of mixed Spanish, Italian and native American descent. We had talked about having a baby together, and he suggested that because many members of his mother’s family were fair-haired (he himself was not), we might produce a blond child ourselves. At the time I didn’t think the chance of that was very high, but after I saw the blond children in Cape Dorset the possibility no longer seemed so remote.

My visit to Canada’s Arctic also got me thinking about other Natives in the Americas. On the whole, their plight has not been an enviable one. Both demographically and culturally, the indigenous peoples of the New World have been swamped by European invaders, to the point where the Americas have become, in the words of Belgian sociologist Pierre van den Berghe, a "cultural extension of Europe." Such a situation is quite different from that of other regions colonized by Whites. Though much of Asia, for instance, came under European rule, its original cultures remained more or less intact.

A number of Native American groups who retain a good portion of their traditional cultures may be found in Latin America. Like the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, these groups generally reside in areas unsuitable for European agriculture or difficult for Whites to adjust to physiologically (such as the highlands of the Andes).* Countries with a significant indigenous component include Guatemala and Bolivia (where Amerindians form more than half the population) and Ecuador, Peru and Mexico (where they constitute a considerable minority). Some Latin American nations, such as Peru and Paraguay, have acknowledged their Native heritage by giving one or more Amerindian languages official status alongside Spanish. However, Native Americans throughout the hemisphere have seen their numbers and cultures overwhelmed and in some cases completely overtaken by Europeans and the latter’s mixed race descendants.

I often think about the trip to Cape Dorset, and I feel I learned a lot from it. On the chest of drawers in my room are several carvings I bought there. My father sometimes speaks of going back to visit Cape Dorset, so once again I may experience being a "minority" for a week or so.

* From the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.

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