All the Way Read Free Page B

landscape and the landmarks that you see in summer have disappeared under the snow. You lose your sense of direction. You can get lost just like that. People get lost all the time—people who don’t know the territory. They say they’re going out hunting for the day, the day turns into two, and then search-and-rescue has to get out there to find them. A storm can just turn around on you within hours.
    I don’t really care to go hunting or fishing down south because it’s not like it is here.
    When I say “hunting and fishing,” people envision going to a camp where dinner’s served and you have a guide and everything’s taken care of. They don’t understand how tough it is here, that you’re on your own. Like that caribou we saw. You may want to shoot a caribou, but then you have to deal with the fucking mosquitoes and cutting it up and hauling it out. Your regular hunter down south has people to do that for him.
    When my buddy Scottie Upshall came up here, I told him we’re going to jump on the quad and go fishing. For him, jumping on the quad meant riding on a road, a paved road, for a couple of hours nice and easy, because that’s what they know down south. It’s not that you break your own trail and it’s hard. I think it came as a bit of a shock to him, getting knocked around like that.
    When I was a kid, as much as I loved the fishing and hunting, the best part was all the other shit we had to do: packing up, making camp, unpacking, tying everything up. That’s really hard work, but for my dad it’s just second nature. You tie everything up and when you think it’s tied well enough, he tells you it’s not because he knows how rough it is out there. Knowing those little things, that’s what I really admire about my father—that he has all those skills and that survival mindset. I think that’s how I learned to go into survival mode when I’m out on the ice. That comes from all the trouble I’ve seen out on the land growing up, because even when things are going okay, something bad is going to happen eventuallyand you’ve always got to prepare for it. Out on the land, you never know.
    MY PEOPLE, the Inuit people, are very humble. And they work together. When times are tough, they depend on each other. As an Inuk person, when I go home and look at our elders, I know that life is very simple for them. As long as they have their traditional foods and culture around them, life is good. All of this other materialistic stuff means nothing. I think that’s what’s great about being an Inuk. Whatever is put in front of you, you deal with it and go from there. For my family, everything has always been pretty simple. We don’t need a nice car and we don’t need the best Ski-Doo to be all flashy and be the cool guys. Up here, being a good hunter and a good family guy is all that matters.
    I come from a mixed race family, but there’s not a lot of talk about that in Rankin Inlet. A lot of white people come up here for jobs. It’s the same in a lot of the remote communities. Race is less and less of an issue because there are white people who have lived here for generations. Here, you are really defined more by your surroundings. A lot of white people move up north, people who have grown up in well-off families and had everything given to them. They come here and it kind of brings them back to earth. They start to realize that what is most important is living a simple life and being able to provide for your family. That’s why knowing the land, going out hunting and fishing, and knowing the tradition of living the Inuit lifestyle are more important thanrace. At the end of the day, people who move up north from down south aren’t going to change how life is up north because that’s simply reality. Instead, they have to become Inuit in their own way. They’ve got to live the Inuit lifestyle or the