CRUMPLED PAPER BOAT ABOUT SAR ADVANCED SEMINAR TITLES EXPERIMENTS IN ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING Since 1970 the School for Advanced Research (formerly the School of American Research) has published over one hundred volumes in the Advanced Seminar se­ ries. These volumes arise from seminars held on SAR'sSanta Fe campus that bring together small groups of experts to explore a single issue. Participants assess re­ Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, editors cent innovations in theory and methods, appraise ongoing research, and share data relevant to problems of significance in anthropology and related disciplines. A SCHOOL FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH ADVANCED SEMINAR The resulting volumes reflect SAR'scommitment to the development of new ideas and to scholarship of the highest caliber. The complete Advanced Seminar series DUKEUNIVERSITY PRESS Durhamand London 2017 can be found at www.sarweb.org. word, annaktuq, is also used to describe an animal or quarry that gets away, escapes a death. Human survival is etymologically linked to escape from death in a hunt. The intimacy of the other death, the death that one some­ 19 how escapes, is crucial to Inuit lifeworlds-the other death imagined as one's own, but a death that one has, for the time bein.9,escaped. The bear hunter, in Gandolfo's piece, also escapes, first, the insipidness of servile, A Proper Message productive existence, and, second, the hunter's own mortality, which is em­ LISA STEVENSON braced but only through the animal that is loved and killed. The animal dies, and the hunter, for the time being, escapes death. Is it possible that to be able to write about, to render, other lives we enter a make-believe world where, if only for a moment, there is such a thing as escape for our prey, and thus also for our fragile bodies, for ourselves? Per­ haps this possibility of escape (which always means to witness the death of A voice involves the throat, saliva, infancy, the patina of experienced life, the another, a death you know will someday be your own) is what we mean by a mind's intentions, the pleasure of giving a personal form to sound waves. What lifetime or a lifeworld. That without that possibility of some kind of escape attracts you is the pleasure this voice puts into existing ... we might as well not bother to write? That through writing we create a world -ITALO CALVINO, "A King Listens" in which we diminish our powers, on purpose, so that our prey has a chance of escape. Of course, in the end, with writing, as with hunting, someone In the midst of a Thanksgiving dinner, with people splayed out on the always dies or must already be dead. Surviving, like writing, entails witness­ floor-a middle-aged man with his back against the legs of a chair recount­ ing that other death that is also our own. ing a road trip across the southern United States, a teenager twisting her hair around her finger and gazing inertly in front of her, a couple of kids lying on their stomachs, engrossed in their own densely laid world of right and Notes wrong-and everyone eating and talking and bickering as most families, 1. Gandolfo, this volume. happy or sad, eat and talk and bicker. In the midst of all that, two women 2. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations,57. face each other, the younger one kneeling on the floor at the knees of the old 3. Diamond, "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy." woman, a woman whose legs can no longer support her weight, a woman 4. Stevenson, Lifebeside Itself. who has been lifted from a car into the house and placed on the living room couch. The two women bring their faces close together, so close they are almost touching, their arms resting on each other 's shoulders. They sway slightly as they begin to kataq.The younger woman starts, and the sounds she makes come from the back of her throat, low and thick, almost growling. Ham ma ham ma, ham ma, ham ma- she breathes in and out in a steady rhythm, intensely, her vocal cords bruising each other. Buzzing, panting, the older woman's voice comes in and moves up and down as if plucking the lower rhythm, teasing it almost. The sounds and rhythms pass from body to body, echoing and playing with each other, growling, buzzing, yelping. 208 LISA STEVENSON There's something machinelike and modern in sounds that are also archaic In June 2008 I received an email from Anna, Sakiassie's daughter, who and guttural. had been trying for several years to figure out what happened to Kaujak. 5 "My name is Anna," she wrote, "a few years ago I was in search of my dad's Ham me, ham ma, ma, ham ma, ham ma, ham ma grandmother that passed away on the train to Hamilton, they unloaded her Ha ha ha, ha he he, ha he he, ha he he ha ha ha ha body before reaching Hamilton." The only trace Anna has been able to find Then the old woman breaks off and cackles loudly, hooting almost , in plea­ in her search for Kaujak is an index card from the municipal offices with sure. The younger woman laughs too and wipes away tears. People smile, Kaujak's name and disc number typewritten on it. Handwritten in ink are clap, and go back to what they were doing . the words "Dead" and "1956." A few months later the old woman dies in her sleep. I am in the house when Kaujak raised Anna's father, Sakiassie, as a son, after his own father the young woman returns, but I've already heard the news. I hear her shut­ drowned in a hunting accident when Sakiassie was only one year old. Anna ting the door, putting down her purse. The ordinariness of the sounds is told me that Sakiassie was very attached to his mother-grandmother and hard. "She's gone," the young woman tells me, thinking I don't know. "My that "Kaujak was able to do things a man could do, she was a very good anaanais gone." In my memory it's as if she is swaying, but not rhythmically, fisher, she would go fishing, dry fish." Each spring when Sakiassie goes rather as if she might fall over. fishing "a lot of the techniques [he uses] he learned from her." Anna tells In one sense these katajjaiitare not well understood even by the women me, "She was a very able woman ... she was [capable] of.doing things that who perform them (and these days they are performed all over the world, at men were capable of doing. She was able to build qaumaqs[sod houses]. The the Olympic Games in Vancouver, at the World Conference on Women in Bei­ year before she left she couldn't build the qaumaq and she developed an jing). Between cry and language,1 many katajjaiit have no discernible words infection on her stomach and on her back .... When the ship came in to whatsoever. Just the breath-rhythmic, guttural, staccato-being passed screen people for TB they screened her and that's when they sent her away." from one body to another. Some have titles like Kitturiat(Mosquitos) or Qim­ Sakiassie was fourteen years old when Kaujak was sent away on the CD miruluapik(The last little puppy). Some people say that the sounds voiced in Howe.I ask him whether he remembered the day of his mother's departure. katajjaiit were words used by the remote ancestors of modern -day Inuit, and "Yes, I remember very clearly," he tells me. Her illness had been getting that what the words mean is forever lost. 2 Others say that katajjaiit can only worse and she began to pay visits to family members, even distant relatives, be understood by the dead or their ambassadors-the northern lights, for ex­ saying she might not live long enough to see them again. Sakiassie was very ample, who make their presence felt by whispering or whistling, or the tunni­ worried. "!twas very painful when the helicopter came from the ship to pick tuarruit,the flying heads without bodies, that occasionally descend to earth. 3 her up to move her," he tells me. Kaujak was taken from her camp outside of town to the ship where the medical team was waiting. Kaujak tested posi­ tive for tuberculosis. A Son Listens Generally when the x-ray technician discovered a shadow on the lung On August 10, 1956, an Inuit woman named Kaujak left the Canadian Inuit Inuit weren't allowed to return to shore for fear they would never return to community of Arctic Bay,4 on a ship known as the CD Howe,to begin her the ship. But for some reason they made an exception for Kaujak. She made journey to the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, Ontario. For months a last trip to shore in a small skiff. Sakiassie didn't get to speak to her. He Kaujak had been getting weaker and weaker. She was increasingly unable to was unloading the ship's supplies at the time, and he saw his mother smil­ hunt and fish as she once had, and the medical personnel on the patrol ship ing and posing for a photograph - all from a distance. 6 had diagnosed her with tuberculosis. Her grandson, Sakiassie, standing on That fall, in October sometime, Sakiassie doesn't remember the exact the shore, followed the ship with his eyes until it passed out of sight beyond date , the Hudson's Bay Company manager called him on the radio to let Uluksan Point.