The Ottawa Citizen Amenities: Gravity, grace and seal meat: Forget the heavy science, the Inuit say, in order to build an igloo you need snow Sun Mar 16 1997 Page: M7 Section: Arts - Weekly Byline: Ken MacQueen Dateline: Rankin Inlet, N.W.T. Illustrations: Color Photo: William Belsey Black & White Photo: Igloo builder Ollie Ittinuar says snow has to be of the best quality to construct an igloo Black & White Photo: William Belsey An igloo never dies, it just melts away. It is as new as the season and as old as Arctic history; a frozen piece Occasionally, the igloo builders of Rankin are of genius -- disposable, biodegradable and cheap. summoned south to demonstrate their skill at a winter carnival or a cultural event, but that is as close as Cheap? It is free. A free house. What a concept. they get to making money from the craft. Below the treeline, the igloo was long ago reduced to Another bit of Inuit ingenuity, the kayak, was more a cliche. There is not much use for frozen houses in successfully transplanted into the North American the South, and if there were, igloos would be wage economy, although not to the benefit of those outlawed, free housing being a danger to the who took nature's leftovers -- skin and bones, antlers economy. and driftwood -- and developed a classic hunting craft: sleek, light and seaworthy. It is southern In cartoons, and in the southern imagination, the factories and craftsmen who turn out kayaks today in igloo shell is drawn as a perfect hemisphere. Wrong. every colour and space-age material imaginable, Those who study igloos say its design is far more except, of course, seal hide or caribou. mathematically complex. On the northwest coast of Hudson Bay, kayak is The igloo is a catenoid, from the Latin for the shape usually spelled qayaq, and igloo is usually spelled assumed by a chain held only at the ends. The design iglu. There is a sense that southern people, usually uses compressive forces to hold it together, unlike a spelled qallunaaq, never get it right. hemisphere, which pushes down upon itself until its walls buckle and its top falls in. An igloo is made of snow, naturally, which is why you never see one in a museum. Not that the igloo is From Roman times until today, many of the world's an artefact. In May here, when spring is easier to major edifices are topped with domes. Yet most of imagine, there is Pakalak or `play around time', with the great domes of civilization would collapse if their games, dog-sled races and igloo building contests. bottoms weren't held together with iron hoops, chains or masonry buttresses. Not that the igloo is a plaything either. Igloo building is a near essential skill, as much as reading or The igloo needs no such help, notes Richard L. writing, says Mr Karetak, his hands wrapped around Handy of the Engineering Research Institute of Iowa a mug of tea in the family's cosy, cluttered kitchen. State University. His 1973 research, still quoted by His nose bears the frostbite of seven hours on a scientists in the field of igloo building, concludes that snowmobile yesterday, driving north from Whale the Inuit design is `structural perfection arrived at by Cove into the wind. trial-and-error, without benefit or prejudice from mathematical theory. Say your qallunaaq-made snowmobile craps out, or the batteries die in your Global Positioning System, `The design process constitutes an evolutionary for those dependent on such toys. Or a blizzard optimization for design of domed masonry structures, comes howling across the tundra. This is a land matched but hardly surpassed by modern scientific without trees or shelter or roads. Snow is what there engineering.' is; work with it. No kidding, says the average Inuk igloo builder in Igloo-building is passed down from elders to Rankin Inlet, who is prone to wonder whether children. It is also taught at Maani Ulujuk high scientists don't have too much time on their hands. school by Jack Kabvitok, the land skills teacher. You have to be a genius to live up here, says elder Igloos save lives. It happens all the time. Johnny Karetak, 67, who spent his formative winters in igloos. Ollie Ittinuar, who is 76, was born in an igloo at Chesterfield Inlet, the next settlement up the coast. `Our forefathers had to be highly intelligent in order His family lived traditionally, travelling to hunt, fish to survive and for us to be here today,' he says, and whale, using igloos when the season dictated. speaking through a translator. As a young boy, after carving many play houses, he FPinfomart.ca Page 1 asked his father's permission to build the entrance to the family igloo. He failed to fit the difficult curved The igloo, having weathered a harsh southern wind, top of the tunnel, and he recalls crying in frustration. survives as a modern symbol of Inuit pride. And a damn fine shelter. His `transition time' started in 1949, when he took on wage work for the RCMP. He was a guide, still One of the fathers of the new territory is John building many an igloo to keep the law alive and Amagoalik, the sinewy, sharp-tongued chief sheltered as the RCMP mushed north from Churchill, commissioner of the implementation commission. Man., to more remote settlements like Baker Lake and Repulse Bay. Mr Ittinuar also acted as mailman, He has not built an igloo since he was a teen. `If I had distributing government cheques and other to, I probably could,' he says over a bad phone line curiosities. from his office in Iqaluit. Could the next generation say the same? `I think young people have to For the younger generation of this post-war era, the recognize that there is some ingenuity in their transition from life on the land was profound and heritage, and being able to build an igloo and survive abrupt. The federal government and the Church, a blizzard is part of it.' represented at Chesterfield by the Roman Catholic mission, began a concerted effort to educate and The art and science of the igloo is an exercise in `civilize' Inuit children. grace, harmony and balance. Much like an Oriental martial art, it turns an enemy's power against the The pattern at Chesterfield's Joseph Bernier School enemy. during the 1950s and 1960s was depressingly similar to earlier experiencess at native residential schools in Or as Mr Amagoalik once put it: `A blizzard creates the South. The business of educating was often taken the right conditions so man can build shelter from it.' as a licence to proselytize, abuse and assimilate. The Inuit language was suppressed; the culture, with its It all comes down to snow, of which there is not as igloo building and other survival skills, was much in the Eastern Arctic as one might think. discouraged and devalued. This is a polar desert. The force of a blizzard is as apt The experiment across the Arctic did create an to be horizontal as vertical, the snow moaning across educated class, now a fortysomething generation of the tundra from afar, scouring all in its path before some of the most articulate and accomplished piling into drifts that are hard as plaster of Paris. aboriginal leaders in Canada. Many have had key roles in the creation of the Eastern Arctic territory of `Is it igloo quality snow?' asks Ollie Ittinuar, Nunavut, which comes into being in 1999. warming to the subject. `It's just like wood. You don't use any kind of wood to build a house. If it's poor But the residential schools also created a twilight quality wood it reflects on your work, and if it is poor world of casualties who drift between traditional and quality snow it also reflects on you.' southern cultures without belonging to either. Earlier, Johnny Karetak, gazing out his kitchen Today, almost 30 years after the school's closing, the window, said much the same. He pointed to a bulletin board at the Rankin Inlet Co-op store snowbank where several children were sliding, advertises counselling for former Joseph Bernier oblivious to a brewing storm. `If you were to ask me students still trying to cope with the experience. to make an igloo right here, I would refuse you. It's not good.' Peter Ernerk, 50, now a commissioner of the Nunavut Implementation Commission, an advisory body for The best snow is rarely the freshest. It is older snow, the new territory, calls his removal to Bernier school often buried below the surface, laid down in a from his parents' hunting camp a sanctioned form of continuous layer during a single storm early in the kidnap. Until that day in 1958, his home had been a season. It is dense, but not so dense that it loses its series of tents, five-metre-diameter igloos and sod insulation value. houses. In the December issue of Arctic, a quarterly academic The three-storey school residence seemed huge and journal on northern issues, three scientists -- G. Peter terrifying. Kershaw, Peter Scott and Harold Welch -- made a determined effort to measure `The Shelter `Looking back,' he has written, `I realize my Characteristics of Traditional-Styled Inuit Snow departure was forever.' The emotional bond with his Houses.' parents was never the same. The effect upon a generation -- lost parenting skills, alcoholism and Considerable science went into constructing two social breakdown -- was devastating. igloos, three and four metres in diameter, at Resolute in the High Arctic.