Northridge, California;
1964

Though I have written, over a period of fifteen years, on a variety of topics concerning my life with the Eskimo, I have not, until recently, attempted to describe those experiences that touched me most, the images that come to mind when I think back, the ones I live with. I've wondered whether this failure derived from personal censorship or from poverty of expression; whether the words used to cover ordinary experiences failed when the situation went beyond; whether the spirit & memory didn't recede as well. The few times I tried, in relaxed moments, to tell someone what it felt like to undergo intense happenings, I faltered: "It was more involved than that ... I guess I loved her, but that says nothing ... he sat in the dark, crying, blaming me. …" Words failed, images failed, even memory failed. The whole key & rhythm of my life had been altered forever by a handful of experiences that left no communicable mark. And even now, as I wait for the right words, I wonder how accurate, how honest, these descriptions will be, and to what extent I am working them up a little afterward.

For months after I first arrived among the Aivilik, I felt empty, clumsy, I never knew what to do, even where to sit or stand. I was awkward in a busy world, as helpless as a child, yet a grown man. I felt like a mental defective. There was so much distance between us, such unnatural silences. So I smiled a lot, though smiles come grudgingly to me, and helped lift, pull, or do anything. These efforts were met with stares. But gradually my feelings of stupidity & clumsiness diminished, not as a consequence of learning skills so much as becoming involved with a family, with individuals. If they hadn't accepted me, I would have remained less than an outsider, less than human.

I had done extended fieldwork before, in the tropics, and did more later. But this was different. I recall an afternoon with an Eskimo whom I admired and his daughter whom I loved. She was betrothed. I was married. He once sent her to me, an act that embarrassed me & hurt her. She was named after his first wife, whose memory I knew he lived with. The sealskin tent was warm & close; all of us were laughing at his stories until she saw her eldest half-brother approaching with his team along the coast-ice & spoke to her father: "Son-ours-comes, betrothed." It was a spontaneous outburst, at once tender, incestuous, pleading, yet with full awareness of its effect on each of us.

Such experiences left me indifferent to the cold reports coming out on the Eskimo: they were alien to all I had experienced. I gradually stopped taking the wrapper off the American Anthropologist; I let my membership in that organization drop; I listed my occupation as teacher, not anthropologist.

In the early fifties there was only limited interest in Arctic research & even less backing. So I helped dig the Toronto subway & worked nights in a brewery to finance trips, a breach of faculty etiquette my colleagues never forgave. On the first trip, my food never arrived - a great asset - and soon I abandoned all gear, traveling unencumbered, dependent on hosts. It was still a primitive world. The Iglulik used stone lamps; impoverished Okomuit hunted without cartridges; an angakok publicly hung himself following an unsuccessful séance.

But soon the Canadian Arctic was drawn into the world battleground and anthropologists settled about the posts, exhausting the traders' liquor & misinformation. They seemed uniformly unhappy, counting days until they left. I assumed they would publish nothing, because they experienced nothing, or if they did publish, their reports would be ignored. I was doubly wrong. They published voluminously & they all took one another's publications seriously.

I speak only of Canadian reports, for though I've visited Alaska, Greenland, Siberia & Outer Mongolia, these trips were superficial. Most Canadian reports I judge to be based on casual observation, full of heavy theory, fusty kinship data & pretentious claims to insights into self-concepts, all badly written & few of lasting value. Most are so dull they lessen man's respect for man. I see anthropology as far more than the study & presentation of man. It's experiencing man: sensing, appreciation, recognition. It's art.

We're not all agreed on this, of course, but we are agreed - at least we pay it lip service - on the necessity of accuracy. I checked one voluminous Eskimo kinship study and found a 32 percent error in marriages alone: the investigator simply had not known who was who. In another instance, an Oblate missionary forwarded to me a list of Eskimo kinship terms requested by an itinerant anthropologist; he asked that I locate the man whose name he had forgotten. The list, to which the missionary had been asked to add the Eskimo equivalents, had been copied from Notes and Queries on Anthropology - a childlike manual on how to do fieldwork.

When I encountered these same anthropologists at conventions, they didn't seem at all ludicrous. They were poised, sure, condescending. Their data & theories seemed eminently suitable to their role as government advisers. They communicated easily among themselves, reaffirming concepts that arose solely from professionalism, unencumbered by those thrilling insights that pierce the hearts of those who care nothing for professionalism.

Shallow fieldwork & bad writing are forgiven on the assumption that if a professional was "there," his data must be valuable. "Being there" is regarded as necessary & sufficient. Civil War veterans who read The Red Badge of Courage said, "Crane must have been there. No one else could have known what it was like." Yet we know he was born six years after Appomattox and, at the time he wrote, had never seen a battle. The details he heard from veterans; the truth of terror he learned by more complex means. Top of the World contains superb Eskimo dialogue, yet its author, Hans Ruesch, never saw an Eskimo. Knud Rasmussen & Peter Freuchen combined fieldwork with genius; the world knows the Eskimo through their books, not because they were the first to publish, which they weren't, but because they experienced man & left us intense, beautiful revelations.