Rocky Brook, Northwest Territories;
1950

One day when Kowanerk & I were alone, she looked up from the boot she was mending to ask, without preamble, "Do we smell?"

"Yes."

"Does the odor offend you?"

"Yes."

She sewed in silence for a while, then said, "You smell & it's offensive to us. We wondered if we smelled & if it offended you."

Tribal life has been described as "a seamless web of relationships" where all information is shared alike by all members. This is certainly true of most information. But not all. Information may be deliberately withheld in playfulness or for power or for many other reasons. Yet my impression is that communications are superb in this tiny igloo settlement. Conversations are tough-minded, yet sensitive. The brutality of life is acknowledged, yet poetry is part of daily living & there is great sensitivity in personal relations.

Life at the government weather station some twenty miles east is quite different. Most of the men there haven't spoken to each other for months. They never leave the base. The jukebox has nothing but outdated popular songs. The library contains 1,500 books, but most are unreadable. One is entitled English Pewter Marks. The film library includes "How to Clean the M-I Rifle," "Venereal Disease" & "Security." This last film has a brief scene with a female spy - a scene the men project over & over, running it forward, backward, upside down, shouting out the same loutish comments, addressed to no one. There is virtually no human communication in this multimillion dollar electronic communications center. There have been several murders at other weather stations this year; there could easily be one here.