My life as an Inuit girl

Icicles form on your eyelashes and your nose freezes up, but on Baffin Island Jane Dunford finds it's modern life that poses the greatest threat
An Inuit child climbs out of an iglu on an ice floe in the Opingivik area of Baffin Island
An Inuit child climbs out of an iglu on an ice floe in the Opingivik area of Baffin Island. Photograph: Stephan Savoia/AP

If you want to build a state-of-the-art igloo, there's a thing or two you need to know. The right snow is crucial: it must be 'aputi', 'perfect snow' in the Inuit language, not 'sitiju', too hard, nor 'aquittu', too soft. The angle of the first block is important: too great and there's no roof; too small and you end up with a horizontal wall. If you get it right, the spiralled blocks, steadily decreasing in size, are unshakable.

I was up in the frozen hills outside Kimmirut, a remote Inuit settlement on Baffin Island, Canada, learning a spot of DIY from Joe, the mayor, and Josephie, one of the village elders. In less than an hour my home for the night was complete - easy as pitching a tent.

'Do you know how to use the gun in case of polar bear?' asked Martha Padluq, my Inuit host, as she piled Arctic wolf and caribou skins on the ice bed.

I'd come to Kimmirut to learn about traditional life in perhaps the harshest environment on earth, staying with one of the last aboriginal peoples. There are no roads between Baffin's capital, Iqaluit, and Kimmirut, a village of 400 people on the east coast, so earlier that day I'd boarded a 17-seater plane for the half-hour flight. Squashed in between boxes of Sultana Bran and washing powder, I stared down at mile after mile of treeless wilderness, endless jagged ripples of snow and ice like a badly finished Christmas cake. The fifth-largest island in the world, Baffin is one-and-a-half times the size of Germany - with just over 13,000 inhabitants it's among the most sparsely populated places on Earth.

As we piled out of the plane I scanned the crowd for a fur-clard woman with dogs and sled in tow. But Martha arrived on a skidoo and wearing a beret.

Clinging to steep slopes around a natural harbour, Kimmirut was first visited by outsiders when Scottish whalers landed in the 1800s. An Anglican mission arrived in 1909 to convert the islanders from shamanism, and the Hudson's Bay Company opened its first port here in 1911. By the 1950s many Inuit who had lived in small hunting camps along the coast had settled in the community.

While there's not much in Kimmirut itself - a cluster of wooden houses, school, church, a small museum and two shops - the sense of isolation and harsh natural beauty make a heady mix, particularly in winter. Each day, the sea ice in the bay drops several metres with the tide and rises again to meet the shore ice like a giant jigsaw puzzle being pushed into place with a muffled creak.

On the hill above the harbour lay Martha's chalet-style house, with a huge polar bear skin drying on a stretcher outside. A couple of pink-cheeked children stopped to stare. We're known as 'Qallunaat', meaning eyebrow/belly folk - apparently our most striking features.

In these temperatures, icicles form on your eyelashes and your nose sticks together when you breathe, but before the frostbite set in Martha appeared with assorted animal skin clothes.

So, dressed as an overgrown seal, I retired to my igloo for the night. Winter homes until the 1960s, igloos are today used only as emergency shelters for hunters. I'm no hunter, but the night passed uneventfully and surprisingly warmly, given that it was -30C outside - with no curious bears, just a couple of kids joyriding snowmobiles nearby.

The skidoo has replaced most husky sleds and the rifle has usurped the harpoon, but hunting and fishing are still cornerstones of Inuit culture. Food flown in from the mainland is expensive, and 'country foods' - whale, seal, walrus, caribou, eider duck and goose - remain an essential part of the diet. So early the next morning I set out with Moe Ikkidluak, the 23-year-old son of Kimmirut's most revered hunter, to learn more. 'Hunting's still important, but the younger generation prefers to watch TV or play ice hockey, and eat chicken from the store,' he said.

We snowmobiled for an hour across frozen sea to the floe edge, where the ice melts. It's a serenely beautiful landscape of icebergs, blue-tinted snow and patchy sea ice. The air is incredibly pure and the deep peace is slightly unnerving.

All the while, Moe scrutinised the land, reading barely perceptible signs of life or danger with the understanding of someone born here. This is true polar bear territory, but hunting 'nanook' is carefully regulated. Each year biologists assess the local bear population and set a limit on the number the community can kill. There is great kudos (and cash from the sale of the pelt) to be had for the hunter that brings one home.

'Can you hear the walrus breathe?' asked Moe as I stood speechless. Sure enough, in the distance, five walruses had surfaced. We spotted seals too, bobbing about in the ice. 'Raw seal tastes good,' said Moe. 'I eat it when I'm hunting. But I prefer pizza with pineapple.'

Though no seal passed my lips, I did try cooked walrus - a bit like steak but with a fishy aftertaste - and raw caribou dipped in soya sauce.

Back at Martha's house, I met her mother Jeanie, a well-known bootmaker. Traditional sealskin boots, 'kamik', take a week to craft. It's a long process of scraping off fur, washing, drying, cutting and sewing. Jeanie showed me how to soften the leather, nibbling on the skin, as though it were corn on the cob.

I learnt to fish through the ice, too, and had a lesson in driving a husky sled. The Inuit used to travel by sled for days, hunting, sleeping in igloos, surviving. Today it's a dying tradition.

Winter nights are long and dark on Baffin Island. Alcohol was banned 20 years ago in Kimmirut after a community vote because of high levels of alcoholism, so there are no bars. Instead, locals socialise at the village hall, often playing traditional games like 'ear tug-of-war' or the 'wood-sawing race' with unbridled enthusiasm, and eating seaweed or Mars Bars.

Baffin Island is part of Nunavut, Canada's newest territory, created on 1 April 1999 to give control of the lands back to the Inuit. But fresh challenges face the community as the young move away for work, or swap harsh traditional ways of life for convenience foods and satellite TV, and climate change affects seasons.

My visit coincided with Nunavut's anniversary celebrations, and in the town hall, Elijah, one of the old hunters, showed me the Inuit version of 'cat's cradle', called 'ajaraq'. His dexterous fingers turned the string into a pack of dogs pulling a sled. 'I haven't mastered the snowmobile yet,' he shrugged.


The Great Adventure Company, based in Edmonton, Canada, organises Native Cultural Homestays on Baffin Island (00 1 780 414 1676). Packages are tailor-made, with prices from £77 per person per night including meals and accommodation. Air Canada (0871 220 1111) flies from London to Ottawa with fares in April starting from £304. Flights from Ottawa to Kimmirut are operated by First Air (00 1 800 267 1247), from around £790 return.