The Heat Is Online

Melting Permafrost Unearths Sacred Graves

Waking the Dead, Rousing Taboo
In Northwest Canada, Thawing Permafrost Is Unearthing Ancestral Graves

The Washington Post, Oct. 17, 2001




But for the Inuvialuit, the westernmost of Canada's Inuit people, there is an immediate and haunting concern: what to do about their ancestors who are no longer resting beneath the ground. The dead can't bury the dead.


"Spiritually, we were told never to be around grave sites," says Andy Tardiff, a park ranger, whose ancestors once lived here. "It's a taboo even for us to touch graves. It's a taboo. But we can't leave it the way it is."



No repairs were made on the Inuvialuit graveyards, which are now in the poorest condition. The government now says that the decision "was a mistake, especially when tourists were tampering with graves," Tardiff said. "It's too bad. That's 14 years of nothing."








A group of scientists is studying the melting of the permafrost. Until measurements have been taken for a few years, they are not supposed to say whether the problem is caused by human-created global warming, rather than some other phenomenon, Gordon said. But, he added: "We all know one way or another it is connected to global warming. You can see it happening on a day-to-day basis."



A sheet of ice pushed north, scraping the ocean's bottom into a pile of land. The seas later rose around the mound -- modern scientists say the ocean was about 460 feet below its current levels in the middle of the last ice age. The Inuvialuit called the new island "Qikiqtaruk," which means simply the island.


Soon after Franklin's arrival, whalers came to hunt in the Bering and Beaufort seas. There was a demand for whale oil as well as whale bones, which were used to make corsets. The whalers kept and made bad company, and their rowdiness attracted the attention of the Anglican church, which sent missionaries. Later police arrived on the island to maintain the peace and establish Canadian sovereignty. At the peak, about 1,500 people lived here.

"You know that time when they first started to come, they had no priest," said Peter Thrasher, an elder. "They started drinking. They try to kill each other. Their wives, they lost them to those white people. When that preacher came, just like that, all the bad people stopped."

Storms arose suddenly, sometimes tragically. The one that people most talk about happened on March 7, 1897. Some whalers and some Inuvialuit were playing baseball. A blizzard came from nowhere. When it had passed, five frozen corpses were found. One man lay dead only 100 yards from his house.

Over the years, disease took its toll as well. During the 100 years after their first contact with Europeans, many of the island people died from exposure to new diseases: flu, smallpox and typhoid. "The flu epidemic killed hundreds of people," Tardiff said. A rash of smallpox nearly killed the rest: "In 1902, people noticed people rubbing their backs in the snow, making the snow red."

Given this history, some scientists who visited the island are concerned that moving the graves might release diseases that were buried with the dead. "People were buried in permafrost so their flesh is frozen in time," Gordon said. "When that great epidemic happened with the flu, is that going to be released back into the atmosphere?"

On a recent day, the Beaufort Sea was restless. There was a wet chill blowing as Tardiff pulled on his big rubber boots and stepped into his motorboat to ferry passengers across the cove into what could be Hades, where grave sites were moving.

At the shore, Tardiff turned off the motor and tied the boat to a rock. He began to ascend the hillside. Coffins were above the ground in various states of undress, as if the graveyards had been caught in an invisible storm that picked them up, then set them down as it pleased. A coffin sitting on this slope one day could move five feet away the next.

Before contact with Europeans, the native people built wooden burial platforms on which bodies were placed so that the souls could commune with the moon. Some of the platforms were more than six feet high. "Now, everything is down. After the big flus, they buried everybody," Tardiff said.

He walked over the slushy ground, like stepping in a knee-deep, icy swamp. He stopped near what appeared to be tumbling wooden boxes, not drawing too close, out of respect. "This is what happens when the actual hill site comes down. It forces the casket up with the bones and the shoes. But it's taboo to touch them."