The Icelandic Canadian - 01.10.2002, Side 13

Vol. 57 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
55
surgery. This was another very dramatic
event.
I was interested in the helping profes-
sions. I was also interested in the ministry.
My own church, First Lutheran, had
adopted me as possible theology candidate.
Rev. Eylands encouraged me. These ideas
were in my mind when I was in the
Sanitarium, but when I came out I went
back to University where they were then
teaching sociology.
There I developed a mentor, Bill
Morrison, who was a sociologist with a
background in anthropology. My grades
had been terrible before I went to Ninette
(likely due to my illness) but I tended to
excel in sociology and psychology.
I changed my mind about the ministry,
where I had thought more to be a teacher at
a seminary than to have a congregation. I
wanted an academic career.
I was encouraged by Dr. Morrison to
pursue graduate school in sociology. I did-
n’t even know what anthropology was. I
applied to various schools and was given a
teaching assistantship at University of
Michigan State in East Lansing, where I
spent two years working on my Masters
degree.
There I developed a new mentor,
Richard Adams, a prominent anthropolo-
gist, who taught in the combined sociology
and anthropology department. Then I
applied to receive a teaching assistant job at
Cornell University. My plans had been to
work in India. Bill Morrison had done
research there and I had met some others in
Michigan and also at Cornell with special
interest in India. However, a latent interest
in Canadian Arctic studies rekindled itself.
I had met Vilhjalmur Stefansson when he
spoke and I was student in Winnipeg and
he had an influence on me. Just a number of
things came together—I didn't want to
work in India for it would require a life-
time of commitment to work and also the
language and written materials to learn. I
did my doctorate on the Canadian Arctic. I
taught for two years at Marquette,
Milwaukee. An offer came through to
teach at UCLA. I really had planned to
stay and teach in the United States, but
then another offer came up. It was from the
University of Manitoba where they had
something new called "Senate for
Settlement Studies". They brought me up
for a two year term. They had very good
research funding for studying new commu-
nities across the northern frontier. I accept-
ed and have stayed here ever since.
I had an interest in law and did my
masters in the area of legal sociology. I
wanted to look at what was happening to
the Inuit of Arctic Canada as they were
brought into the Canadian legal and social
systems. I believed they had a legal system
of their own and I wanted to see what kind
of conflict there might be and how they
resolved it.
So I went to a place called Pond Inlet in
northern Baffin Island for that research.
Something happened there that I was not
expecting. I felt I would spend the year's
field work, which was mandatory at that
time, in the settlement. Most of the Inuit
were living on the land in small hunting
camps. If I was going to work with them I
would have to go out of the settlement. I
arranged with the local Mountie that I
would move in with an Inuit family just for
a few weeks out on the land in a hunting
camp about 100 miles from the settlement.
He took me out on a tour of all the camps
and had arranged for me to meet Jimmy
Muckpah who was about my age. I was to
stay with him. I ended up staying almost a
whole year with them This was not what I
had expected! The Mountie had explained
to Jimmy that I wanted to live as an Inuit.
Jimmy took this very seriously and he
decided to teach me to be like him and his
people.
I brought some food with me that I
bought from the Mounties. That first night,
I gave it to the family and we had a Western
feast. They could not speak a word of
English and I could not speak their lan-
guage. The next day I had to eat with them
(native food). They were full time hunters
living in tents. Shortly after I went with
them to their winter camp which was par-
tially made of sod and scraps of lumber.
We made snow houses when we hunted.
We became very close, and we have pre-
served our relationship.
I wrote a book about called Living on