Free The Shaman's Knife by Scott Young Page A

Sanirarsipaaq.
    He seemed to have shrunk since I saw him last, years ago. His clerical collar was several sizes too large under his open parka. He sat with his arm comfortingly around the shoulders of a very old lady, maybe of my mother’s generation, who was making a steady heartbroken sound, stopping only for breath. Another old Inuit woman sat at her other side, tears running down the deep lines in her cheeks. Many other women, especially the old, wailed as they wept. Some alone, some with the women, were somber, set-faced men with tear-filled eyes. Little kids stared, upset and wide-eyed. Some teenagers were trying to keep the little ones calm, holding their hands, talking quietly.
    I knew what was happening. I had been part of it from time to time myself, long ago.
    â€œFather Lovering,” I said, leaning over to him.
    â€œMatteesie,” he said, looking up, unsurprised.
    The old woman he was holding to him was oblivious, her wails uninterrupted.
    â€œThis is for the boy and his granny killed in Sanirarsipaaq?” He nodded and briefly met my eyes. “The young man murdered, Dennis Raakwap, was young and bright, much beloved,” Lovering said quietly. “Good schooling, more planned . . .”
    So my guess had been right. It was always this way for the young and treasured, not so much for the old. Deaths of the old by sickness, accident, drowning, freezing, starving, are seen as natural, inevitable—they have lived their lives. When a young person dies, cut off almost before the real life begins, it is a wound to the survival of our whole race, our culture, our language. The worst losses are those suffered through suicide or murder, unnatural ends. A young girl’s suicide through lack of job opportunities, a perceived hopelessness, an unwillingness to keep on in the world she sees, of drink, unemployment, serial welfare, so that she chooses death instead, brings such an outburst as I was seeing now.
    There were tears in my own eyes. All the brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, loved ones, of the vastly extended family that is common to Inuit life were here. “They’re from Pelly Bay, Hall Beach, Gjoa Haven, Spence, Cambridge, Igloolik,” Lovering murmured, looking up at me. “Even Iqaluit, Inuvik. Gathered here to mourn. It is the double blow, Dennis and Thelma . . . not only the loss of a good young man, but Thelma was the mother to some here, granny, aunt, cousin.”
    I turned away. No doubt some would come on to Sanirarsipaaq, others would not. The old taboos against touching the dead or anything that had belonged to the dead are no longer so strong as they were, but the Inuit always would rather remember the live person than mourn over the body emptied of its soul.
    When the boarding call came and I moved with the wet-eyed mourners who were continuing to Sanirarsipaaq, I felt part of them more than just in the physical sense. The last time I had grieved among others this way was when a sixteen-year-old girl in Paulatuk, my first cousin, had hanged herself, apparently out of deep despair that what she saw around her was all she had to look forward to. She was wrong, she was special, but it is the special people who most often fear that they are not special
enough
. Among the weeping people gathered with me in that other airport I had heard a kindly white woman, just wanting to say something to show sympathy, ask among the mourners, “How old was she?”
    A middle-aged Inuit woman with a ravaged face had replied calmly, but too fatalistically, a common trait among my people, “Old enough to make up her own mind.”
    The plane was not very crowded for the fairly short flight on to Sanirarsipaaq; there were perhaps fifteen of us in all. As usual, the passenger part of the plane ended at a partition behind which freight would be stowed. The partition, movable depending on the size of the freight load, had a small door on the left hand