University Times

This time, the research team didn’t travel by dogsled and snowshoe. But a revisit to the site of the 1938 Carnegie museum exhibition to the Hudson Bay’s Belcher Islands took Pitt photographer Jim Burke to a world of Inuits (Eskimos), wind and dead Eider ducks.

For 10 days last month, Burke snapped about 2,500 images to document the cultural change and continuity of the Inuit for an upcoming exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Polar World, one of the largest exhibits on the Canadian Inuit in North America.

“It looked like Mars,” Burke said of the Belcher Islands landscape, stretched by flat expanses of rock, sod and water. “When you walked, either the ground was real hard or real soft.”

The project was coordinated by Jim Richardson, Pitt professor of anthropology and curator of the Section of Anthropology at the Carnegie Museum, and was directed by Boston anthropologist Dale Mudge, guest curator of the exhibit.

In 1938, explorers led by J. Kenneth Doutt, then curator of mammals for The Carnegie, set out on a 9-month journey in pursuit of North America’s first fresh water seal, rumored to inhabit Labrador. Doutt’s group endured temperatures 20 degrees below zero, slept in igloos, navigated ice flows and almost starved to death when their food caches were stolen. Eventually, their intrepid spirit paid off: They found the first fresh water seal, a new subspecies, Phoca vitulina mellonae at a land-locked lake in Quebec. The animal was named after Mary Taylor Mellon, whose husband, William Larimar Mellon, funded the expedition.

Doutt shot more than 2,000 high-quality pictures of the Inuit inhabiting the Belcher Islands, who served as guides and hosts during the four months the explorers spent on the islands after returning from their seal expedition. Doutt captured the Inuit smiling in their duck-skin parkas – fashioned from the skins of Eider ducks, feather-side in — and hunters standing next to a prized walrus. He documented the lives of this close-knit community, only lightly touched by the outside world, which toured in sealskin kayaks and survived on hunting, fishing and trapping.

The photos resided in The Carnegie’s archives until a high school principal from the Belcher Islands called Richardson about four years ago wanting to see the images. Apparently, the Inuit, numbering only about 750 in the Belcher Islands village, remembered Doutt and his photos and were curious about them. Richardson approached Burke, a long-time associate of the museum, to print pictures for the villagers from Doutt’s glass-plate negatives.

“When the Inuits got the photos, it was very emotional,” Richardson said. “There were people who saw photos of their parents or grandparents for the first time.”

At the same time, Mudge had just completed a book featuring photos of Navajo Indians in New Mexico taken from 1948 to 1952, and was looking for another subject. Richardson told her about the Belcher images and Mudge put together a trip with Burke to photograph the Belchers Islands again and detail how their society had changed.

And in the intervening 66 years, change has been plentiful, the team discovered. Now there is a school, two stores, televisions and houses, according to Mudge. But strong traditions still survive, she said. “The village still hunts for seal, whale and polar bear – harvesting and consuming 5,000 pounds of seal a year. And they prefer that food” she said.

Mudge’s exhibit at The Carnegie in 2005-2006 will detail what has changed and what has not since the Doutt exploration. But despite the comfort of some modern conveniences, the people’s ties to the land still cannot be denied, Mudge and Burke said.

He couldn’t help but notice the importance wind played in everyday life in the Belchers. “In the days of the 1938 expedition, survival depended on where the wind would blow driftwood. You had to know because there were no trees, peat or wood there.” He learned about the wind when duck hunting for Eiders with some Inuit guides. “Let’s assume you shoot a duck; it falls into the water. You don’t have a retriever. How do you get it? You wait for the wind to blow it in.”

As Burke develops his photos from his Belcher trip, he contemplates about a return to the islands. “I would like to go up in the winter time, to capture the experience of how people deal with the temperature when it hits 30 degrees below for extended periods of time and the Hudson Bay freezes up to a depth of 6 foot.” If he returns, perhaps he too will need a duck-skin parka and dogsled.

-Mary Ann Thomas