Trumped in Peckerdom

We landed softly on the sand that serves for an airstrip in Inoucdjouac, Nouveau-Quebec. Immediately I spotted one of my students. Johnny Nastapoka, chubby and always cheerful, stood among the crowd greeting us, a big smile on his face. "You brought good luck," he told me. "This is the first sunny day all summer." Mosquitoes still flew thick in the breeze.

Jeanne and I, just married that summer, chose to walk the half-mile to the village, taking in the fresh air after the cramped and too-hot atmosphere of the Twin Otter. We talked of our eagerness to start the school year--and to get out on the land for fishing, goose-hunting, and picture-taking. Our blue-green house stood waiting for us, full of forty-some boxes of goods that we'd shipped by air cargo in advance. Books, teaching materials, bulk foods for the year, our supply of alcohol . . . and a new pack of Rook cards.

It took three days to unpack and set up housekeeping: interspersed with evenings of partying with the other returning teachers and our local friends among the young Inuit adults. The returning teachers (Wayne, Claude, Suzanne, Jeanne and I) revelled the two newcomers, Sandra and Ann, with tales of last year--"the Golden Days."

There were stories of a teacher who was railroaded out of the north, a raving self-proclaimed genius. Of a mysterious pregnancy among the Inuit teaching staff, and aborted teacher strikes. Of Claude himself, tall and red-haired, with proudly tailored mustache and beard and friendly wrinkling eyes, venerable in his seven years of service without a full year's teaching, due to every mishap from fire and plague to lack of a principal. Wayne began to kid him right off the bat: "So, Claude, what's it gonna be this year, huh? What have you got up your sleeve now? Another strike for us, this time for real? Of course, you're not even working full-time to start with, with this P.E. job you wangled from the front office. What a con-artist, for Christ's sake. Now how 'bout some of that cognac. C'mon, Claude, I know you've got some . . ."

"No," Claude smiled sagely, "not for you, Wayne. This is for something special."

"Ah, dja hear that Sandra, Ann? It's gonna take something I don't have to pry it loose from this cheapskate. How about it?"

Wild-haired but balding, ultraradical yet also deserving of Jeanne's malicious label "bourgeois pig," Wayne was King of the Office Mondays through Wednesdays, and chief party host the other nights of the week. An Ojibway teacher the previous year had nicknamed him "Pecker." Rough and ready Conrad, who'd lived with Suzanne the previous year, was moving on and would be sorely missed. But with Wayne the regime continued. Our North had become, in a year of hazy weekends of Alcool, hash and Rook, his "Peckerdom."

But there was another force to be reckoned with. Not the previous year's principal, rotund Roland Chenier, alias The Black Knight. Nor his wife, affectionately referred to by Wayne as The Black Knightie. They were not coming back. The hidden force was mythological, at times synchronistic. It surfaced with a phrase we heard repeated often while playing Rook, on Dylan's recent release Blood on the Tracks; an expression fast gaining the status of an official philosophy among the teaching corps, and even among the students. When my oldest student, a Mark Messier clone named Adamie, showed up late for class one day and I asked him why, he replied with an ironic grin: "I dunno, man. Just a simple twist of fate." Alice Cooper gave the darker side of this force a name: "The Black Widow."

I was full of renewed hopes for educating Inuit youth, after a rocky beginning. All along there was an underlying malaise I had to feel in this venture, because of my role as colonist, assimiliator. More and more, during my first year, I had found myself in the uncomfortable role of weaning the younger generation of Inuit away from a lifestyle and culture that I admired more than my own.

The students' parents didn't agree with my uncertainty. "I grew up in an igloo," one told me via translation. "The winters were cold and people died of starvation. That's why we moved into the settlement. These children have to learn how to live in the whiteman's world now."