Aerospace III - The Inuit Cycle

Aerospace III - Suqi's Tale

Aerospace III : The Inuit Cycle

Suqi's Tale

Gordon Best

Chapter 1 : Himba

When we heard of their arrival it was me that reacted as if hit by lightning. This is Suqi here.

I am a well educated 70 year old inuit woman, with a brilliant husband, Irniq, and three mature children who have 12 children between them. I have done my part. We live in Caniten on the Caniapiscau River in Nunavik, Great Shield. But when the '100' came I told Irniq that we had to pack and move to Ivujivik.

It is the most northern of our towns and that is where the Himba people moved. I had to find out why. Ivujivik has four large domes and one medium one. It is on the northern point between Hudson Bay and Ungava Bay. Why the Himba moved there was not clear.

The first thing I found out on arrival in Ivujivik, was that they were from the Kunene River region on the Namibia / Angola border. They were from a far up region, inland and isolated in Namibia.

I first met Twako or Twakoseka, a very social and funny young woman dress in western garb. She became my friend from the start and she knew who I was. Twako said, as we sat in the cafeteria, looking out onto the sea, north of us,

"I am a Himba woman, who has chosen to help a change come about. Our people are again under threat of being pushed out. But we are not uneducated. We have mobile schools and we learn english with our own language and culture. We got an offer from your Nunavik government to come here and learn your survival skills."

"I am glad you came. I have a great interest in your reasons for coming here and I want to see you succeed."

"You are famous in our group. It was our plan to come and visit you when we were finally settled."

"Well, I have good instincts." We both laughed. "And I see you do as well. You could not have picked a more difficult spot in Nunavik."

"Yes, it was our plan."

I said, "And this is the most difficult location of the five domes. The domes are so exposed that we wondered if they would survive. The road never got here and the airport is dangerous. We built a dome on either side of the runway and we made the airfield a full 4km long. Wind screens at each end make it safer to use."

"It is so different and cold. But I cannot understand that it used to be much colder?" Twako said. We laughed a lot that day and I fell in love with Twako.

At the end of the day, I invited her and anyone she wanted to bring, to visit us.

They came to learn. There were more than two hundred by the time they all had arrived.

Irniq met with Kakuve Tjihoto during the same period. When I was talking to Twakoseka my husband was taking to Kakuve her brother.

Irniq told me that Kakuve and many of his family wanted to learn to be pilots. I suggested that they all become pilots. So we brought people to this distant spot, from Caniten and taught the lot. We trained them in the most difficult flying conditions and we tried not to tell them, that it was not normal. They will be well trained, when they go back. They will also be trained in airships, because it was our intention of leaving a small fleet of such ships, when we go back with them.

They learned every aspect of the gardens, the dome systems. We visited Lab City and showed them the 3D printers and dome segment construction. We showed them the hundreds of domes and explained why each dome was where it was. We told them about the 40,000 people that lived here before the domes were built and how it grew quickly as each dome sheltered 20,000 people.