Qajartalik

← Encyclopedia

In the early 1960s, an Oblate missionary working out of the mission at Wakeham Bay, on the north coast of what is now Nunavik, told a visiting French ethnographer that there were devils carved on an island a few hours out in the strait. The ethnographer was Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, then in his twenties and beginning the fieldwork among the Kangiqsujuaq Inuit that would occupy him for the rest of his life. He went to look. On the eastern tip of a low island in Hudson Strait he found a shelf of soapstone, gray and lichen-mottled and scoured smooth by the wind, and on it faces — dozens of them, browless and open-mouthed, staring straight up out of the rock. He recorded ninety-five. Later inventories would raise the count past a hundred and eighty. The missionary had been right about the faces and wrong about everything else.

The great island in the strait

The island is called Qikertaaluk, “the great island,” and the point where the carvings lie is Qajartalik, “where there is a kayak,” from the Inuktitut qajaq. It sits in Hudson Strait roughly five kilometers off the Nunavik mainland and some forty kilometers southeast of the Inuit community of Kangiqsujuaq — the town the missionaries knew as Wakeham Bay. The carved shelf is a modest thing to hold so much: a rise about fifty meters back from the shoreline and fifteen meters above the sea, along a rift of steatite that runs some hundred and thirty meters across the point. Steatite — soapstone — is soft enough to work with a harder stone, and that softness is the whole reason the place exists as it does. The same outcrop that took the faces was a quarry. For centuries people came here to cut blocks of the gray stone for oil lamps, the qulliit that lit and heated a house, and for cooking pots and the raw material of carving. The extraction scars and the faces are cut into one continuous body of rock. The sacred surface and the working rock are literally the same stone.

There is a jurisdictional oddity built into the ground here, and it matters to the story. Qikertaaluk is one of the offshore islands of Hudson Strait, and by the boundaries drawn on federal maps those islands lie within the territory of Nunavut, not the province of Quebec — even though the island sits off the Nunavik coast and is used, reached, and cared for by Nunavik Inuit. For more than a decade that ambiguity froze the site in place. In 1997 the Avataq Cultural Institute, the Nunavik Inuit heritage body, applied to have Qajartalik named a National Historic Site; the application was shelved while governments argued over whether the island answered to Nunavut or to Nunavik. Only after the offshore land-claims settlement of the following decade recognized Nunavik Inuit rights to the islands did the file move again. A carved shelf that had held its faces for a thousand years waited on a line drawn in an office in the south.

The people who made the faces were the Dorset — the Dorset culture, known in Inuit oral memory as the Tuniit, the strong, shy giants who had the country before the Inuit came into it. They were a pre-Thule, Paleo-Inuit people, unrelated to the Thule ancestors of the modern Inuit and separated from them by a genuine gap in the record; the genetic evidence shows almost no mixing between the two. The Dorset held the eastern Arctic from around twenty-two hundred years ago and were gone by roughly a thousand years ago, overtaken and replaced, not absorbed, as the Thule pushed east out of Alaska. Saladin d’Anglure made casts of some of the Qajartalik carvings and, on the style of them, assigned them to the Dorset — and to the latter third of the Dorset era, which would make the faces something between seven hundred and fifteen hundred years old. The site has never been dated by any physical method; the attribution rests on the way the faces are made and on what the Dorset are known to have carved elsewhere. Thule and later Inuit kept coming to the island for its soapstone, but they left no petroglyphs. Only the Dorset carved the rock. In 1996 Avataq returned and inventoried the whole shelf in detail, lifting the recorded total from d’Anglure’s ninety-five to more than a hundred and eighty images and giving the site its archaeological catalog number, JhEv-1.

The Inuit community of Kangiqsujuaq, formerly Wakeham Bay, on the Nunavik coast of northern Quebec; the Qajartalik petroglyph shelf lies on an island in Hudson Strait some forty kilometers to the southeast. Lkovac, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

A crowd of faces

What is on the rock is faces, and almost nothing but faces. This is the first thing that sets Qajartalik apart from every other rock-art site anyone has cataloged: there are no hunting scenes, no boats, no animals in a landscape, no narrative at all. There are faces, front-on and disembodied, and a handful of animal heads and creatures that are part human and part beast. Most are human. Each has a clearly modeled forehead, cheeks, a chin, eyes, a nose, a mouth — and then it stops. There are no ears, no hair, no necks, no bodies. The face floats on the stone, cut off at the jaw and the hairline, as if the rock were a surface the being was pressing through from the other side.

They come in every size. The smallest are two or three centimeters across, barely more than a scored notch; the largest run past seventy centimeters, big enough to fill a person’s whole field of view when they kneel over it. Most sit in the middle range, somewhere between ten and thirty centimeters. The small ones were made by incision, scratched and grooved into the soft stone; the large ones were pecked and battered out with hammerstones, a slower and heavier labor. And the faces vary in shape as much as in size — round, oval, square, triangular — so that no two are quite the same, and the shelf reads less like a decorated wall than like a gathering, a crowd of distinct individuals turned up toward the sky.

The details are what pull the reading toward ritual rather than portraiture. A good many of the faces carry horns, or long pointed ear-like projections, rising from the top of the head. Mouths gape open; some faces have swollen, distended cheeks over an open mouth, which archaeologists have read as the act of blowing. Fine grooved lines cross some of the chins in patterns that look like the facial tattoos worn in this part of the Arctic, or like scarification. None of this is the vocabulary of an ordinary human likeness. Horns, open mouths, tattoo-lines, the human face slid halfway toward an animal’s — these are the marks of a being that is not simply a person.

A Dorset carved-ivory swimming bear from the Iglulik region — the kind of small, powerful spirit-figure the Dorset usually made in bone, ivory, and antler. Qajartalik is the one place where they cut such faces into living rock, at monumental scale. dalbera from Paris, France, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

To see why the shelf matters, it helps to know what the Dorset otherwise carved, which was miniatures. Across the eastern Arctic they left an extraordinary body of small sculpture in bone, ivory, and antler — bears in mid-swim, human figures, and above all faces and little maskettes, objects small enough to hold in a closed hand, made with a control and an intensity that mark an active spirit-tradition and the work of the angakkuq, the shaman. These small carvings are read as spirit-beings and helping-spirits, the beings a shaman knew and called on. Qajartalik is the single place where the Dorset took that private, palm-sized art and cut it into living rock, out in the open, at the scale of a human head and larger. Louis Gagnon, a curator with the Avataq Cultural Institute who has worked on the site for years, calls the Qajartalik faces “unique manifestations of Dorset Era artistic expression,” and in a discussion of what the shelf was for he ventured only that it might be “a sort of an attempt to make some sort of a ritual or something linked to shamanism.” The hedging is deliberate and honest. As reported by Radio Canada International, Gagnon and his colleagues read the shelf as the Dorset engravers’ attempt to set down, on a large surface, their vision of the unseen world — a vision tied to shamanism and to the spirit-iconography of their small carvings.

What the faces mean past that is genuinely unknown, and the honest thing is to say so plainly. The best working readings are that these are spirit-beings, portraits of shamans, or images of the human turning into the animal and the animal into the human — a stone assembly of the beings that stand behind the visible world. In the tradition’s own terms they are close kin to the tuurngait, the spirit-helpers a shaman commanded; the Inuit who knew the island spoke of the carvings as spirits. But the specific meanings — which face, which being, what the horns and the blowing and the tattoos were meant to do — are not recoverable from the rock, and no living tradition carries the key, because the Dorset themselves are gone and left no descendants to remember. This is one of the few sacred places in the world whose meaning has to be marked, in every honest account, as debated and open, not as a settled reading dressed up in confidence.

And the same softness that made the faces possible is now their danger. Steatite is soft because it is easily broken: it exfoliates, shedding thin sheets from its surface; it weathers under a thousand years of freeze and thaw; lichen creeps over it and eats into it. A face pecked into soapstone is not carved in granite for the ages — it is written in one of the most fragile stones there is. Quarrying continued on the island into modern times, cutting into the same rift that holds the images. And in 2006 someone vandalized the site outright, damage that turned a slow anxiety into an urgent one and set off the campaign for formal protection that is still going on.

The devils and the record

Return to the missionary and his devils, because that small mislabeling opens onto something much larger. When the Oblate at Wakeham Bay called the Qajartalik faces devils, he was not inventing a private opinion. He was applying, at a specific island, a reading that missionaries had been laying over the whole Inuit sacred world for two centuries — a systematic recasting of Inuit spirit-beings as demons.

The signal case is Torngarsuk. In the belief of Greenland and Labrador he was the master of the tornait, the helping-spirits, one of the greatest powers a shaman could reach — and when the Danish-Norwegian mission under Hans Egede reached Greenland from 1721, the missionaries took his name for the adversary of their God. The master of the spirits was mapped onto the Christian Devil; the old cosmology was named “the devil’s work”; and the ordinary word for a shaman’s spirit-helper drifted, in the missionary mouth, toward “demon.” By the nineteenth century a European catalog of hell could list Torngarsuk among its fiends. The missionary who saw devils on Qikertaaluk was reading the Qajartalik faces through exactly that lens: spirit-beings become demons, a sacred shelf become a field of the damned.

That reframing was not a matter of vocabulary alone, and it did not stand by itself. It belonged to the long apparatus by which the Inuit sacred world was pressed down and the angakkuit — the shamans — were driven out of practice: the mission stations and the demand for conversion, then the day schools and residential schools that took the language and the ceremonies out of the children, then the harder machinery of the twentieth-century state. The 1953 relocation of Inuit families from northern Quebec to the far High Arctic, to Grise Fiord and Resolute, moved people like counters to plant a flag on the map, and left them to hunger in a country they did not know. The RCMP killing of sled dogs — the qimmiit on which a family’s mobility and livelihood depended — cut the ground from under the hunting life across the eastern Arctic in the 1950s and 1960s. The “disc number” system hung a numbered identity tag around Inuit necks in place of names an administrator would not learn to say. This is the setting in which a carved shelf of spirit-faces became, to the people who governed the North, a curiosity, a field of devils, a thing without a claimant. Named here as context and never endorsed, it is the frame the site had to be pulled back out of.

Pulled back out of, and by the Inuit themselves. The stewardship of Qajartalik today runs through Avataq, the Nunavik Inuit cultural institute, working with the community of Kangiqsujuaq and with outside partners including the Canadian Museum of History; the archaeology done on the island in recent years has been collaborative and community-based, carried out with Nunavik Inuit rather than on them. It was Avataq that inventoried the shelf in 1996, Avataq that pressed for a decade to have the site protected against the boundary dispute, and Avataq that carried the heritage case forward. According to Parks Canada, Qajartalik was added to Canada’s tentative list of future UNESCO World Heritage nominations on December 20, 2017 — one of eight Canadian sites announced that day by the federal environment minister, Catherine McKenna — and the formal nomination was submitted on April 13, 2018. The case made for it is simple to state and hard to overstate: it is the northernmost rock-art site in North America and the only major petroglyph site in the entire Arctic and Inuit world, the sole place where the Dorset ever cut their spirit-images into the land at monumental scale.

The stone that will not be read

The afterlife of Arctic sacred imagery has often been a story of things pulled loose from where they belong and set to work as signs. The inuksuit, the stone figures the Inuit raised across the tundra to mark a route or a cache or to funnel caribou toward the hunters at Inuksuk Point, have become an emblem: one stands on the flag of Nunavut, and a stylized human-shaped variant, “Ilanaaq,” was the logo of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver — a choice some Inuit leaders faulted, since the human-figure form is properly an inunnguaq and not a true inuksuk at all. The tupilaq, once the secret and deadly made-thing a shaman sent through the sea against an enemy, survives now chiefly as a carving sold to visitors, its danger filed down to the size of a souvenir. And Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, the staged 1922 film that taught the outside world to picture the Inuit, gave the whole people a face that was a fiction — a hunter renamed, a pre-contact purity performed for a camera that hid the rifles and the trading post. In each case a living form was decontextualized, and the meaning thinned as the image traveled.

Qajartalik is the counter-case, and that is finally why it holds the attention it does. Its faces cannot be lifted off the tundra and sold, because they are the rock; they cannot be restaged, because no one alive knows the script; they cannot be made into a clean logo, because they are strange — horned, blowing, tattooed, halfway between a person and an animal, and impossible to reduce to a single confident caption. The missionary could only call them devils. The archaeologists, who have looked far longer and far harder, will say no more than that they are probably spirit-beings, probably tied to a shaman’s vision of the world, and that beyond that they do not know. The Inuit who cut lamp-stone from the same rift know that a much older people made them and that the beings are spirits, and stop there, which is its own kind of respect.

So the shelf keeps its crowd of faces turned up to the Arctic sky, on an island the maps could not decide the owner of, in a stone soft enough to carve and soft enough to lose. Kneel where Saladin d’Anglure knelt and the faces meet the eye without a body between them and without a word to explain them. A thousand years of weather has not read them, and neither, yet, has anyone else.

→ Related: The Dorset Culture · The Inuit · The Yupik · Sedna · Nanook · Torngarsuk · Sila · Tupilaq · Inuksuk Point · Nunalleq · Aasivissuit Nipisat