Director's Statement: Niobe Thompson
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Like many people, I've become very worried about the ways in which climate change will alter our lives in the coming years. But as an Arctic anthropologist, I have the unusual opportunity to regularly spend time with high-Arctic hunters, people who live on a part of the planet already experiencing radical climate change. The aboriginal village of Vankarem, on the Arctic coast of northeast Russia, is such a place. This is one of the most isolated communities I've ever encountered anywhere in the North, and the 430 villagers rely almost completely on locally-hunted walrus, seal, and whale, as well as on tundra reindeer. In the past, the hunters moved on the sea amongst drifting ice, which offered both a platform for resting prey and calmed the sea. Now, Vankarem's coastal waters are ice-free for four months in the summer, and the hunters are forced to hunt on the wild and unpredictable Arctic Ocean in their open boats. This is only one way in which the warming North is throwing aboriginal communities off balance, and threatening their survival.
An Inuit woman
The problem is, even though we know the warming Arctic will change the lives of its native peoples, we have little idea of how. So our filmmaking team decided to search for answers back in time, and to look at the last major Arctic meltdown. For four centuries, beginning in roughly 800 A.D., the world experienced the Medieval Warm Period. Wine grapes grew in England, and Norse Vikings settled Iceland and the fjords of southern Greenland. We asked the question, how did the last major warming similar to the one we face today redraw the map of human cultures in the Arctic. The remarkable answer: radically. All the cultures of the Canadian Arctic and Greenland present at the dawn of the last great warming cycle were gone by its conclusion, and a new culture - the ancestral Inuit (the Thule) - were its masters.
Traditional Inuit boat
Very soon, we realised a fascinating and surprising story lay in the migration of these new arrivals into the Canadian Arctic and onwards to Greenland. The roots of modern Inuit culture today lie in a superbly skilled and technologically advanced group of whale hunters whose homeland lay on the Bering Strait, between modern-day Alaska and Russia. These were the Thule, and they had learned how to make large sailing boats from driftwood and the skins of walruses, fashion powerful harpoons and Mongol-style recurved bows, and build immense longhouses supported by the jawbones of whales. Most remarkable of all, they discovered the art of hunting the bowhead whale, the largest mammal in their universe, whose vast reserves of fat and meat could feed a village for months.
Something happened on the Bering Strait about 800 years ago. Suddenly, groups of Thule hunters raced north and east into completely unknown waters, and within two or three years, they were building new villages in Greenland and the Eastern Canadian Artic. What triggered the Thule invasion? And what happened to the indigenous peoples they met on their path? For us, these were the questions that triggered our own Arctic Odyssey.
Remains of ancient villages
In the summer of 2008, I and a small documentary film crew travelled right back to the birthplace of the Thule culture on the Russian side of the Bering Strait. Using a chartered Navajo Piper from Nome, Alaska, we flew into the nearly abandoned Russian port town of Provideniya, and from there we went overland to the Inuit village of Novoe Chaplino. In a group of islands nearby, our Inuit guides showed us the remains of ancient villages, situated where migrating whales and walrus are concentrated into narrow passages of water. A millennium ago, these were thriving Thule communities, and massive bowhead whale jaw bones, crania, and vertebrae the size of washing machines littered the tundra.
It was in these waters among the spume of passing grey whales that we shot our recreations of the Thule, including scenes at sea in a traditional walrus-skin umiak whaleboat. I also explored the modern world of Inuit walrus hunters, and visited a group of nomadic reindeer herders deep in the mountains of the interior. I speak Russian, and earlier in the decade I lived in this part of Russia for a year. But I'm always amazed by how truly the aboriginal Chukchi and Inuit live a subsistence existence, more by choice than necessity, and by how healthy they seem to be as a result.
Inuit boy
Our journey then followed the route of the Thule migration 1000 years ago: Alaska, across the Canadian Arctic from Victoria Island to Baffin Island, and finally, to Greenland by way of Denmark. I visited Canadian archaeologist Max Friesen near Cambridge Bay, and he showed me the massive stone foundations of Arctic longhouses, miraculously mounted by a now vanished ancient Arctic people, the Dorset. On south Baffin Island, Patricia Sutherland, from the Canadian Museum of Civilization, showed me what she believes are the remains of Norse houses, perhaps proof that Europeans were in our Arctic before 1000 A.D. In Denmark's National Museum, curator Michael Andersen showed me boxes of Norse artefacts recovered from farms abandoned in Greenland in the 15th century. We read together from a three-century old illustrated journal, the record of Hans Egede, the first European to find evidence of the vanished Greenland colonies. And in Greenland itself, local historian Kenneth Hoegh guided me to a beautifully preserved church in Hvalso Fjord where the last recorded event in the history of Norse Greenland took place: a wedding in 1408.
By journey's end, I felt I had travelled back in time and into a fantastic and unlikely world until then completely unknown to me. And this is the world our audience can visit through the film, which we shot on cutting edge Hi-Def cameras with the best lenses available. Back in the editing suite, the visual power of the Arctic captured in our footage was overwhelming; the film is stunningly beautiful.
What had I learned? That when the ancestral Inuit entered the Arctic eight centuries ago, they carried the 13th century equivalent of weapons of mass destruction. That if we accept Marco Polo crossed Eurasia in search of silk on a camel, it's just as likely that the Thule crossed the Arctic in their whaleboats in search of iron. And that when the Arctic climate changes, its peoples either perish, or emerge transformed.
And what happened to the cultures that lay in the way of the Inuit invasion? Watch the film and find out.
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