Iqaluit

Iqaluit is Nunavut’s capital and the northern gateway through which Anawak re-enters the landscape of his birth. His arrival makes the city a threshold: a working airport and transfer point, but also a place where familiar cultural forms confront his estrangement from them.

Setting and Arrival

After crossing Hudson Strait, Anawak’s plane descends over Frobisher Bay, which cuts into southeastern Baffin Island. The airport appears as a bright yellow building with a short tower, an isolated human outpost against the frozen expanse. Iqaluit’s name is glossed as place of many fish, while the town itself is introduced as Nunavut’s capital and the route onward into the Arctic.

A Cultural Encounter in the Terminal

While waiting for a delayed flight to Cape Dorset, Anawak passes displays of Inuit art, including wall coverings and soapstone sculptures. At the center of the terminal, a large figure in traditional clothing holds a drum and drumstick. Its accompanying inscription describes drum dancing and throat singing as practices through which Arctic communities gather. The image meets him with an assurance and vitality he recognizes from childhood, when drum dancing was common, but his recollection is troubled by the sense that those earlier times may never have been wholly secure.

The ticket-desk worker assumes that Anawak, whose appearance identifies him as Inuk, knows his way around Iqaluit and recommends the Nunatta-Sunaqutangit Museum. His hesitation and admission that he does not know the capital expose a gap between outward identification and lived familiarity. He declines to wander through town, instead waiting at the terminal, unable to absorb the newspaper he tries to read as a barrier between himself and the world around him.

Transit and Returning Memory

The onward journey makes Iqaluit a passage rather than a settled destination in this episode. Anawak and the other passengers board a cramped, six-seat Piper, with baggage netted at the rear and no partition between cockpit and cabin. After waiting for another aircraft to land, they take off over the mountains and glaciers. As Hudson Strait glitters to one side and a lake comes into view on the other, Anawak remembers its name: Amadjuak. The sight opens a rush of memories he has been resisting. Iqaluit’s narrative significance lies in this conjunction of movement and return: the capital is the practical stop on his route, while its cultural signs and surrounding landscape begin drawing him back toward a past he had sworn not to revisit.