Do we see Rankin Inlet

A small group of young children are playing on a very large piece of corrugated cardboard. Hours fly by while they play as they create their own vast landscape. They stomped the mud. They loved scattering small, large and huge rocks every where. They created rushing rivers and streams, flowing into thousands of beautiful deep and shallow ponds and lakes. The water that flowed off of the transformed cardboard entered the vast outer space of salt water they called "The Sea".
Green, brown, white, and black mosses and a kaleidoscope of flower colours were lovely added to their landscape form. The sun was angling down onto the children as they now lay asleep on their land, oblivious to the misquote laying it's eggs in their pond and the spider stalking it's prey in the corrugated esker shadows.
I live on a tiny part of this beautiful landscape, in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, Canada. On the west coast of the Hudson Bay. The geographical co-ordinates of the community are 62 49' North latitude and 92 05' West longitude or approximately one thousand miles due north of Winnipeg Manitoba. I arrived in 1977, from the Canadian banana belt to get a "years worth of arctic experiences" under my belt. Twenty one years later I am still here and not wearing a belt.
Rankin Inlet grew from a small exploration camp starting in 1951, when geologist started to restudy a nickel-copper deposit that was originally found in 1928. The mine opened in 1957 and closed in 1962. After Northern Rankin Inlet Nickel Mines Ltd. closed and left , the town was still keep alive, as around this time the Federal Government was undertaking it's program of rehabilitation and re-location of many of the Inuit.
Hundreds of years earlier the Inuit of this area, many times helped explorer's and whalers prepare for winter survival and from starvation. Many were helped on the historic Marble Island located at the mouth of Rankin Inlet. Many did not survive as they did not want to take the advise of the Inuit. Why they wouldn't take their help is hard for me to understand, as I find it very hard to comprehend how the Inuit did survive for the thousands of years in the arctic. It was in harmony with nature and with a total understanding of nature; Nature - calm, serene, beautiful and very unforgiving, very harsh, very cruel and always changing.
Today, Rankin Inlet is a main government community for the Kivalliq region and awaiting many other government departments from the newly created Nunavut Territory Government which will become operational on April 1, 1999. Gold is being extensively explored by WMC, an Austrian company who are proposing on opening a mine just kilometers from town, possibly with in the next two years.
I stumbled and fumbled for years after being so blown away from the landscape I saw on the day I arrived, though unable to take it's image and put it on film and photographic paper. I would keep trying. I kept going out more and more onto the land trying to understand it more, so I could catch it.
Years passed and a decade. Shock absorbers were installed onto the little three wheel all terrain bikes, that now have evolved to the standard four wheel ATV. My past and current mode of transportation.
Each time I go, on the land, to photograph, to see, camp, fish , hunt or to think my whole body gets a feeling that I have entered into a time warp, an other dimension. On my return, I am just in ahh. In a state of a decompression mode - a mind overload on what I have experienced and seen. Even if I have seen the scene many times before the image is presented as something new. Like a far away place, a place I have never seen before, everything is always changing though still staying sort of the same.
It wasn't until my second reading many years later, from its original publication date, an article in the March/April 1990, View Camera magazine by Constance Morris-Shortlidge who interviewed Ruth Bernhard. Ruth was quoted "Never work more than thirty feet from your bed; that's where all the pictures are". That day I think I awoke myself up from my not seeing, to a beginning of a long learning and understanding of what is 'just' before me.
No trees, vast canyons or fine majestic mountains. Wow! Just lots of moss, water, rocks, dirt, sky and very few people. It is so much fun trying to capture the image that is before my eyes in a fresh exciting manner. But man, is it ever hard to capture that magical power you see when viewing it live and transporting it into the photographic image.
We all seem to wish to go some place else to find, and capture amazing images as the images around us all seem so boring and drab. Really, our images that are before us, at Drumhelleer, La Ronge, Brandon, Sarnina, Sept-Iles or on EightElm Street are so alive and vibrant. We only need to take the time to look, see and accept. Even if we go afar are we really capturing that magical power or are we only seeing a new image in front of us?
The sun sets where ever you are and you are swept with a happy feeling that your set up, focus and the exposures of the images before you was really captured. Your joyous! You pack your view camera and remove the lens. From with in the dark hollows of your camera billows a huge bright mosquito fly's out. It was very bright. You wonder if it stood on the film and sucked the light away from the film.
Nature, never stopping and always changing. If we do not see our own amazing front and back yards, how can we expect our photographs will touch and will give off that special magical power?
copyright
Jimmy Mac Donald
July 1998, Rankin Inlet, Nunavut Canada
jim@nunavut.nu