'You asked whether I'd missed this,' said Anawak.

Akesuk stayed silent.

'I hated it, Iji. I hated it, and I despised it. You wanted an answer. Now you know.'

His uncle sighed. 'You despised your father,' he said.

'Maybe. But you try explaining the difference to a twelve-year-old, whose father and people seem as wretched as each other. My father was weak and constantly drunk. All he did was whine and drag my mother down till she put an end to it all – she couldn't see any other way. Everyone was killing themselves back then. Name one family that wasn't in mourning for someone who'd taken their own life. All those stories about the proud Inuit, the self-sufficient Inuit – well, there wasn't much evidence of it back then.' He faced Akesuk. 'If your parents are reduced to wrecks in the space of a few years, get addicted to drugs, lose the will to live, how do you cope? What do you do when your mother hangs herself and all your father can do is get drunk. I told him to stop. I told him that I could get a job, that I'd do anything if he stopped drinking, but he just stared at me and went on as usual.'

'I know. He wasn't himself any more.'

'He gave me up for adoption,' said Anawak. The bitterness that had built up over the years was on the point of spilling out 'I wanted to stay with him, and he gave me up for adoption.'

'He wanted to protect you.'

'Oh, really? Did he ever wonder how I might cope? Like hell he did. Ma died of depression, he knocked himself out with liquor. They both threw me out of their lives. Did anyone bother to help me? No. They were too busy staring into the snow and bewailing the fate of the Inuit. Oh, yeah, and that reminds me, Uncle Iji. You always told good stories, but you never changed anything. That was all you could ever think of- fairytales about the free spirit of the Inuit. A noble people. A proud people.'

'That's right.' Akesuk nodded. 'We were a proud people.'

'When would that have been?'

He waited for Akesuk to lose his temper, but the old man merely stroked his moustache. 'Before you were born,' he said. 'People of my generation came into the world in igloos at a time when everyone knew how to build them. Back then we used flints and not matches to light fires. Caribou weren't shot, they were hunted with bows and arrows. We didn't hitch skidoos to our qamutiks, we had huskies. Sounds romantic, doesn't it? Like the long-lost past. . .' Akesuk mused. 'It was barely fifty years ago. Look around you, boy. Look at our lifestyle. I mean, there are good things too. Hardly anyone on Earth knows as much about what's going on in the world as we do. Every second household has a computer with a modem, including ours. We've got our own country now too.' He chuckled. 'The other day there was a question posted on nunavut.com. On the face of it, it seemed harmless enough. Do you remember those old Canadian two-dollar notes? Queen Elizabeth was on the front, with a group of Inuit on the back. One of the men was positioned beside a kayak with a harpoon in his hand. It all looked idyllic. The question was, "What does the scene really show?" What do you think?'

'I don't know.'

'Well, I do. It's the image of an expulsion. The government in Ottawa had a more palatable term for it. They preferred to call it "relocation." A Cold War phenomenon. The politicians in Ottawa were scared that the Soviet Union or the United States would take it into their heads to lay claim to the uninhabited Canadian Arctic so they relocated the nomadic Inuit from their traditional territory in the southern Arctic to Resolute and Grise Fjord near the North Pole. They claimed that the hunting grounds were better there, but the opposite was true. The Inuit were forced to wear numbered dog-tags as though they were animals. Did you know that?'

'I can't remember.'

Tour generation and the kids growing up today have no idea what their parents had to live through. And it started long before that, with the white trappers in the 1920s who came here with guns. The seal and caribou populations were decimated – and not just because of the qallunaat. The Inuit killed them off too. That's what happens when you exchange your bow and arrows for a gun. Anyway, the Inuit people were plunged into poverty. They'd never had much trouble with disease, but now there were outbreaks of polio, tuberculosis, measles and diphtheria, so they left the land and moved into settlements. By the end of the 1950s our people were dying of starvation and infectious disease, and the government did nothing about it. Then the military got interested in the Northwest Territories and secret radar stations were erected on traditional Inuit hunting grounds. The Inuit who lived there were in the way, so at the instigation of the Canadian government they were packed into aeroplanes and deposited hundreds of kilometres further north – without their tents, kayaks, canoes or sleds. When I was a young man, I was relocated too. So were your parents. Back then the authorities justified it by claiming that the chances of survival for the impoverished Inuit were better in the north than in the vicinity of the military bases. But the new settlements were nowhere near the caribou trails or any of the summer breeding grounds.'

There was a lengthy silence. Every now and then the two narwhal reappeared. Anawak watched the clash of swords, waiting for his uncle to resume his story.

'After our relocation, they bulldozed our hunting grounds. Everything that might remind us of our old lives here was razed to the ground to stop us returning. And, of course, the caribou didn't change their habits to suit us. We had nothing to eat, no clothes. What use is all the courage in the world, if all you can hunt are a few siksiks, hares and fish? People could be as determined and strong as they liked, but there was nothing they could do to stop their kinsmen dying. I won't go into the details. Within a few decades we were reliant on welfare. Our old way of life had been destroyed, and we didn't know any other. Around the time you were born, the Canadian government started to feel bad about us again, so they built us some houses – boxes. It was the obvious thing for the qallunaat. They live in boxes. If they want to take a trip somewhere, they get into a box with wheels. They eat in public boxes, their dogs live in boxes, and the boxes they sleep in are surrounded by other types of boxes that they call walls and fences. That was their way of life, not ours, but now we live in boxes too. Losing your identity comes at a price. Alcohol, drug abuse, suicide.'

'Did my father ever fight for his people?' Anawak asked softly.

'We all did. I was still a young man when we were driven out. I campaigned for compensation. For thirty years we struggled for our rights and went through the courts. Your father campaigned with us, but it broke his spirit. Since 1999 we've had our own state, Nunavut, "our land". No one can tell us what to do any more, and no one can force us to move. But our way of life, the only way of life that was truly ours, has been lost forever.'

'You'll have to find yourselves a new one.'

'I expect you're right. Self-pity never helped anyone. We were nomads, free to come and go as we pleased, but we've come to terms with the idea of our territory being limited. A few decades ago, our only social structure was the family. We didn't have chiefs or leaders, and now the Inuit are governed by the Inuit, as in any civil state. The concept of property was alien to us, but now we're going the way of every modern industrial nation. We're starting to revive our traditions – people are using dog-sleds again, the young are being taught how to build igloos and start a fire with flints – and that's good, but it won't stop the march of time. You know, boy, I'm not dissatisfied. The world moves on. These days we're nomads in the Internet, wandering through the web of data highways, tracking and collecting information. We can roam all over the world. Young people chat with friends from different countries and tell them about Nunavut. But too many of our people still kill themselves. We're coming to terms with a profound trauma. We need time. The hopes of the living shouldn't be sacrificed to the dead.'