Inuit

IQALUIT, Northwest Territories -- Already the hunters are fanning out across the frozen tundra to bag sufficient caribou for a feast the likes of which has never been seen in Canada's Arctic. There will be fireworks, much chest-thumping and grand oratory. There will be drum dancing and traditional throat singing.Tomorrow, the eastern half of the Northwest Territories splits off to form the new territory of Nunavut -- "Our Land," in the language of the Inuit, or Eskimos, who make up 85 percent of the 27,200 inhabitants of one of the most remote, forbidding and sparsely inhabited regions on Earth.

IGLOOLIK, Northwest Territories -- The time when the sun disappears and day becomes night is known as "the great darkness" by the people who have lived on this island of ice high in the Canadian arctic for over 4,000 years.Stars shine at midday, and though violet bands brighten the immense sky for brief periods around what would be high noon in Toronto, 1,950 miles south, the sun does not appear at all for seven weeks.The day the sun finally emerges from the horizon was once the most important day of the year for Igloolik's Eskimos, who now prefer to be known as Inuit.

The severely economical forms of Inuit sculpture are highly refined -- even elegant -- in their placement of geometric and representational designs."Transformations: Inuit Art of Nunavut" is an exhibition of works by more than 100 Inuit artists in honor of the newly created autonomous Inuit homeland of Nunavut, which means "our land," in Canada's arctic region. The show at Salisbury State University's Fulton Hall Gallery runs through Dec. 19.The Fulton Hall Gallery is on the campus of Salisbury State University in Salisbury.

You have to be there to feel how a wolf's howl - beneath a crescent moon in a sky filled with dancing northern lights - forever becomes part of your soul. In early summer, time flows without punctuation as days merge into undark nights north of the Arctic Circle. Wildflowers dot the tundra and trace the edges of flowing waters in what appear to be endless mountain meadows. This place is called Nunavut, "our land" in the Inuktitut language.On April 1, 1999, the vast region of the Canadian North will become a new territory larger than any province.

IQALUIT, Northwest Territories -- Springtime, and the rays of the midday sun spark a thousand tiny rainbows in the ice mist. The howl of Eskimo dogs tethered on the frozen barrens of Frobisher Bay is offset by the hoarse squawk of the giant ravens that steal their bones. The weather, as usual, is cold -- below freezing.A snowmobile wends along the snowpack of Iqaluit's main street. The driver, an Inuit outfitted in fur, has a carbine slung from his shoulder. The wooden sled bumping behind his machine carries a fresh-killed seal.

"History," writes William T. Vollmann, "is nothing more than a long list of regrettable actions."In 1990, Mr. Vollmann, then 31, embarked on a series of seven novels, which bear the collective title, "Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes." These books will be a survey of the "regrettable actions" that resulted from the first encounters between various Indian populations and those who came to explore, colonize and "bring them into the present."The first dream, "The Ice Shirt," centers on the encounter between the Norse and the natives of Greenland in the 10th century; the second dream, "Fathers and Crows," is about the clash between the Black Robes and the Huron in Canada 400 years ago. And now, skipping ahead, is the sixth dream, "The Rifles," which is mostly about the Inuit of the Arctic Circle.

IQALUIT, Northwest Territories -- Adamie Pitseolak dreams of leading his people to master a more modern destiny as they carve an independent homeland out of the arctic ice.But with five years to go before they redraw the map of North America, there is growing anxiety among Canada's Inuit over whether Nunavut (Our Land) will be a shining success or a dismal failure.Once known as Eskimos (literally, "eaters of raw meat"), the Inuit yearn to preserve their ancestral ways of hunting, fishing and trapping across the snow-swept top of the globe, while also moving into the modern world and the next century.

WASHINGTON -- Just when you thought your lawmakers really did not care about the quality of life in this country, they have proved you wrong:It may soon be legal for American citizens to bring polar bear heads into the United States.For more than two decades, this has been illegal under something called the Marine Mammal Protection Act.Some in Congress had assumed the purpose of the Marine Mammal Protection Act was to protect marine mammals.But it turned out they were being naive.That's because the hunting lobby last week rammed through Congress a change in the law to allow wealthy Americans to travel to Canada -- the only country where the trophy hunting of polar bears is legal -- and bring back the heads and hides.

You don't often meet an art form that springs into being spontaneously, flourishes for two generations and then dies, but that may be the fate of the art of Inuit textile wall hangings so colorfully on display at the Baltimore Museum of Art.The Inuit, more commonly known as Eskimos, until the mid-20th RTC century lived a nomadic hunting and fishing existence. But in the 1950s famine coupled with a government requirement that they send their children to school drove Inuits to permanent settlements, one of which is Baker Lake in the Canadian Northwest Territories.

Just what we needed most of all: an Eskimo "King Lear."That's "Shadow of the Wolf," a large, quite absurd picture hailing from the land north of Buffalo, N.Y. that has invaded local theaters.The $31-million Canadian production, reportedly the most expensive movie made in that country, is at once spectacularly exotic and spectacularly mundane. Conceived, evidently, as some sort of tribute to the hearty Inuit people of the frozen north who eke out a surprisingly comfortable existence from a terrain so hostile it could be Martian, the movie nevertheless founders at the level of respect for the very souls it seeks to honor.

Visions of Paradise National Geographic, $35 Is there heaven on earth? If so, where does it exist? That essentially was the assignment that the photographers whose work is represented in this volume were given. The book is divided into three main sections: land, water and air. Everyone, of course, has their own opinion of what makes a paradise, and the photographers here are no exception. In the land section are majestic images of the open sky country of Montana but also a cozy cafe in Paris; a pair of camels in the middle of a dust storm in Mali; and sunflowers buried under winter snow in Hokkaido, Japan.

QUEBEC Knopf / $27.50 One sometimes forgets just how huge the province of Quebec is: almost 600,000 square miles. Of that, nearly two-thirds is covered by forest. Around 82 percent of the population speaks French (in 1977, French was made the official language), while 10 percent are English speaking. Those are the basics. In addition to the rich French culture, Quebec also happens to contain two of the most beautiful cities in North America, cosmopolitan Montreal and charming Quebec City.

James A. Houston, 83, an artist who brought an appreciation of Inuit art to audiences around the world when he lived in the Canadian Arctic in the 1950s and 60s, died Sunday in New London, Conn. Mr. Houston was a master designer at the renowned Steuben Glass Co. in New York City, where he worked for the past 43 years Among his best-known works were Arctic Fisherman, a sculpture showing an Inuit fisherman preparing to spear a fish in the water, and Trout & Fly, in which a fish leaps to catch a gold fly. Mr. Houston was also the author of numerous adult and children's books.

Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness, Murder, and the Collision of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913, by McKay Jenkins. Random House. 268 pages. $25.95. McKay Jenkins is fascinated by snow and ice. One of his books, The Last Resort, told the story of the 10th Mountain Division, a U.S. Army unit that skied through the Italian Alps to fight Axis troops during World War II. Another, The White Death, recounted the tale of unlucky climbers caught beneath an avalanche. And now comes the snowiest, iciest book yet, an account of a double murder set in the upper reaches of Canada's Northwest Territories, where the geography bears forlorn names like the Barren Lands and the Dismal Lakes, where the frigid winters last for six months and where complete darkness descends for three.

QAANAAQ, Greenland - Pitching a makeshift tent on the sea ice, where the Arctic Ocean meets the North Atlantic, brothers Mamarut and Gedion Kristiansen are ready to savor their favorite meal. Nearby lies the carcass of a narwhal, a reclusive beast with an ivory tusk like a unicorn's. Mamarut slices off a piece of muktuk, the whale's raw pink blubber and mottled gray skin, as a snack. Peqqinnartoq, he says in Greenlandic. Healthy food. Mamarut's wife, Tukummeq Peary, a descendant of famed North Pole explorer Robert E. Peary, is boiling the main entree on a camp stove.

The Fast Runner has received tons of advance publicity for being a genuine Inuit production: director Zacharias Kunuk and his late screenwriter, Paul Apak Angilirq, and the cast and almost all the crew are Inuit. They made this tale of inner-tribal conflict and survival, set in the Arctic of a thousand years ago, more or less communally, in keeping with Inuit culture. But I think the biggest contributor to the film's slow-accreting power is the New York-bred cinematographer, Norman Cohn.

YANRAKYNNOT, Russia - The native elders have no explanation. Scientists are perplexed as well. The icy realm of the Eskimo - the tundra and ice of Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland - has started to thaw. Strange portents are everywhere. Thunder and lightning, once rare, have become commonplace. An eerie warm wind blows in from the south. Hunters who prided themselves on their ability to read the sky say they no longer can predict the sudden blizzards. "The Earth," one hunter concludes, "is turning faster."

PITUFFIK, Greenland - In an icebound land with one person for every 15 square miles and no industry to have blighted the backdrop of icebergs and emerald glaciers, one would hardly expect to stumble upon a ghost town. Here, on a mossy saddle of rock overlooking a frozen bay of breathtaking beauty, stand two dozen sturdy wooden houses, a handful of sod hovels and a graveyard, all silent testimony to a cultural trespass a half-century ago. This was the northernmost hunting village of Greenland's indigenous people until Denmark consigned it to U.S. authorities for the Thule Air Base in 1951, when this vast Arctic island was subject to Danish colonial rule and the Inuit were regarded as a backward society blocking progress.

The severely economical forms of Inuit sculpture are highly refined -- even elegant -- in their placement of geometric and representational designs."Transformations: Inuit Art of Nunavut" is an exhibition of works by more than 100 Inuit artists in honor of the newly created autonomous Inuit homeland of Nunavut, which means "our land," in Canada's arctic region. The show at Salisbury State University's Fulton Hall Gallery runs through Dec. 19.The Fulton Hall Gallery is on the campus of Salisbury State University in Salisbury.

IQALUIT, Northwest Territories -- Already the hunters are fanning out across the frozen tundra to bag sufficient caribou for a feast the likes of which has never been seen in Canada's Arctic. There will be fireworks, much chest-thumping and grand oratory. There will be drum dancing and traditional throat singing.Tomorrow, the eastern half of the Northwest Territories splits off to form the new territory of Nunavut -- "Our Land," in the language of the Inuit, or Eskimos, who make up 85 percent of the 27,200 inhabitants of one of the most remote, forbidding and sparsely inhabited regions on Earth.