Daron Letts
Northern News Services

Cambridge Bay (July 18/05) - Like a hunter pursuing game across the tundra, researcher Darren Keith follows trails and clues to uncover pieces of history.

The senior researcher with the Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay discovered a treasure last fall Ç some of the first moving images of a traditional Umingmaqturmiut village, filmed in the early 1920s on Malirisiurvic Island.

While reading the report of the fifth Thule Expedition, led by Danish/Greenlandic anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, Keith noticed a reference to footage taken by filmmaker Leo Hansen.

"I thought, well, it has to exist somewhere," he said.

He waded through the online Canadian archives but found nothing. He contacted the Danish Polar Institute, which put him in touch with the National Museum of Denmark, that had just laid off its audio/visual archivist.

Finally he tracked down a fragile copy on 35mm nitrate at the Danish Film Institute. He acquired a digital reproduction on DVD for the Heritage Society. It records more than an hour of footage from Malirisiurvic Island and another nine minutes from Hudson Bay.

"I was very excited watching the film for the first time," he said. "The footage is invaluable."

In the fall of 1923, Rasmussen's expedition left King William Island and arrived at the Kent Peninsula, where they stayed with the Umingmaqturmiut from November 1923 until the following spring. Hansen met the expedition there.

The silent black and white film is a window into the everyday life of a sealing camp. It shows people building an iglu from start to finish. They cut away a cross section to show the inside of the dwelling.

It also shows a drum dance, sled dogs, tools, kayak frames and hunters gathering spring mud to improve the grip on their sled runners.

In the final scene, the people leave the sealing area to follow the caribou inland, their possessions packed tightly on their sleds.

The film is recorded in a European DVD format that doesn't work on North American players, so it is being converted. Chief archivist Colleen Rusk viewed the film with several elders on a computer monitor.

"What stood out for me was the original clothing," she said. "It was fascinating and beautiful."

She said the society is looking into how widely the copyright allows them to screen the film. If possible, it will be made available to the public online.

The people in the film are not anonymous, Keith said. He recognized several individuals from photographs taken during the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1915.

When the society screens the film for elders living in the region, Keith expects many will recognize the faces and the families they see while remembering the stories they left behind.