by Ian Elliot
Northern News Services

INUVIK (May 01/98) - This town developed a serious fascination with string last week.

Blame Camilla Gryski, who came to Inuvik with 1,025 pieces of yarn and reinvigorated a Northern story-telling device that can be created out of a simple length of twine and made to run between two fingers.

Gryski, an author of books on string games and other ancient pastimes, worked the town last week, entrancing youngsters and more than a few of their parents with the figures that could be created using a piece of string and 10 busy fingers.

She was a hit both in Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk, and eager students could be seen working out their figures on street corners, in restaurants and in playgrounds.

"That always happens, everywhere I go," Gryski said with a laugh, prior to holding a session at Ingamo Hall on Thursday evening.

String games have long been a part of the North's culture, used for everything from storytelling to competitions among children when it came to assigning household chores, in which the slowest one to make a teepee or a rabbit has to wash the dishes or fetch the water. The games have long been passed down by elders or swapped among children.

String games are found literally around the world, and she was able to show creations from Africa, South America and the South Pacific.

The North's string figures and some of the chants that accompanied their creation were first set down by Diamond Jenness in a major study done between 1913 and 1918 and many of those figures were brought to life again last week, from Running Caribou to Fishnet Torn By Polar Bear.

"The kids here know string games already," said Gryski, who lives in Toronto and whose day job is the clown with the purple hair at the Hospital For Sick Children.

"They all know some that they might have learned from their parents or their aunts or their anaanaqs (grandmothers). And one of the things I always tell them is to go out and share their string games, ask your parents or grandparents to show you the games they know."

Gryski gives many such seminars each year but says Northern kids are a special pleasure to teach, not only because they have seen string games before but because they pick it up so quickly.

"The children here are very adept, and the younger kids especially skillful with their hands. Maybe it's because they are used to learning by watching something be done, but they pick it up much more quickly than the kids I'm used to and they are a joy to teach."

Inuvik's youngsters were particularly entranced by two figures they had not seen before -- a flower and a crab -- she said, and their parents took as enthusiastic an interest as the younger set.

"These aren't just for children. I've done sessions where there are a row of parents sitting in the back row working on string games of their own and they are having as much fun as the kids."

She has made six trips to the North and has taught the figures from hay River to Baffin Island and as far west as Alaska.

"I think they are so widespread because the material is so simple," she said.

"It's a piece of yarn, it's nothing. Every culture has string or something like string and from it you can make something wonderful, something that moves and is magic."