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Kekerten
162 Ko
Remnants of a bowhead whale on the site of whaling station on Kekerten Island. Kekerten Island, Cumberland Sound, Baffin Island, (Nunavut).
also known to Qallunaat as Kikkerton, Kikertyne, Kikartine and other corruptions of the Inuktitut word qikiqtaq, meaning island
Kekerten is the name of both a harbour and an island at the mouth of Kingnait Fjord. It is part of a group of islands that whalers often called "the Kekertens" - Kikistan Islands on current maps. Kekerten was one of the busiest and most important whaling sites for almost the entire duration of the overwintering whaling period.
78 Ko
The CGS Arctic
The Scottish captain William Penny had a house built on Kekerten Island in 1857. Soon afterwards, American whalers erected their own station there. The earliest ships came with full crews of Qallunaat whalers, but captains quickly discovered that local Inuit were expert whale hunters, and they began to hire them. By the early 1860s, there were 18 Inuit whaleboat crews at Kekerten. By the end of the whaling period, the stations at Kekerten were often staffed by only two qallunaat,a manager and a cooper, who made barrels for the whale oil. Inuit provided the vast majority of the labour at Kekerten from the 1870s onwards.
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Whaling station house, Kekerten, Cumberland Sound, Nunavut
Most of these Inuit lived at Kekerten year round, leaving only in the summer to hunt caribou. Generations of children grew up there. Today there are still remains of children's play houses. According to the late Etooangat Aksayuk, there was once a school at the American station. The late Katsoo Evic recalled playing with small china figurines that had been given to her and her mother, Aasivak, by the whalers.
In 1894, the Americans sold their Kekerten station to the Scots, and its bunkhouse was used as a church, a dancehall and a storehouse for sealskins. The years at the end of the whaling period were often difficult, with hunger and disease striking repeatedly at Kekerten, often together. The seal population had probably declined from overhunting, and Kekerten had never been an ideal hunting ground. There were often strong winds, and it was not easy to hunt from a small island during freeze-up and spring thaw. Etooangat Aksayuk recalled that, when he was a child at Kekerten in the early twentieth century, people were usually hungry around freeze-up except for one fall when they killed a whale.
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Angmarlik, Aasivak and their adopted child Malaya, at Kekerten
Most of the whaling was in the spring at the floe edge. At the beginning of the season, the men from Kekerten and Umanaqjuaq would meet up for a day in the middle of Cumberland Sound, and they would all play games and wrestle. They would stay on the floe from around May to July. While the men were gone, most of the women would hunt seals back in camp and make the skins into their summer tents. The men would also send seal meat back from the floe edge on qamutiit. Often, each man attached a string with a special pattern of knots to the seal meat that belonged to his family, so the wives could easily divide up the meat back in camp.
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The EASONIAN of the Robert Kinnes Co. of Dundee, being towed by BAY CHIMO of the Hudson's Bay Company
There were about 150 Inuit living at Kekerten in 1909 near the end of the whaling period. Many families dispersed over the next few years, spreading out around Cumberland Sound and beyond to camps like Usualuk, Idlungajung, Saunaqtuarjuq and Padli. In 1923, the Hudson's Bay Company bought the station, and within two years, all the Inuit had left. Kekerten was only sporadically used as a small camp until, in the summer of 1998, dozens of Cumberland Sound Inuit camped there once again. Inuit killed a whale and brought it to Kekerten Harbour, where many people tasted bowhead maktaaq for the first time.
NOTE : This story was told to me by both Daisy Dialla and Enoosee Nashalik in summer 2008.