The Breathing Hole

With a sensational ensemble, compelling storytelling, and beautiful design, this play is something very special.

 — Broadway World

Colleen Murphy’s remarkable play is making an ecological statement . . . it radiates genuine heart when it comes to environmental matters. It is an intensely human play tinged at the end with a melancholy that is palpable. We’re conscious that we are witnessing a work of epic proportions.

 — Jamie Portman, Capital Critics Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

"There are plenty of plays that tell of climate change. This may be the first to find a way of showing it . . . What Warhorse did for horses, this does for bears."

 — Robert Cushman, National Post

Also by Colleen Murphy

Armstrong’s War

The December Man (L’homme de décembre)

The Goodnight Bird

Pig Girl

Also by Janet Tamalik McGrath

The Qaggiq Model: Toward a Theory of Inuktut Knowledge Renewal

Sila in An Ecotopian Lexicon

The

Breathing Hole

Aglu

ᐊᒡᓗ

by Colleen Murphy

with Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murphy

Nattilingmiutut Translation

by Janet Tamalik McGrath

Playwrights Canada Press

Toronto

The Breathing Hole © Copyright 2020 by Colleen Murphy

Aglu | ᐊᒡᓗ © Copyright 2020 by Janet Tamalik McGrath

The One Who Adopted a Polar Bear © Copyright 2020 by Nilaulaaq Aglukkaq

First edition: November 2020

Jacket photo of Angu’řuaq, designed by Daniela Masellis, by Ann Baggley, and provided with the support of the Stratford Festival.

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Library

and

Archives

Canada

Cataloguing

in

Publication

Title: The breathing hole = Aglu / Colleen Murphy with Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murphy ; Nattilingmiutut translation by Janet Tamalik McGrath.

Other titles: Aglu

Names: Murphy, Colleen, author. | Arnatsiaq-Murphy, Siobhan, Inuk dramaturg and cultural consultant. | McGrath, Janet Tamalik, translator.

Description: First edition. | Title includes some text in Nattilingmiutut syllabics. | Text in original English and Nattilingmiutut translation.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200301802 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200301845 |

ISBN

9780369101105 (softcover) |

ISBN

9780369101112 (

PDF

) |

ISBN

9780369101129 (

EPUB

) |

ISBN

9780369101136 (Kindle)

Subjects:

LCGFT

: Drama.

Classification:

LCC

PS

8576.

U

615

B

74 2020 |

DDC

C

812/.54 — dc23

Playwrights Canada Press operates on Mississaugas of the Credit, Wendat, Anishinaabe, Métis, and Haudenosaunee land. It always was and always will be Indigenous land.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts — which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country — the Ontario Arts Council (

OAC

), Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada for our publishing activities.

This play is dedicated to Aaron Gervais.

Contents

Introduction: A Confluence of Cultures and Souls by Kenn Harper

Colleen Murphy’s Statement

Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murphy’s Statement

Janet Tamalik McGrath’s Statement

ᐃᓄᒃᑑᖅᑕᐅᓂᖓ ᐱ’ᓗᒍ ᑎᑎᕋᐅᓪᓗ ᐱ’ᓗᒋᑦ

Pronunciation Guide

Notes

Production History

Characters

ᓕᕆᙳᐊᖅᑐᑦ

Act I

Scene One

Scene Two

Act II

Scene One

Scene Two

Act III

Scene One

Scene Two

ᖁᓐᖏᐊᖅᑕᐅᖪᒃ ᕗᓪᓖᑦᑐᖅ

ᖃᓄᕆᑦᑑᓂᐊ ᐱᒋᐊᕐᓂᐊᓂ

ᖃᓄᕆᑦᑑᓂᖓᐊ ᑭᖑᐊᒍᑦ

ᖁᓐᖏᐊᖅᑕᐅᖪᒃᖅ ᑐᒡᓕᐅᖪᖅ

ᖃᓄᕆᑦᑑᓂᐊ ᐱᒋᐊᕐᓂᐊᓂ

ᖃᓄᕆᑦᑑᓂᐊ ᑭᖑᓂᐊᓂ

ᖁᓐᖏᐊᖅᑕᐅᖪᒃᖅ ᑭᖑᓪᓖᖅᑐᖅ

ᖃᓄᕆᑦᑑᓂᐊ ᐱᒋᐊᕐᓂᐊᓂ

ᖃᓄᕆᑦᑑᓂᐊ ᕿᖑᓂᐊᓂ

The One Who Adopted a Polar Bear

ᑎᒍᐊᖅᑐᕕᓂᖅ ᓇᓄᐊᓐᓄᐊᕐᒥᒃ — ᓂᓚᐅᓛᖅ ᐊᒡᓘᒃᑲᐅᑉ ᐅᓂᑉᑳᖅᑖ

Acknowledgements

About the Contributors

A Note From Qaggiavuut

A Confluence of Cultures and Souls

by Kenn Harper

Colleen Murphy’s play begins with an epigraph from an Inuk shaman: The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls. All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, like we have, souls that do not perish with the body, and which must therefore be propitiated lest they should avenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.

That shaman was Aua, a man from the western shores of Foxe Basin in farthest northern Hudson Bay. This was but one piece of the wisdom that he imparted to Knud Rasmussen, the Danish ethnologist and adventurer, himself part Inuit, who had arrived in Aua’s land in 1921. Rasmussen was intent on collecting the traditional tales of Inuit before they disappeared in a confusion of cultures brought on by the arrival of missionaries, traders, police — the triumvirate of the Qallunaat advance force that would shortly overwhelm Inuit beliefs.

We explain nothing, we believe nothing, Aua claimed. "We fear the weather spirit of earth, that we must fight against to wrest our food from land and sea. We fear Sila."

Sila — now there’s a word that packs a wealth of meaning. Ubiquitous in Inuit culture, it encompasses the weather, the outside, the environment, and — in a different sense — intelligence, knowledge, wisdom. The modern-day Nunavut Arctic College, in the bilingual world of today’s north, uses Sila as the root of its Inuktut name, Nunavummi Silatuqsarvik. Rasmussen, on the basis of what he learned from Aua and other shamans, called Sila a great and dangerous spirit that threatened mankind through the powers of nature.

Yet Sila was but an agent, an embodiment of something greater. Aua told the explorer, "We fear Takannakapsaaluk, the great woman down at the bottom of the sea, that rules over all the beasts of the sea." Elsewhere she was known as Nuliajuk, a being well beloved of Inuit carvers and art collectors. Sila was the force that she unleashed when angry, to bring inclement weather to punish mankind for its transgressions of the rules that circumscribed their lives.

We fear the souls of dead human beings and of the animals we have killed.

Aua tells us melted water had to be dripped into the mouth of a freshly caught seal to quench the seal’s thirst so that the animal’s soul might appear again in another seal and offer itself to mankind.

And how are these seals — this lifeblood of the Inuit — caught? For most of the year, Inuit hunt using the technique of mauliqtuq — hunting at the breathing hole. The farther one ventures into the deepest recesses of the Arctic, the more long-lasting becomes the ice cover, and the longer the mauliqtuq technique is used. It has come to epitomize the Inuit seal hunt. But one shouldn’t sentimentalize it. Although a difficult and technologically sophisticated method, it was a tough way to feed one’s family. Charles Francis Hall wrote about the Inuk hunter Kudlago waiting patiently over a breathing hole for two days and two nights before he achieved what passed for success — a single seal to feed his family and dogs.

Colleen Murphy’s play is set in the harsh landscape of the central Canadian Arctic. It comes as a shock to most Canadians, who live in a thin line just north of the American border, to learn that this isolated area near the Northwest Passage is barely north of the geographic centre of our peculiarly shaped country. Here an Inuk woman uncharacteristically risks her life to save Angu’řuaq, a polar bear cub, and teaches him to be calm and helpful, against the advice of the hunter Nukilik that none of us can go against our nature.

Three centuries later, Sir John Franklin and his desperate crew share this same unchanged geography with the descendants of the Inuit who rescued Angu’řuaq, and with the bear itself, now three hundred years old. The Qallunaat — white men — couldn’t have chosen a worse time or place. Science hasn’t yet given the name Little Ice Age to the frigid period in which they make their unfortunate attempt on the Northwest Passage. Having failed to adopt Inuit clothing and travel techniques, they perish, to a man, over a hundred of them. The search for Franklin, seemingly never-ending due to the single-mindedness of his wife, the indomitable Lady Jane, results in the charting of the final stretches of this man-killing coast. But the men and the ships are never found, not until the summers of 2015 and 2016 when first the Erebus and then the Terror were discovered almost intact, preserved in warming waters, the last one more or less where Inuit had predicted it would be found. Sir John remains, his resting place unknown, his legacy uncertain; Margaret Atwood called him a dope, but one Inuk researcher has recently proclaimed him a good guy.

Almost two centuries pass. The modern machinery of an oil platform throbs incessantly. The ice is deteriorating. Now, in the heart of winter, cruise ships ply the waters that were once impenetrable ice even in summer. The anthropomorphic polar bear, old and tired now, is not what the tourists expected; zoomorphic humans in costume prove more reliable and appealing to the paying passengers.

Angu’řuaq lived at the intersection of land — or in winter, sinaaq, the ice edge — and sea. For Inuit, a complex set of taboos governed their relationship with nanuq, this beast both feared and sought, whose soul remained with its corpse for three days after it gave its life to a hunter. Like the playwright, Indigenous peoples anthropomorphized the polar bear in their legends — it hunts at the same breathing holes as they do. Climate change threatens this iconic predator now, as it does nanuq’s own hunter, the Inuit. In the future as imagined by Murphy, Angu’řuaq succumbs to a world made worse by man — not the men of his experience, the Inuit, nor even the first wave of invaders, the British explorers, but modern, acquisitive man.

Reneltta Arluk, director of the world premiere, inhabits an intersection too, the juncture of several Indigenous cultures. I first encountered her in Iqaluit when she performed in Christopher Morris’s play, Night. Reneltta brings to her craft a deep understanding of Indigenous culture and a strong awareness of the fragility of her northern environment.

A hunter — is it a man or a bear? — stands over a breathing hole, hostage to Sila. The great woman at the bottom of the sea withholds her largesse. She is angry.

Kenn Harper is a writer and historian who lived for fifty years in the Arctic. He is the author of Minik, the New York Eskimo (formerly Give Me My Father’s Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo); Thou Shalt Do No Murder: Inuit, Injustice, and the Canadian Arctic; and the series In Those Days: Collected Writings on Arctic History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog (Denmark).

Colleen Murphy’s Statement

As a dramatist and as a mother, I felt compelled to write a play about the climate emergency — factually grounding it in science and history, yet rooting it in emotional reality . . . but the subject is so vast and complex that I was not sure how to create an epic journey that could touch people’s hearts.

Years ago, I had read a very moving children’s story about an old woman in the Arctic who adopted a bear cub and raised him. Inspired by the essence of that story — a special bond and a profound connection between human and animal worlds — I developed the play around a mythical polar bear who lives through five hundred years of history. It begins in 1535 when a Nattilingmiut woman named Hummiktuq takes in the little cub and names him Angu’řuaq. The bond between mother and son is so powerful that it continues to grow through time. Angu’řuaq interacts with all kinds of people in the play, but mostly he interacts with the twenty-first century, because he represents all of us in our lives . . . and in our deaths.

My deepest gratitude to Aaron Gervais for helping me work through the original outline; to Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murphy, who generously shared her extensive traditional knowledge and her artistry to help shape the specificity and behaviour of all the Inuit characters; to Janet Tamalik McGrath, who vividly and precisely translated this play into the Nattilingmiut dialect, and who kindly allowed us to incorporate some of her Nattilingmiut-back-to-English retranslations that now enrich the play; and, finally, to Nilaulaaq Aglukkaq, an Elder from Gjoa Haven, who carries within her soul the original story of the old woman and the polar bear. Life is a circle.

Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murphy’s Statement

I met Colleen, a fellow Murphy, in the fall of 2016 at Qaggiavuut, our northern artist collective in Iqaluit. Myself and a team of Inuit artists provided cultural insight and authenticity to her proposed work of art.

In the spring of 2018, I worked in earnest with Colleen both critiquing and writing the play. In turn she mentored me on how to write a play. She did this the Inuit way by allowing me to see her rewrites and not by overt instruction but through modelling.

It has been such a joy to work with Colleen and a highlight of my past few years.

Janet Tamalik McGrath’s Statement

This book was both challenging and delightful to translate. It really required getting inside each character, exchange, and scene to understand how to bridge the story to a Nattilingmiut audience in Inuktut (the Inuit language). My goal was to convey the range of feelings that the masterfully crafted English text inspired in me as a reader. However, Nattilingmiut oral tradition relies more on context and shared reference for written material. Literary forms are newly adopted and can be sometimes awkward, especially when it is translated material. For first-language readers a work written as a transcription of an oral piece would be easiest to read. With translated works a reader always needs much more contextual information. As such, a number of adaptations were made in the translation to provide that.

It was truly a joy to work closely with my childhood Inuktut teacher, Nilaulaaq Aglukkaq of Gjoa Haven, Nunavut. She is a gifted storyteller and she connected to the play easily,