WAZED AND CONFUSED
ABOUT 15 YEARS ago, anthropologist Claudio Aporta and philosopher Eric Higgs traveled to Igloolik, a remote island in far northeast Canada, to answer an intriguing question: How might newly introduced GPS devices affect the island’s Inuit hunters, who possessed some of the sharpest wayfinding skills on Earth?
You don’t want to get lost on Igloolik. The proximity of magnetic north makes compasses fickle. The land can appear utterly featureless, especially in winter, when the cold—like a cat watching a mouse, “waiting patiently to see if he would make a mistake,” as explorer R.M. Patterson once put it—can make the smallest mishap fatal. During the summer, when Inuit hunters stalk walrus by boat, sea fog can close so tight around a vessel that anyone lacking GPS must drop anchor, lest they run aground, or steer out to sea and risk running out of fuel.
To navigate this murk, Igloolik’s hunters had long attended closely to not just stars and landmarks, but patterns of wind, snowdrift, current, animal behavior, and light. They read as much in the wind’s snow sculptures as Polynesian sailors read in constellations and tides. They had no formal training and rarely used
