When I bought a fiddle before moving up North, I had no idea how popular fiddling was up here. It’s a big thing. About twice a year, fiddle instructors come through town for a few days to teach the kids (this is about as often as dentists come through town). Yesterday, I noticed on the community facebook group that they were doing fiddle lessons for adults, so Maciek and I scurried over to the school. It’s a good thing too, because I’ve apparently been doing approximately everything wrong (“Okay, that’s good, except for your shoulders, right elbow, right wrist, and all your fingers”). I went back today and got grouped in with the kids’ lessons (and yes, the kids were all better at fiddling than me). After two lessons, Maciek and I have improved greatly and can play a version of Amazing Grace that sounds like we are only gently strangling some cats. Maciek’s gotten into it too, and fortunately it turns out that the school has a fiddle loan program. And by “program”, I mean you can just take home a fiddle and promise to return it eventually.
The local police presence is two RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) officers, working out of one small station building. The back of that building has two rooms made of concrete (or at least painted with a hard concrete-like surface layer) with massive sliding steel doors. Those two rooms are the local holding cells. When people get arrested, usually for being drunk and aggressive, they get put into those cells until they’re either released or sent south to Yellowknife, where the real machinery of the justice system lives.
By law someone has to always be watching the people in those cells, in case they have a medical emergency, there’s a fire, etc. So the local RCMP are always looking for people to work as jail guards.
The RCMP station from outside.
After about 4 months of waiting for security check paper work to go through, I took the job. Now I get called in to the station, usually on short notice, usually about 3-4 times a month. I typically work an 8 hour shift.
The guard post, where we watch you on TV.
The crime rate here varies dramatically with how accessible alcohol is (i.e., whether the winter roads, or in summer the river, are open). The work tends to come in waves. I’ll hear nothing for weeks, and then suddenly be called in 4 days/nights in a row.
The inside of a cell.
The job involves:
Checking on the prisoner/s at least every 15 minutes, either by looking at a camera or through a window in the door.
Making a note in a log book of what they’re doing. Usually it’s either sleeping, sitting quietly, or screaming abuse at either me, the police, or the world in general.
Keeping myself entertained, usually by either reading or working on other projects on my laptop.
Keeping myself awake if it’s an overnight shift. Turns out you can do quite a lot of exercise in a holding cell area, especially if one of the cells is unoccupied (so you can do chin ups on the rails that hold up the heavy steel door) or if you use the bags of police body armor as weights.
The inside of a cell.
The pay is pretty big (like every job up north), the cops are nice and the work is easy and can be doubled up with other computer-based work. Plus, as a bonus, my “ignoring belligerent drunk people” skills are improving super fast!
A lot of local Dene traditions were lost over the last few hundred years as populations gradually shifted from living on the land to hanging out at home watching Netflix (sometimes not voluntarily). One tradition that seems to have hung around, however, is fire feeding.
I’ve seen this happen a few times now. Everyone stands in a circle around or near a fire to be fed. A few people, usually older men, sing and beat drums. Sometimes a Christian prayer is said, but usually in the local Dene language. The drums are, I believe, locally made from stretched hide of caribou.
A recent fire feeding ceremony in Tulita
Afterwards, everyone (even weird foreign whiteys like me) takes a little (about a pinch of) tobacco, flour, sugar or other granular foodstuff and throws it into the fire. As best as I understand, this means the fire is fed and bad things won’t happen as much and good things will.
