Norman Hallendy with Inuk elder Oksurallik on Baffin Island.Handout
Crossing a big bay on Hudson Strait one summer, Norman Hallendy and his friend, Inuk hunter Lukta, became lost in a dense fog. Lutka stopped the outboard motor and, using the foil from his cigarette package, fashioned a tiny boat, complete with a sail. He set it on the water, watched the course it took, considered the time of day and season, and motored off in the opposite direction. They soon bumped into an outcrop, scrambled onto it, and waited until the fog lifted and they could see land. Before they returned to the boat, Lutka took the time to assemble an inuksuk, or stone messenger, to point other travellers toward the coastline.
That journey was one of many Mr. Hallendy made during his more than 40 years of visits to the village of Kinngait (formerly Cape Dorset) on southern Baffin Island. He met community elders and was intrigued by stories of the life they led following the migrations of caribou, their conceptions of time and space and their legends and myths. Although he had no formal training as an ethnographer or anthropologist, he took careful notes and learned Inuktitut. He recorded interviews with Lutka and other Inuit elders, the last generation to have lived on the land before moving into government-funded communities. He learned how the Inuit use inuksuit (the plural of inuksuk), to communicate across vast Arctic landscapes. He relished journeys with his friends to their hunting camps and places that had special meaning for them. And he delighted in recounting in articles, lectures and books the interior lives and survival skills of a people who inhabit one of the harshest landscapes on the planet.
Mr. Hallendy, who died in Ottawa at 91 on Oct. 27, had a creative spirit, a capacious mind and an appetite for adventure. Writer and editor Alan Morantz, who worked with Mr. Hallendy on several book projects, said “Norm could be the most cantankerous and the most charming man. He was both artist and scientist. He could hold a room of thousands spellbound or make himself small to draw others in.”
Norman Earle Hallendy was born in Toronto on April 7, 1932 to Marie and Michael Hallendy, who had immigrated to Canada in 1917 from Bukovina, then an administrative division of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were entrepreneurial, starting several small businesses.
At 16, to help with the cost of his studies at the elite private school Upper Canada College, he decided to seek a summer job working in the mining industry. He spotted a notice in a Toronto newspaper for the annual prospectors’ convention at the Royal York Hotel. Making his way to the convention, he talked his way into a job re-examining an abandoned gold mine near Lake of the Woods. Subsequent summer jobs in the mining industry took him all over northern Ontario and eventually to the Arctic.
Hallendy working in a mining camp at the age of 16.Handout
When he finished high school, he disappointed his parents by choosing to study art. He had always had, he once wrote, “a strong instinct for curiosity and a means of expressing it at a very early age.” He was admitted to the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), where he specialized in industrial design. His skills earned him scholarships that allowed him to pursue postgraduate design studies in Stockholm, Zurich, Milan and the United States.
Appointed senior designer for Canada’s exhibition at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958, he moved to Ottawa, married Clara Catherine Cardillo, had two daughters and held a series of increasingly senior design and executive positions with the Department of Northern Affairs, the National Film Board and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CHMC).
It was while Mr. Hallendy was working for Northern Affairs as an industrial designer that he made his first trip to Kinngait. Over the course of the next four decades, he would bank his vacation time to make yearly visits to the community. The people he met say he was respectful, patient and keenly observant of local customs. Slowly, the elders began recounting to him their knowledge of the physical and metaphysical landscape, hunting techniques, shamanism and their legends.
He became so well known in the community that one day his friend Simeonie Quppapik roundly chastised him: “You have been visiting me long enough. Stop knocking on my door when you come! Only qallunaat [white people] and police knock on doors. Stop scaring me!”
Jeannie Manning, who was born in Kinngait and worked for Mr. Hallendy as interpreter, said when she first met him, she thought “he was a little weird” for asking so many questions about spiritual matters. But through the stories he elicited from the elders, “I learned about things that had never before been revealed to me.”
When Mr. Hallendy retired in 1988 as vice-president of CMHC, he began pulling together his photographs and notes into illustrated lectures and books.
In one of his first articles about inuksuit, Mr. Hallendy explained in Equinox magazine that they can serve as hunting and navigational aids, co-ordination points and message centres. Some are placed to be viewed from a long distance, others to be seen from the sea, as with the one Lutka built on the outcrop. Others are meant to serve as warnings of dangerous river crossings or rich spawning grounds. A stone placed on an existing inukshuk can be a message from a travelling hunter to his following family that he is headed in a different direction. And some mark memorable places or tragic events
Mr. Hallendy wrote several books, including Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic, that featured his photography, his insights into the Inuktitut language and the spiritual and practical life of his Inuit friends, one of whom told him “I’m telling you these things so that they are written. Write carefully, you are carrying the remains of our thoughts.”
His work drew the praise of Arctic scientists. William Fitzhugh, Director of the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Centre, wrote in the foreword to one of Mr. Hallendy’s books that his “passion for exploring stone structures transformed the way anthropologists and many others approach the Inuit landscape. His beautiful photography and sensitive probing for meaning, especially his
Mr. Hallendy wrote widely about inuksuit – the plural of inukshuk, a stone messenger built to communicate with coming travellers.Norman Hallendy/Handout
lexical recording among his Inuit friends and elders, opened our eyes to a spiritual, historical, and intellectual world hidden in seemingly prosaic rock placements.”
Mr. Hallendy lectured widely and was awarded the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Gold Medal and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Mungo Park Medal. In 1989, he began donating his photos, as well as Inuit drawings, prints and sculptures, to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. McMichael officials said the donated works, “brilliantly capture the essence of the people, the land and the history of Kinngait.”
Daughter Angela said she once asked her father why he was so passionately devoted to his Inuit friends and the Arctic. “He said he loved the vastness of it, the ruggedness and the elders he met.” He was also at heart a bit of survivalist, she said, and loved living off the grid.
Mr. Hallendy once said he saw himself 'as a student, continually seeking help from the Inuit elders to feed an insatiable curiosity.'Handout
Mr. Hallendy once said he saw himself “as a student, continually seeking help from the Inuit elders to feed an insatiable curiosity. They helped me to understand what I was so moved by in the landscape, the environment, and in the insights of those who knew and experienced their surroundings so intimately.”
In his retirement years, Mr. Hallendy lived with his second wife, Diana Cousens, on a rural property near Carp, Ont., a village 40 minutes west of Ottawa. He and Ms. Cousens transformed the property into what farmer Bruce Munro, one of his morning coffee buddies, described as a “little utopia,” with a pond, waterfall, gardens, and an endless list of improvement projects. Another buddy, biologist James Coupland, said for years Mr. Hallendy and a mixed group that included himself, Mr. Munro, a couple of long-haul truck drivers, a banker, an ex-military man and others met at a big table in Alice’s Café in Carp. Mr. Hallendy often treated the morning sessions as a show-and-tell, bringing in a narwhal tusk, Inuit art or copies of his books.
“He had stories, but he was also really interested in people. He always wanted to know more about each of us, who we were and what we did,” Mr. Munro said. Or, said Mr. Coupland, he’d be forcing on us “jars of his latest pickling project.”
Editor Mr. Morantz said he once asked Mr. Hallendy for a biographical note about himself and he wrote back: “I’m just a person who went to school, got a good education, learned how to observe things well, got a series of interesting jobs, had the good fortune of working with people much smarter than me, and who continues to derive much pleasure in discovering things for myself, rather than, as Lin Yutang once said, being carried in the rickshaw of another man’s labours.”
Mr. Hallendy leaves Ms. Cousens; his daughters, Angela Hallendy and Andrea Hallendy-Mallon; sister, Delores Smith; and grandchildren, Nicholas Roy and Cayden Yooeun Mallon.