When I travelled to the central Canadian arctic in 1973 for my first fieldwork among the Nattilingmiut of Kugaaruk (Pelly Bay), I encountered a community amidst a process of rapid transition. Formerly fully nomadic, the Nattilingmiut had started to congregate around the mission post at the mouth of the Kugaaruk River in the early 1950’s, building temporary shacks there. Four years before I arrived, the Nattilingmiut had become fully sedentary. The RC Mission led co-operative had made a bid on a Canadian government contract to build prefab housing and won it. The houses and other building had been put up in the summer of 1969 and when I arrived the community was still busy finding its way of living in a permanent setting. Established in 1935, RC Mission of the Oblate Fathers was still very present in the community, although that situation had started to change too as the government of the Northwest Territories was taking over public services (schooling, healthcare) that had traditionally been provided by the RC Mission.

During that first visit I was highly interested in the question to what extent traditional religious beliefs were still held and practiced. A diary, written between 1958 and 1964 by Bernard Irqugaqtuq at the request of Geert van den Steenhoven, suggested that shamanistic practices were still carried on and basing myself on this information I made an attempt to get some more insight into the matter. It became one of my big frustrations during that first year of fieldwork. Discussing the matter with informants invariably failed: all they wanted to do is show me how good Catholics they had become. Shamanism was something of taipsomanialuk, of a long time ago. They would state adamantly that they had broken with that past and that they were now maliktunik, followers of the missionaries. In this respect, Bernard was even more tacit than his fellow Nattilingmiut. Given the RC Mission's strong presence in Kugaaruk I had anticipated such behaviour, but I was stubborn enough to believe that with some patience I might be able to break through that icy ‘Catholic’ surface and catch a glimpse of what was hidden behind. Indeed, I did catch a few glimpses, but not as a result of a deliberate research strategy, but rather by chance as the following example illustrates.