LOS T IN TRANSLATION
It’s the fourth day of my five-day hiking adventure, and I’m happy to spend it at the Sheep Creek Station base camp with my fellow hikers and a few park employees. (We’re all glad to give our feet a rest after three days out on the uneven, tussocky terrain.) At the cookhouse, Diane Wilson, the park’s Western Arctic field unit superintendent, is busy decorating
a cake to celebrate the fact that the base camp, which was built in 1989, is getting a new name at a ceremony today. Danny Gordon, an elder and hunter from Aklavik who’s also a member of the North Slope Wildlife Management Advisory Council, helped inspire the name change. “Imniarvik,” I’ve been told, means “place where sheep are born” or “meeting place for sheep”—but now Gordon, who arrived this afternoon on a bush plane with other members of the council, tells us it means “the place where sheep are harvested.” (There is a nearby animal-processing
site that dates back 650 years.) I look over to Wilson, who, for just a moment, seems to be taken aback by the altered definition. “Translating
Inuvialuktun words can be nuanced,” she says with a smile. In the end, though, the official consensus on the meaning is “where the sheep are.”