The Other Side of Eden Opening Imagine the crystal darkness of an arctic night. A canopy of stars and a glowing arc of aurora, the northern lights. A vast astral flickering and dancing; yet a sense of eternal, unmoving space. Under the moonlight, the surface of the world shines and fades into the distance. The sky is cloudless, open, with clearness that is like a sound, a crackling of frozen silence that many arctic travelers claim to be able to hear. And there is a wind, strong enough to blow the snow across the ice. I was traveling by dog team with Paulussie Inukuluk. He was taking me to hunt seals at their breathing holes, in a favored area beyond a headland that shapes the southeast corner of Bylot Island.

We crossed the sound in front of Pond Inlet and followed the coast of Bylot Island, moving on bumpy sea ice. I was half running, half stumbling beside the sled, while Paulussie ran alongside the dogs, urging them on. I remember a particular moment, close to the shore, when I lost my footing, almost fell, and stopped. The entire surface of the world was flowing along at knee height. There were no features to the earth; the dog team was half immersed in this strange current of snow. I stood long enough for the sled and Paulussie to be no more than a blurred, gray movement at the edge of the light. I was encased in caribou skin clothing--parka, trousers, socks, and boots. If I faced away from the wind, I felt nothing on my skin but the mix of my breath with the cold air.

The world before me was as a vision, an unbelievable magnificence that filled me with awe, disbelief, and at the edge of my mind, real fear. I began to run, as fast as I could, on the uneven surface of the sea ice, my feet invisible in the layer of blowing snow, to catch up with Paulussie and his dogs. This moment is held in my memory like a film clip--vivid, available for recall, but distanced by time and strangeness. There is a sense in me of a mystery. It comes to mind now, as I begin to write again about the words and people of the North.   In 1969 I spent five months living on the skid row of a Canadian city. Most of the people I met there had lived, or identified themselves and their ancestors, as members of "Indian" communities. I put quotes around "Indian" because it is a word Europeans brought to the Americas and used to categorize a huge range of peoples--none of whom, of course, had any connections with India.

What the people I met had in common was that most of them had grown up in societies that were, or had been, dependent on hunting and gathering. Two years later, in 1971, I first went to the Arctic. I lived and worked in several regions, encountering many people who had lived much of their lives as hunter-gatherers. From then until now, I have continued to work with hunter-gatherer communities, as anthropologist, land-claims researcher, filmmaker, and twice as expert witness in land-rights court cases. For all that I had written about hunter-gatherer societies, I was left with a deep conviction that I had yet to write about that which is most important. Something lay there that eluded not just me, but many who have experienced another way of life. We write about some facets of it, some surfaces, that we make our business. But the gold we find is transformed by the reverse alchemy of our journey, from there to here, into lead.

Not into nothing, not into worthlessness, but into a substance that has more weight than light, more utility than beauty, is malleable rather than of great value. What is this reality that gets left behind? It is not simply some kind of otherness. In fact, anthropologists are often skillful at crossing divides between peoples in their fieldwork, but clumsy when it comes to writing up the "findings." Perhaps the desire for the esteem of peers and critics leads to a tendency to make things unduly complicated or scholarly or heroic--depending on the audience we most need to impress. This book draws on all parts of my work; it is rooted in my experience of hunter-gatherer ways of being in and knowing about the world. In many ways it is a personal account, with memories of people and places that influenced my life. The influence has been on how I see and understand both history and society, so this book is also about ideas. Several important points need to be made at the outset.

There are virtually no people in the world today who live purely as hunter-gatherers. Many kinds of colonial process have transformed peoples'' economic lives, even in the remotest areas. Those who see themselves as hunter-gatherers, and are seen as such by their neighbors, may also be part-time laborers, do bits of farming, have domestic animals, or rely on welfare payments and state pensions. Nonetheless, there are many individuals, families, and societies for whom their way of raising children, using land, and speaking of their culture is rooted in hunter-gatherer heritage. This is something about which people are often proud, and they do what they can to secure it against the incursions and criticisms of others, including the insistence by some anthropologists that hunter-gatherers themselves are a kind of myth. My book takes its inspiration from the courage and determination these people have brought to their struggle for survival, as well as from their skills and wisdom. It must also be said that I have lived and worked in hunter-gatherer societies as a man; this places a limitation on what I have experienced. I learned far less about gathering than about hunting.

I saw far less in the domestic sphere than I did on the land. In reality, the economic, social, and political lives of the peoples I knew were as dependent on women as on men. Despite this imbalance in how I spent my time, I hope to pass on what hunter-gatherers can teach us not only about their own particular human genius but also about human history. I invite readers who are not experts in anthropology, archaeology, or linguistics to come on an exploration that leads to wild places, harsh climates, and concepts that may seem to lie beyond most people''s actual and intellectual geography, but are, in reality, central to the history of all societies. My work relies on that of many others. I have found information and inspiration in a wide variety of sources. There are also passageshere that need some degree of qualification or explanation. To avoid burdening the text with too many references and refinements of argument, I have created a set of endnotes.

They are--tike much of the knowledge they refer to--a sort of shadow text. It is not easy to write about other peoples without falling prey to conceptual and political misconceptions. The stereotypes that capture and tend to diminish tribal peoples in general, and hunter-gatherers in particular, are pervasive and powerful. I attempt to combat some of these stereotypes here. But I would like to establish, as a way of introducing these stories of exploration, three pivotal ideas. First, hunter-gatherers live at what have become the margins of the "developed" world. Development means profitable farming and towns that exist thanks to the farms that feed them. Where farming is judged not to be possible or profitable, hunter-gatherers can sometimes continue to use and occupy their lands.

At these margins, two ways of life meet and sometimes overlap. Yet there is a profound difference between these two ways of life, and an equally profound difference between the peoples who practice them. That difference is at the heart of what I have set out to explore. Second, the difference between hunter-gatherers and farmers, or between hunter-gatherers and all other peoples, has nothing to do with evolution or with supposed levels of civilization or development. Hunter-gatherers live at the margins of the farmer''s world; farmers live at the margins of the hunter-gatherer''s world. Each way of life is the center of its own universe. This book places the sophistication of hunter-gatherers alongside the achievements of farmers. Hunter-gatherers, like other peoples, use whatever technologies are available to them, including guns, engines, and manufactured food, and they participate in national economic life insofar as they are able.

We are all contemporaries, whatever lands we live on and whatever heritage we rely on to do so. All human beings have been evolving for the same length of time. Third, a crucial difference between hunter-gatherers and farmers is that one society is highly mobile, with a strong tendency to both small- and large-scale nomadism, whereas the other is highly settled,tending to stay firmly in one particular area or territory. This difference is established in stereotypes of "nomadic" hunters and "settled" farmers. However, the stereotype has it the wrong way around. It is agricultural societies that tend to be on the move; hunting peoples are far more firmly settled. This fact is evident when we look at these two ways of being in the world over a long time span--when we screen the movie of human history, as it were, rather than relying on a photograph. In one important way, hunters and farmers are not equals.

Agricultural peoples, especially in the world''s rich nation-states, are numerous, immensely rich, well armed, and domineering. Hunter-gatherers are few in number, poor, self-effacing, and possessed of little military strength. The farmers have it in their power to overwhelm hunter-gatherers, and they continue to do so in the few regions of the world where this domination is not already complete. Yet hunter-gatherers have experience and knowledge that must be recognized. Their genius is integral to human potential, their skills are appropriate to their lands, and thei.