Even though Kapugen, Miyax’s father, doesn’t appear in person until the end of the novel, the reader learns a lot about his character through Miyax’s many memories of him. Kapugen played a formative role in Miyax’s life: after Miyax’s mother died, she and Kapugen moved to a seal camp to live according to the old Inuit way of life. Miyax grows up believing that her father died while on a seal-hunting excursion (although this turns out not to be true). Even before her father’s supposed death, Miyax and Kapugen were separated when she was taken away to attend school, in accordance with the Bureau of Indian Affairs’s compulsory education mandate for indigenous children. In the present, Miyax—who is trying to survive in the Alaskan tundra after running away from her abusive husband, Daniel—regards the years she spent with Kapugen at the seal camp as the best time of her life. It was during this time that he instilled in her a deep respect for their Inuit traditions and beliefs. Miyax idolizes her father and sees Kapugen and herself as kindred spirits, both equally inclined toward the old way of life and happy to coexist “with the cold and the birds and the beasts.”
However, it eventually becomes clear that Miyax’s memory of Kapugen is an idealized construction that she has created—intentionally or unintentionally—to replace the father she couldn’t keep. When Miyax finally discovers that Kapugen is alive and reunites with him, her initial elation is replaced by bitter disappointment when she learns that Kapugen has eschewed his firmly held convictions about respecting nature and the old way of life. Miyax is horrified to find in Kapugen’s house a crash helmet and goggles that are nearly identical to the ones worn by hunters who recently shot and killed Amaroq, a wolf Miyax befriended and considered her “adopted father.” When Kapugen, a formerly revered Inuk hunter, admits to hunting from an airplane the way gussak (white) people do, it’s as though he’s admitted to killing Amaroq himself.
Miyax reflects as she leaves Kapugen’s house just moments after being reunited that “Kapugen, after all, was dead to her.” This thought suggests that although her father is physically alive, Kapugen as he was “to her”—that is, the romanticized image of him she created in his absence—is dead. Miyax’s bitter reflection also implies that this romanticized version of Kapugen might have only ever existed in her mind. Her treasured memories of Kapugen, which Miyax initially relies on to bring her comfort and ancestral wisdom in the Arctic wilderness, show how memory is a powerful tool that can connect people to their loved ones or to entire ways of life that have largely been lost to history. Yet through her reckoning with the disparity between the father she remembered and the father he turned out to be, the novel also highlights the fallibility of memory and the human tendency to become disillusioned after glorifying the past.
Memory and Disillusionment ThemeTracker
Memory and Disillusionment Quotes in Julie of the Wolves
Amaroq got to his feet, and as he slowly arose he seemed to fill the sky and blot out the sun. He was enormous. He could swallow her without even chewing. “But he won’t,” she reminded herself. “Wolves do not eat people. That’s gussak talk. Kapugen said wolves are gentle brothers.”
The signal went off. It sped through his body and triggered emotions of love. Amaroq’s ears flattened and his tail wagged in friendship. He could not react in any other way to the chin pat, for the roots of this signal lay deep in wolf history. It was inherited from generations and generations of leaders before him. As his eyes softened, the sweet odor of ambrosia arose from the gland on the top of his tail and she was drenched lightly in wolf scent. Miyax was one of the pack.
“Change your ways when fear seizes,” he had said, “for it usually means you are doing something wrong.”
Miyax at last was sure of what had happened to Jello. He was the low man on the totem pole, the bottom of the ladder. She recalled the day Amaroq had put him down and forced him to surrender, the many times Silver had made him go back and sit with the pups, and the times that Kapu had ignored his calls to come home to the den. He was indeed a lowly wolf—a poor spirit, with fears and without friends.
Later, Kapugen’s Aunt Martha told her that he had lost his mind the day her mother died. He had grabbed Miyax up and walked out of his fine house in Mekoryuk. He had left his important job as manager of the reindeer herd, and he had left all his possessions. “He walked you all the way to seal camp,” Martha told her. “And he never did anything good after that.”
To Miyax the years at seal camp were infinitely good. The scenes and events were beautiful color spots in her memory.
“Wolves are brotherly,” he said. “They love each other, and if you learn to speak to them, they will love you too.”
“Yes, you are Eskimo,” he had said. “And never forget it. We live as no other people can, for we truly understand the earth.”
“What a lovely i’noGo tied!” Julie said politely. “A what?” asked Judith. Julie repeated the Eskimo word for the house of the spirits. Judith snickered. “That’s a charm bracelet,” she said. Rose giggled and both laughed derisively. Julie felt the blood rush to her face as she met, for the first but not the last time, the new attitudes of the Americanized Eskimos. She had much to learn besides reading. That night she threw her i’noGo tied away.
As the months passed, the letters from Amy became the most important thing in Julie’s life and the house in San Francisco grew more real than the house in Barrow. She knew each flower on the hill where Amy’s house stood, each brick in the wall around the garden, and each tall blowing tree. She also knew the curls in the wrought-iron gate, and how many steps led up to the big front door; she could almost see the black-and-white tile on the floor of the foyer. If she closed her eyes she could imagine the arched doorway, the Persian rug on the living-room floor, the yellow chairs and the huge window that looked over the bay. Radios, lamps, coffee tables—all these she could see. And if she shut her eyes tight, she could feel Amy’s hand in her hand and hear Amy’s big feet tap the sidewalk. The second floor was always fun to dream about. At the top of the winding stairs four doors opened upon rooms lit with sunshine. And one was the pink room, the one that would be hers when she got to San Francisco.
Instantly she knew what had happened; Amaroq had turned on him. Once Kapugen had told her that some wolves had tolerated a lone wolf until the day he stole meat from the pups. With that, the leader gave a signal and his pack turned, struck, and tore the lone wolf to pieces. “There is no room in the wolf society for an animal who cannot contribute,” he had said.
To amuse herself she thought of the hill where the white house stood in San Francisco. When it seemed almost real enough to touch, and very beautiful, it vanished abruptly; for the tundra was even more beautiful—a glistening gold, and its shadows were purple and blue. Lemon-yellow clouds sailed a green sky and every wind-tossed sedge was a silver thread.
The gussaks were paid to shoot them. A man who brought in the left ear of a wolf to the warden was rewarded with a bounty of fifty dollars. The bounty was evil to the old men at seal camp, for it encouraged killing for money, rather than need. Kapugen considered the bounty the gussaks’ way of deciding that the amaroqs could not live on this earth anymore. “And no men have that right,” he would say. “When the wolves are gone there will be too many caribou grazing the grass and the lemmings will starve. Without the lemmings the foxes and birds and weasels will die. Their passing will end smaller lives upon which even man depends, whether he knows it or not, and the top of the world will pass into silence.”
When she thought of San Francisco, she thought about the airplane and the fire and blood and the flashes and death. When she took out her needle and sewed, she thought about peace and Amaroq.
She would be very useful to him and they would live as they were meant to live—with the cold and the birds and the beasts.
“Come in. I’ve never seen such a bird.”
Kapugen, after all, was dead to her.
Julie pointed her boots toward Kapugen.