Nain, Labrador 1995 — “Gossan” is the Welsh word for “blood.” Prospectors always look for gossans, the blood-rust-colored earth which often occurs over sulfide ore-bodies. Early in January, our exploration team had discovered one of the richest nickel-copper ore-bodies of the 20th Century about one mile east of a hillside gossan. In late August, I was taking journalists around the gossan and telling them about our discovery.
While I was explaining how the geophysics was used to map the underground geology and mineralization, I spied some lighter-colored King Boletes (Boletus edulis) sprouting near a drill-site. “How ’bout gourmet mushrooms with our caribou steaks tonight?” I tell them.
Our camp cook is an Inuit woman (“Eskimo” is derogatory) who is none too happy when I bring her Boletes from the gossan.
“What do you want me to do with these?” she asks.
I say, “Do you have any olive oil?”
“Hell no,” is the reply, “this is the Arctic and olives don’t grow up here.”
“Okay, how ’bout butter?” I tell her, “just sauté the ‘shrooms in a little butter and put them on my caribou steak.”She brings out my ‘shrooms and steak, making a point to hold the dish as far away from her as she possibly can.
The dish was very good, and the ‘shrooms complemented the Canadian beer too. One of the drillers even tried a small bite, and said they were very good.
The next morning all the Inuit and geos in the camp seemed amazed I was still alive after eating the shrooms. So I tease them over my coffee, and pout how they could ever doubt their Chief Geophysicist?
Later that morning, while I was making maps, there was a knock on my field-office door. I opened the door, to find about twenty old Inuits (the town elders) standing outside. Their interpreter told me that the elders had heard of my mushroom identification skills, and hoped that I could teach them about the mushrooms sprouting around Nain. He explained that their grand-parents had been the last generation to know the good eating mushrooms.
In the 1920’s, Canadian and German Christian missionaries came to teach the Inuit the modern ways. The missionaries apparently had told them that mushrooms can be difficult to identify, and never to eat them. In ’96, some of the Inuit were beginning to question these beliefs, and wanted to learn about the local ‘shrooms.
Well, I was both honored and flabbergasted. I told my staff to handle the maps and called my chopper pilot to give me and a few senior Inuit a ride to the mushrooms. I showed them both the edible and inedible ones. They were very grateful, and on my next trip I brought them a good mushroom field-guide. The same mushrooms at Colorado’s +8000-foot elevation grow near sea-level in Labrador.
They had a little ceremony for me, and now Crebs is a kind of honorary Inuit.
A little sad though, too bad some guy from over 9,000 miles away had to teach a native aboriginal group about their traditional local delicacies.