The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  The early years of the war passed Ungava by. Then, in 1941, the U.S. air force began to build a wartime air base at Fort Chimo, or Kuujuak, in eastern Ungava and American troops poured in to staff it. Inuit employed at the Fort Chimo base passed through Inukjuak on their way to other bases in the eastern Arctic, bringing with them stories of the war, but no one in Inukjuak, least of all Paddy Aqiatusuk and losephie Flaherty, could quite believe them. There had been skirmishes between Inuit and Indians at the tree line for three thousand years, but the Inuit had lived all this time in the Arctic without an all-out war. Of the First World War, which had ended only shortly before Robert Flaherty had arrived in the settlement with his cameras, they knew nothing.

  For now though, losephie had more important concerns. A tiny, fresh-faced girl called Rynee had entered his life and become the woman he was to marry. The love he felt for Rynee was something new. The Inuktitut word for love means “to care for” or “to look after” and all losephie knew was that he wanted to care for Rynee, that he wanted to look after each delicate little part of her. Where had they met? All these years later Rynee finds it difficult to remember the exact moment, the one precise and telling detail. Perhaps it was at a drum dance, or on a camp visit or at the trading post in Inukjuak, their mutual attraction revealed in stolen glances and open, toothy smiles. Perhaps there was some slow simmer, a layering of casual meetings over days or weeks or months, culminating in an accretion of feeling, a bubble suddenly bursting at the surface. However it came about, this miniature woman was everything Josephie wanted in a wife, beautiful and healthy, with seaweedy hair and berry lips that spoke to Josephie of quick and happy Arctic summers. It was easy to imagine her frying him bannock bread and sewing him a pair of kamiks, the bread soft and as fat as summer bees, the kamiks tough and more waterproof than ducks' wings. Before long, family alliances were hinted at, gifts promised. Until they married, the couple would live apart, and see each other when Josephie sledged past Rynee's camp or, in the summer, when he borrowed his stepfather's kayak and paddled up the coast.

  Out on the sea ice, one spring day, Josephie Flaherty and Paddy Aqiatusuk found themselves beside the Belchers, those islands whose bleeding cliffs Robert Flaherty had once explored and the largest of which now bears his name on maps, though the Inuit have long had their own name for the place. The hunters had been sledging out for the bearded seal which sometimes basked on the shore-fast ice and, finding none, decided to make for their usual landfall. Though there were fishing nets still littering the beach and other evidence of recent occupation the island seemed on this occasion emptied out, as though a great gust of wind had come down and swept away its heart. Usually someone would come down to greet them, but today no one appeared. The reason emerged later. A man called Charlie Oujerack had been given a Bible in Inuktitut and taught how to read it by the mission at Inukjuak. After shutting himself away to study the book further he had formulated the view that he was Jesus Christ come to save the world, and that he would start with the Belchers. His first apostle was his sister, Minnie, who succeeded in making a few other converts among the tiny population and in silencing everyone else. The fantasy was harmless enough until Charlie Oujerack landed on the idea that true believers must prove their faith by walking out across the sea ice naked, as a result of which the lives of three adults and six children were lost and the remaining islanders plunged into despair.

  Among the Inuit, the event was seen as the sign of a bad spirit abroad, some malcontented ancestor or river soul out to trip up the unwary. Christianity had never wholly won them over. To the missionary and the RCMP constable at Inukjuak, it was just one further piece of evidence that Inuit were best treated not as the adults they thought they were, but as the children that they had, by this small piece of lunacy and in a million other ways, proved themselves to be.

  For a while, the incident became the chief topic of conversation enlivening the qalunaat's otherwise humdrum weekly bridge and poker parties. In Robert Flaherty's time the sole white occupant of Inukjuak had been the Révillon Fréres trader but by the mid-1940s, and partly as a result of the war, more and more qalunaathzd begun to arrive. In 1945, the qalunaat population consisted of the Hudson Bay post manager, a Mr. Trafford and his wife; Trafford's rival at the Baffin Trading Company, lames Cantley; his assistant, a Swede by the name of “Slim” Carlson; the missionary, the Reverend White-head; and a Mr. Doubleday who ran the radio station and his wife. They were joined in summer by the odd geologist, naturalist or geographer working for the Canadian Geodetic Service. Living on the opposite bank of the river were the detachment policemen, generally a corporal and a constable, and from 1943 onwards, the chief operator of the new Radiosonde station.

  Before the war, most ordinary Canadians rarely thought about the great lands lying to the north. Robert Flaherty's film had left them with a strong sense of the dignity and courage of the Inuit way of life, but then it had allowed them as quickly to forget it. The Inuit were not much more than colourful characters in the press reports and in the movies, and, as Flaherty had said, “happy-go-lucky.” To all but a few, the 200,000 square miles of its northern territories were not in any real sense Canada.

  The eastern Arctic archipelago and its inhabitants were particularly obscure. The islands had officially become part of Canada after they were transferred by Great Britain in 1870, but for the next seventy or eighty years the question remained as to whether or not Great Britain had the right to title in the first place. In 1904 the Canadian cabinet asked Dr. William King, the Chief Astronomer of Canada, to report on Canada's Arctic possessions on the grounds that “Canada's title to some at least of the North Islands is imperfect.” On maps of the time, Ellesmere Island, the largest in the High Arctic Queen Elizabeth Group, was represented as a U.S. possession or as unclaimed. Three years later, on 20 February 1907, Canadian Senator Pascal Poirier tried to clarify the issue by presenting a motion to the Senate formally claiming all the territory between two lines drawn from the North Pole to Canada. The Russians refused to acknowledge this “sector principle,” as did the Americans. All through the twenties, as losephie Flaherty was learning about ice, the Norwegians and the Danes were making tentative claims to those parts of the archipelago which had first been mapped by Norwegian and Danish explorers. These claims were gradually shrugged off and by the time losephie reached eighteen and the Second World War began, Canada's legal right to the eastern Arctic archipelago was no longer hotly in dispute, though a question mark did still hang over whether the seas around the islands belonged to Canada or were international waters, an issue so complex that it remains a matter of contention today. The issue of sovereignty in the eastern Arctic archipelago did not entirely go away, though. The region was now shown as part of Canada on maps but as part of the war effort, the United States had constructed five airfields in Canada's Arctic zone and even though Canada officially bought these after the war for US$78.8m, they often remained staffed, at least in part, by American personnel, and the American military and some of its various satellite departments often acted as though the territory was still open. In 1946 some U.S. newspapers carried recruiting advertisements for young men to work at a series of new weather stations in the Canadian Arctic which Canada knew nothing about. After some frosty enquiries by the Canadian government, Senator Owen Brewster of Maine hastily introduced a bill into the U.S. Senate to establish these proposed stations as joint U.S.-Canadian operations. All through the forties the stations continued to be supplied and serviced by U.S. planes and ships and it was only in 1954 that the Canadian Department of Transport was able to take over sea supply.

  By then, the Arctic had been drawn into the Cold War, and the Americans were announcing plans to build airstrips capable of landing heavy jets and cargo planes at the remote northern Ellesmere Island weather stations of Alert and Eureka, points on the North American continent only 1,200 miles across the Arctic Ocean from the plains of Siberia. A Canadian Department of External Affairs memorandum of
1952 drew anxious attention to the U.S. presence and predicted that the number of U.S. citizens in the Arctic District of Franklin, encompassing the eastern Arctic islands, would soon outstrip the population of “white Canadians” living there. In the same vein, a Privy Council memorandum predicted that the airstrips “would probably assume the character of small U.S. bases and Canadian control might well be lost.” The memorandum continued, “Our experiences since 1943, have indicated the extreme care which we must exercise to preserve Canadian sovereignty where Canadians are outnumbered and outranked.” In lanuary 1953 Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent went so far as to say that “US developments might be just about the only form of human activity in the vast wastelands of the Canadian Arctic.”

  To counteract this new American occupation, and to provide more support for the Canadian Inuit, a string of Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachments was quickly opened across the Canadian Arctic. The joint U.S.-Canadian Arctic weather stations were built and the Canadian government set up Radiosonde posts to collect meteorological data for the newly opened transpolar aviation route between North America and Europe. All of this, it was hoped, would provide jobs in Arctic settlements and put the Canadian Arctic once and for all in Canada's hands.

  The RCMP arrived in Inukjuak in 1935, the Radiosonde post was built in 1943 and a joint U.S.-Canadian weather station opened there in 1946. Qalunaat moved up to staff them.

  One of the side effects of the war was that it gave thousands of American soldiers their first experience of Arctic conditions and their first real sense of Inuit lives. While the war was on, attention was focused elsewhere, but once it ended, stories began leaking out from the American service personnel of the terrible conditions they had witnessed during their Arctic tours of duty. Many Inuit living around the American airfields, among them Fort Chimo on Ungava, appeared to be poorly clothed and thin and under constant siege from white men's diseases. They noted the Inuit's cruel and arbitrary dependence on fox fur prices which meant that any surplus a family was able to accumulate during a good season was immediately wiped out the moment fox prices fell. They saw how, if an Inuk man got ill, then his family often went hungry because the extended family, though anxious to help out, had nothing to give. If the illness was protracted, the entire family would wind up dependent on the goodwill of the local Hudson Bay factor, or they would starve. The RCMP detachments were too widely spaced to be of much use. In extreme cases, whole families died together. These were tough men and women, living in the most extreme conditions, hard-working and uncomplaining, Canadian citizens whom Canada seemed to have forgotten. The stories coming from the Arctic were a far cry from the cheery, upbeat world of Nanook, and the American press jumped on them. The Boston Globe was among the first to run scandalised reports. Other newspapers followed.

  As southern Canadians and Americans were beginning to learn the truth about life for many Inuit, losephie Flaherty's fortunes were changing for the better.

  Out of the blue, the Radiosonde manager offered Robert Flaherty's son the job of station piliriji or choreboy. Why he picked Josephie out is not clear, but it may have had something to do with the fact that Josephie was a half-breed and as such was considered, somehow, more suited to the job. It may simply have been that Josephie was strong-looking with competent hands and a diligent manner and that he smiled a good deal.

  Accepting the job meant, for Josephie, having to leave Aqia-tusuk's camp and going to live in the choreboy's hut beside the station. This Josephie was at first reluctant to do, feeling pushed and pulled by the competing claims of his stepfather and the Radiosonde manager, but he soon saw that by this one small sacrifice, his family could be relieved of some of their insecurity. With the meagre allowance from the choreboy's job he could at least look after himself and help them out and in some way help pay back the family for the years of care they had given him, even though he was only partly theirs. Accepting the job also meant being able to marry the woman he wanted. Finally, and this is not a trivial point, saying yes meant that Josephie would not have to say no to a white man. And so for the first time in his life the young Josephie moved far from his family camp into a hut on the south shore of the Innuk-suak River in the settlement of Inukjuak and became a wage earner.

  The job, as he discovered early on, was exhausting rather than challenging. He kept the floors well swept and the station cleaned, burned the rubbish, checked the station's weather balloons and parachutes for holes and tears. In the summer he maintained the station's Peterhead boat and caulked the station building with rope and tar. When the snow arrived in September, he boarded up the windows, shovelled snow against the exterior walls, fixed the insulation around the pipes and valves and made sure the chimney remained open, primed the stoves with coal and topped off the lamps with coal oil. When there were errands to be run, dog pemmi-can to be made, messages to be taken to the RCMP and so forth, it was Josephie's job to do them and not to question why.

  In return, he received a small weekly wage. The new choreboy's remuneration was barely sufficient for a few bags of flour and sugar, a little lard and tobacco. His idea of being able to keep his family turned out to have been misplaced. When it was parcelled out around camp, there was hardly enough to make much of a difference to anyone.

  The hut was a bonus, though. It had an enclosed snowporch peppered with hooks and, on the bare board floor, a boot rack and a large, flat stone to serve as a makeshift meat store. Beyond the porch and through another door lay a single room, about twelve feet square, marked off with a piece of caribou skin into two areas, respectively for sleeping and living. On one side, farthest from the door, were a couple of shelves, below which there would be room for a Coleman stove, should Josephie ever be able to afford one. The walls were lined with newspapers scavenged from the Radiosonde station, which served as insulation, as well as to lend the hut a cheerful air. True, the place was small, so small that four adults could fit in the living area only by sitting shoulder to shoulder, true also that the rough board floor was so musty and damp in the summer and the ceiling so foggy with smuts and animal fat, that Josephie preferred to live in a tent beside it, and true that in winter, icicles hung from the rafters, but there was something about this hut which nonetheless brought with it a promise of safety, even advancement. It was more qalunaat to live in this hut than it was to live in a snowhouse.

  It also provided Josephie and Rynee with their first home. She moved in and set herself to sewing a pair of new summer kamiks and a winter outfit of caribou skin for her man.

  Whenever Paddy Aqiatusuk came into Inukjuak to trade he dropped by the young couple's hut for a mug-up and a place to stay. Josephie's life, now suddenly abstracted by his humdrum job with its unnatural qalunaat timetable, was rooted by these visits; by the man himself, his presence, his strong, true sense of being Inuk. During the short weeks of summer, the two men would sit outside on the banks of the river, stirring a driftwood fire beside which Rynee dried sealskins and loops of seal gut, and talk about the land, Aqia tusuk's hunting trips, where his trap lines lay. In the winter they chatted inside the hut, on caribou skins. When they had drunk tea and eaten, Aqiatusuk would light a cigarette and set himself to his carvings, while the night passed and the two men relived past hunting trips, the dogs they had had, the winters that had come and gone. Sooner or later, always too soon for Josephie, someone from the detachment would come round to remind Aqiatusuk to leave the settlement once his business there was done and, griping like a wounded walrus, the sculptor would pack his gear and head back out to camp, leaving something of the old days hanging in the air.

  The seasons turned, and at the Radiosonde station the manager was replaced by another then another still and over the months and years the Flahertys began to accustom themselves to the life that seemed to have come their way. Needless to say, Josephie and Rynee Flaherty had no idea of the incidental part they were playing in the “Canadianisation” of the Arctic. Nor did they know that a much bigger part lay waiting
around the corner. To Josephie, the qalunaat were the strangers on their doorstep. He understood less about them than he did about the ptarmigan living in the willow. This half-breed son of Robert Flaherty carried the burden of his odd, alien, blood lightly. He had no means of connecting that part of his own heart in which the spirit of his father lay. The Hudson Bay Company, the government administrators, the RCMP, the missionaries, his own father, were all of a piece to him, a mysterious club whose rules he would never fully comprehend and to which he would never be invited to belong.

  There was another half-breed living in the settlement. Tommy Pallisser worked at the Hudson Bay store and doubled as an interpreter whenever a southern scientist arrived in the settlement. Originally from Labrador, he had almost become a white person, in part because he spoke English and in part because, being from elsewhere, he was as much an outsider as the qalunaat. The qalunaat invited him to their dinner parties and to their endless games of bridge and poker and they talked to him almost, but not quite, as if he were an equal. But Tommy Pallisser knew he was not and he kept his Inuit wife from learning English lest she got ideas. The Inuit in the settlement avoided him for the most part. For all his special knowledge and privileges, he was a man caught between two worlds, belonging nowhere, with no particular affinities, a man not entirely to be trusted.

  Josephie Flaherty had no desire to be white. What Josephie wanted was simple. He wanted his children to grow up strong, and to go out on the land and to catch seals and caribou and walrus as his stepfather and his grandfather and his grandfather's grandfather before him had done. He wanted his family to have enough to eat and to be able to support his stepfather when he got too old to hunt. And if all that had been straightforwardly, simply possible, then Josephie Flaherty would have been a happy man.

  He rarely went out on the land now. For the most part his life was restricted to that small strip on the north bank of the Innuksuak River where the Radiosonde station stood. Without wishing to be, or even fully intending it, he and Rynee had become settlement Inuit, that small group of Inuit residents about whom the police and other qalunaatwere forever complaining and describing in reports as “scroungers” or “slum-dwellers.” Not that Josephie Flaherty had any time for scrounging. The Radiosonde station kept him fully occupied. Nor did he ever ask for anything more of his bosses than what little he was given, except, every now and then, a day or two to go out with Paddy Aqiatusuk hunting for seal, when the two men could feel the wind against their skin and the smell of the dogs in their nostrils and things were something like the old days. And it would have been quite unfair to describe his and Rynee's hut as a slum. True, it was stained with smuts and seal grease, true it smelled of uncured sealskin and fat, but every day Rynee took a goosewing and swept the place until it shined.