It was an extraordinary achievement. After all the approaches to High Arctic constables, the appeals to Eastern Arctic Patrol officials, to interpreters, missionaries, teachers and welfare officers, which had for forty years fallen on deaf ears, the Inuit of Inukjuak, Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord were finally about to be heard. What they had to say would provoke one of the most explosive controversies in Canadian history.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE TV CREWS stationed outside the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa on Monday, 5 April 1993, were anticipating a good day ahead. The weather was sunny and the forecasters were predicting a respectable high of 8°C. The Chateau was looking its usual fantastical self, a good backdrop for the cameras, its Indiana limestone towers shining in the morning sun. The hotel opened quietly in 1912, after the man who commissioned it, American-born Charles Melville Hays, died on the Titanic while bringing over English dining furniture, but there was nothing quiet about the building, built in grand French Renaissance style with Italian marble floors and English walnut-wood fittings. Over the years the place had gained a reputation as the third chamber of parliament, its labyrinth of rooms, coffee bars and intimate nooks serving as the deal-making dens of generations of parliamentarians escaping from the constraining atmosphere of the parliament building next door. There were many in Ottawa, most of them civil servants of one kind or anotherCanada's capital is a resolutely government townfor whom the Laurier symbolised the city's solid, bureaucratic soul, but others, noting the building's mixed parentage and its jumble of cultural references, for whom the Chateau represented something more subtle about what it might mean to be Canadian.
The hotel staff were well accustomed to cameras. Every head of state, pop star or Hollywood face who visited Ottawa stayed there, from Marlene Dietrich to Nelson Mandela, but on that day in April, there were none of the usual red carpets or edgy security detail which usually accompanied the banks of cameras. That morning the TV stations were waiting not for celebrities or politicians, but for thirty-five very ordinary men and women, inhabitants of the two most northerly permanent settlements on the North American continent, the High Arctic exiles. Among those expected were Paddy Aqiatusuk's stepson, Samwillie Elijasialuk, now fifty-seven; Anna Nungaq, who was sixty-six, her stepsister, Minnie Alakariallak, thirteen years Anna's junior; Paddy and Mary Aqiatusuk's son, Larry Audlaluk, now forty-three; Samuel Anukudluk, the Pond Inlet man who taught the Inukjuamiut at Grise Fiord how to build a qarnaq; Markoosie Patsauq, whose tuberculosis had remained undiagnosed during the voyage north to Resolute and who was then, at fifty-three, the first published Inuit novelist and an accomplished bush pilot, and his brother John Amagoalik, forty-five, a wiry powerhouse of a man with a reputation for being difficult, and one of the chief negotiators of the treaty to set up what became, in 1999, the new Canadian province of Nunavut.
Rynee Flaherty, sixty-six, and her daughter Martha, now forty-three and herself a mother were expected to arrive together. For Martha the mill of cameras and reporters was neither new nor particularly daunting. For half her life now, it seemed, she had been lobbying, cajoling, campaigning. She had heard her voice on a dozen radio shows, seen her image on TV, been quoted in the press. By 1993, she was not only among the more prominent campaigners for justice for the High Arctic exiles but also President of Pauktuutit, the Canadian National Inuit Women's Association. Getting that far had been a struggle for Martha, a tremendous test of her resolve. Her adult life had not been untroubled. There were allegations of problems with alcohol and of financial irregularities at Pauktuutit. At her own admission, her relationships with men had sometimes been destructive. But a tougher, more fiercely determined woman you could not meet. Martha had been through too much to give up now and it showed in her face, in the way she carried herself, in the absolute conviction of her smile. She wanted justice, certainly, but more than that, you sensed that Martha Flaherty wanted peace. And there was only one way she knew to get it.
Rynee was smaller and quieter than her daughter, and less at ease among the huddle of buildings, the press of people and the hum of lawyers, politicians, lobbyists and hacks. Over the years she had grown used to making herself invisible but over the course of the next two days she knew it was her duty to stand out. She was tired. Her eyes, once such little jewels of jet, were matt, the crescent folds beneath them swollen with the years.
The two women walked past the cameras towards the brass revolving doors of the Laurier. They were directed to a large, soft-carpeted conference room lined with plump, upholstered chairs. A bank of cameras stood beside the back wall. The formality of the situation, its grand setting, intended to reassure both the Inuit and the TV cameras that the case was being taken seriously, served only to reinforce the sense of displacement among Inuit born under canvas and brought up in snowhouses. They lined up awkwardly, like flowers in a municipal planting. Martha took in the scene. She sensed she was in for a long day.
The press gathered on the benches to one side of the witnesses were hoping for a front-page story. There had been talk that some of the Inuit accusations might be sexual in nature, rumours fuelled by the division of the hearings into on- and off-camera sessions, the off-camera session to be held with full legal privilege. Whatever the outcome of the closed sessions, no one would be able to sue. It seemed likely that the testimony would yield plenty of stomach-punching detail and the editors of all the major Canadian papers were ready to give it space. And while it was true that the reporters were all out for headlines, they were also keen to make amends. For forty years they had printed Department and RCMP press releases about the removal of Inuit from Inukjuak more or less verbatim. Over the next couple of days, the men and women of the fourth estate were being given the opportunity to bring a sense of objectivity to the story. For the next few days they would have the chance to set the record straight.
Rynee and Martha Flaherty settled themselves among their peers within view of the seven chairs reserved for members of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, headed up by the eminent Quebecois judge Rene Dussault and the human rights campaigner Georges Erasmus.
Only about half of the eighty-seven men, women and children taken from Inukjuak and Pond Inlet and sent to the High Arctic in 1953 and 1955 were still alive to testify. Most of the dead, men like Josephie Flaherty and Paddy Aqiatusuk, had lost their lives early in accidents, through untreated illnesses or by their own hands. Of all the babies born in Resolute Bay between 1953 and 1962, boys and girls who, had they lived, would have been aged between forty and thirty-one, nearly one third were already dead. Many had committed suicide.
The fact that so many of the survivors had come was testament to the importance of the occasion. Despite the huge distances, the unfamiliarity of the surroundings and the relative heat, almost all but the very old or infirm among the original exiles had made the journey south to be at the hearings. After forty years of telling their stories only to have them ignored, they were looking forward, at last, to being heard.
The members of the Commission filed into the conference room and settled themselves into their chairs. The cameras clicked on. The assembled journalists readied their microphones and shorthand pads. There was a short introduction. Finally, the Inuit rose to speak.
Simeonie Amagoalik was among the first. At the time of the relocation, he was twenty and newly married, he said, living in Povung-nituk, a settlement up along the coast from Inukjuak, with his eighteen-year-old wife, Sarah, who was pregnant. His father had recently died and left him his whaleboat and he was using it to earn some extra money transporting supplies from the C. D. Howe to Povungnituk at ship time. He was back home in Povungnituk when Constable Ross Gibson showed up. Gibson had informed him that his brothers, Jaybeddie and Thomasie Amagoalik, had agreed to go north on condition that he, Simeonie, accompany them. He did not want to go. He was perfectly happy with his boat business and his life in general, but to have said no would have been to deny his relatives, which was something that, as an Inuk, he could
not do. Later he discovered that neither Jaybeddie nor Thomasie had agreed to go north but by then there was no going back. On board the ship it had been decided, without the agreement of the parties involved, that the three families would be split up, with Simeonie and Jaybeddie going to Resolute Bay and Thomasie going to Grise Fiord. Thomasie Amagoalik was a fragile man, and everybody knew it. Even in In-ukjuak he had been someone who needed family round to prop him up. Being separated from his brothers was the worst possible thing that could have happened to him. After the death of his boys, Salluviniq and Allie, on Ellesmere Island, he had crumbled. Eventually, Simeonie had got permission to sledge to Grise Fiord and bring Thomasie and his family back to Resolute, but by then it was really too late. Mary Amagoalik was ill with tuberculosis and Thomasie was a broken man. He died on his way to hospital not long after.
Simeonie's wife, Sarah Amagoalik, was six months pregnant when Ross Gibson came round to the camp. She was only eighteen and about to have her first baby and moving north would mean leaving her mother, Minnie, and her sisters behind but with her husband agreeing to leave, she had no choice in the matter. She gave birth to her son on the C. D. Howe. On Cornwallis Island her only adult company while Simeonie was away hunting was Nellie, Simeonie's elderly grandmother who was deaf and would repeat the same question all day, “When are we going home?” The old woman kept a box of small gifts, a bone comb or a plaited bracelet made of ox hair, which she was saving until she got back to Inukjuak, said Sarah, but she died not long after the move and the box of gifts was buried with her. After that and for long weeks at a time, Sarah was left with no one. She had had problems feeding the baby when her milk dried up and her uncle had been forced to raid the air-base rubbish dump for some out-of-date cans of sardines to try to boost her protein intake. Living in Resolute Bay, she had contracted tuberculosis (perhaps from Markoosie Patsauq who remained at Resolute Bay with untreated tuberculosis for so long before help finally arrived that by the end he was unable to stand) and had had to spend three years away from her baby in a sanatorium. It was many years before she was able to contact her parents or her family.
At the age of two, while she was still in Inukjuak Anna Nungaq had contracted polio, which had deprived her of the use of her legs. Her father having died young, she was brought up by her grandparents at her uncle's camp near Inukjuak while her brothers, Samwillie and Elijah, were living with their mother, Mary Aqia-tusuk, and her new husband, Paddy Aqiatusuk. Since her grandparents were already elderly and did not know how much longer they would be able to look after her, Anna Nungaq had no choice but to follow her mother to Grise Fiord. Up on Ellesmere Island, she could not leave the tent even in high summer because it was too cold and she could not keep sufficiently mobile to stay warm. She found the dark period terrifying. In her mind she had the idea that she would be able to drift off to sleep and wake up when the sun returned and when it did not she felt she had fallen into some black hole from which there was no escape. The loneliness was as terrible as the cold and dark. Eventually she had married Pauloosie, Phillipoosie Novalinga's son, and for a while she was happier, but Pauloosie was killed in a hunting accident and she was left widowed and with no prospect of remarrying. By the time she did get back to Inukjuak, her beloved grandparents were long since dead. She recalled the last time she had seen her grandfather, all of forty years before. He had taken off in his kayak to follow the C. D. Howe. He was waving and shouting that he would miss her. Then he slowly slipped out of view.
The testimony continued. Parents told of the deaths of children. In 1956, four children were born in Resolute Bay, of whom one died. In 1959, five children were born there. Two died. Twenty-three per cent of all Inuit children in the High Arctic died before they reached the age of one. In southern Canada at that time, the rate was 3 per cent. One of the reasons for this would come out in later testimony, when Ross Gibson would recall helping to deliver Edith Patsauq's breech baby. He had no medical qualifications. For years, Arctic policemen had been expected to function as amateur medics and there had been a consensus on the part of the police and government officials to keep quiet about the resulting deaths. In his report after the Eastern Arctic Patrol in 1955, the same voyage that had brought losephie Flaherty and his family up to Grise Fiord, the chief medical officer on the patrol, Dr. lohn Willis, had written of two Inuit children he had been asked to inspect: “[they] are in such a state that they could be made into newspaper dynamite. We must pray that our friend at the Vancouver Sun doesn't hear about them or cannot get to them with a camera.” But there was little chance of that. The Vancouver Sun, along with most of the rest of Canada's newspapers, was busy producing reports taken more or less verbatim from RCMP and Department press releases. Children continued to die, and the deaths went largely unreported.
Laybeddie Amagoalik of Pond Inlet had lost his two-year-old daughter, Merrari, not long after the family's arrival at Resolute Bay. Unrelated to the Inukjuak Amagoaliks, laybeddie and his family had been brought up to Resolute Bay from Pond Inlet, supposedly to help the Inukjuak migrants settle. In the spring of 1954, only six months after their arrival in the High Arctic, laybeddie had been given the job of driving a dog team for two white men, a geologist and a naturalist, who wanted to be taken to Mould Bay to the north of Cornwallis. laybeddie had not wanted to take the job, he said, because it meant having to bring his family along, and he did not want to expose them to the kind of danger a long trip in hazardous conditions across unfamiliar terrain would inevitably bring. Still, he felt unable to say no to Constable Gibson, so he set off with his wife, Kanoinoo, son, Ekaksak, and daughter, Merrari and the two white men. The moment they reached Mould Bay, two-year-old Merrari fell seriously ill. After several days during which Merrari's condition deteriorated, a plane was scrambled from Resolute Bayan airstrip had been built at Mould a few years beforebut the aircraft got caught in thick fog and was unable to land. A doctor had been summoned on the radio to offer advice but, after her parents' frantic efforts to save the girl, she died and her parents were forced to bury their daughter under rocks, knowing there would be no prospect of visiting her grave in future. After that, Jaybeddie and Kanoinoo desperately wanted to get back to Resolute Bay in case their son Ekaksak fell ill too, but the scientists insisted on staying to complete their work, so the family were forced to remain at Mould Bay for another three months. Soon after they returned to Resolute Bay though, Kanoinoo fell ill and was sent south for treatment, leaving Ekaksak in the care of Jaybeddie. Having no family at Resolute Bay, Jaybeddie had to care for the boy himself, which made it impossible to go hunting. During those long months, he kept himself, his boy and his dogs alive by setting seal nets under the ice, but they were all hungry most of the time. Every so often, the two scientists would come along and borrow his dogs to go out on the land prospecting for oil and minerals, but they never thought to pay him.
During the course of the morning, witness after witness testified before the Commission that they had been trapped in the High Arctic with no way of getting home. Once the true conditions in Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord had become clear, they had begged to return to Inukjuak. Their verbal requests were brushed off. Those who could wrote letters to relatives and to the Department, even to the RCMP, but most were unable even to do this much. In the 1950s only 8 per cent of Canadian Inuit were literate. (At the same time, the literacy rate of Inuit living in Danish-controlled Greenland was almost oo per cent.) The letters were moderate, in retrospect too moderate, but it was part of the Inuit tradition to underplay misfortune. Officials, perhaps unconsciously, took advantage of this natural restraint because it provided the perfect excuse for Inuit views and wishes to be disregarded. The Inuit looked for other outlets, but they were kept from talking to their relatives by radio and, although they were full Canadian citizens and had the legal right to vote, they had no representative in parliament because there was no constituency in the eastern Arctic. Most of their letters were not taken seriously and went unanswered. Others neve
r made it to their intended targets; pieces of them turned up in the police rubbish dumps. Pretty soon, they had exhausted all the options and there was no one left to turn to. There was no escape. They were living in an accidental gulag.
It was in this wide, icy prison that Martha Flaherty had passed her childhood. Standing to give evidence she recalled the journey north with horror; the shrieking of the C. D. Howe as it ground against ice, the pitching of the fore section in stormy swells, the fierce, malevolent mountains and spiny foreshore of Ellesmere Island. But what really stood out in her mind was the grim discovery, made at such a tender age, that her parents were powerless to protect her. It began on the boat, when Dr. Willis had tried to cut off her hair and it had been powerfully reinforced when Mary had been taken from them. She felt exposed and vulnerable, her mind full of the dread possibility, which never entirely left her, that she might be next to disappear.
The family's years at Ellesmere Island had been a long descent into darkness. Martha recalled rising to a breakfast of lukewarm water and heading out with her father across the endless miles of unoccupied ice, looking for polar bear and fox and seal, anything that might fill the pot, overwhelmed by the knowledge that her father was as helpless as she was herself. Over those hard, terrible years on Ellesmere Island, Martha had come to look on her father as her burden. It sometimes seemed that she would never be free of him. During his final illness, when he knew he was dying, he had asked to see her but she had refused to come, telling him only that she would be better off when he was dead. Now, of course, she regretted that. After Josephie's death, the family had been flung in all directions, like drops of water from a blowhole. It had taken them many years to come together again.
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