This estrangement was replicated in families all across the High Arctic. Martha was witness to some of it. Twice a year she would pass through Resolute Bay on her way to and from school in Churchill. There was usually a bit of time to wait before the onward journey to Grise Fiord and it was during that time that Martha Flaherty witnessed the almost complete collapse of the Resolute Bay settlement. The prospects of living a traditional life in Resolute Bay, which is what the Inuit had been brought there to do, were dismal. Fighter jets and spy planes screamed overhead, scattering what little game there was and making hunting there more or less impossible. By the late fifties, just after Ross Gibson left to return to Inuk-juak, most of the men were already working day rate at the air base as janitors and porters, just as Henry Larsen had dreaded and predicted.
During July and August and part of September, when activity at the base was at its height, a fleet of jeeps would arrive at the Inuit camp at six every morning to pick up the Inuit men and take them to the base. They would work a twelve-hour day cleaning the mess rooms and the barracks, sweeping out the stores, setting traps to catch the foxes which frequented the dump, mending the bear-proof fences, hauling coal and equipment and keeping things painted and greased. In return, they would receive the equivalent of a third of the average white man's pay. This they were free to spend at the base's Arctic Circle bar. And spend it they did.
By the mid-sixties, when Martha was passing through Resolute, unscrupulous airmen had set up gaming books and were regularly persuading drunk Inuit to lay down their day's pay on hockey games in Ottawa and Edmonton, the outcome of which the airmen already knew. Others had joined in, with card scams and dice cons. Inuit women began to appear at the Arctic Circle bar to reclaim their men, and soon enough, they also began to drink. The airmen quickly discovered these women could be bought for booze, cash or promises and the women were often too drunk to say no, or did not know how to say no to white men. When the first group of women had been used up, there were plenty more, and younger, down in the camp. And so it went on. A great many half-breed babies were born during that time, a good number of them with the tiny, shrivelled bodies indicative of foetal alcohol syndrome.
Fights broke out between jealous men and their wives, between husbands and between older and younger women. Inuit stumbled out of their huts into freezing nights high on rage and booze and too drunk to be able to feel frostbite setting in. There were a lot of amputations in those years.
By the mid-sixties almost every Inuit family in Resolute Bay had been affected by alcoholism. Things got so bad at the Inuit settlement that in some homes there was nothing to eat for days except the chewing gum the airmen handed out to the children to keep them quiet while they had sex with their mothers. A whole generation of Inuit children were left to bring up themselves while their fathers and mothers descended into squalor and depression. In the absence of any help, the children dealt with all this in the only way they knew how. Some learned to dissemble and lie, others sunk into states of apathy and denial. In the nine years from 1953 to 1962, fifty Inuit girls and boys were born in Resolute Bay. Thirty years later, nearly a third of them were already dead. Remembering it all brought Martha to tears. It gave her no comfort at all to know that, when it came to raw despair during those years, Resolute Bay had probably had the edge on Grise Fiord.
The testimony continued, and when the Commission broke for lunch, many of those who had heard the morning's witness simply sat in their seats, no longer able to trust their legs to carry them anywhere, while men and women of the press raced back to their downtown offices to file their copy. The off-camera session which followed did nothing to lift the mood. The accusations were widespread and devastating. Airmen were accused of assault, teachers of paedophilia. Ross Gibson, it was said, had sexually exploited women at the Resolute Bay camp and threatened them when they protested. There were allegations that Bob Pilot had paid for sex with, among others, Rynee Flaherty, with promises of extra food. While Pilot admitted to having consensual sex with Inuit women, he laughed off the allegation that he paid for the sex.
A subdued crowd left the Chateau Laurier that evening. At home in the smarter Ottawa suburbs, those officials who had been directly involved in the relocation sat watching the on-camera proceedings on television. Of the principal actors, only Ben Sivertz of the Department, Gordon Robertson, the former Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, Rueben Ploughman, the old Hudson Bay factor and the former Mounties Clay Fryer, Bob Pilot and Ross Gibson, were still alive. They were floored by what they heard. These men had always seen themselves as friends of the Inuit, and it seemed to them now that their former friends were turning on them. It was bad enough that, forty years on, their decisions were suddenly being brought into question, but it now looked as if their reputations as men of honour were under review too. Few slept soundly that night.
Everyone woke the following morning to a series of shrill newspaper headlines. The Ottawa Citizen printed a quotation from the co-chair of the Commission, Rene Dussault, calling the High Arctic relocation “one of the worst human rights violations in the history of Canada.” The paper went on to quote Dussault's colleague, Bertha Wilson, telling the exiles that no one could “fail to be outraged by the injustice [or] not be grieved by the pain and suffering that you and your relatives have been exposed to” and that there could have been no justification for the “cruel and inhumane” government policy of moving them. The officials and bureaucrats involved in the relocation got the brunt of it. Sivertz, Gibson, Larsen and Cantley were all mentioned, in scathing terms. Comparisons were made to the notorious internment of Canadian Japanese during the Second World War. “What had it all been for?” the Ottawa Citizen quoted Bertha Wilson as asking. “This is the question only the government can answer.”
Over the weeks that followed, gossip spread and rumour countered rumour about what exactly had been said in the off-camera session. Snippets of information began to leak out from informants and others claiming to be in the know. They did not make the headlines, but Ottawa is a small town and people talk. Of all the officials accused of sexual misconduct, ex-constable Ross Gibson was the most vulnerable to attack. After years of exposure to the pitiless Arctic sun, the freezing wind and constant brushes with frostbite, the man who had set so much store on being a credit to the force had developed melanoma and the cancer had spread to the rest of his body. He knew he did not have long to live, and he was desperate to die with his reputation intact. By the time of the hearings, he was in a good deal of physical pain but this was nothing compared with the psychological anguish visited upon him by the rumours. But by denying them, Ross Gibson knew he would only be serving to stoke press interest in the case. His one option was to wait out the months until the end of June, when the Commission would take testimony from the officials involved in the case. He had to hope that his sense of outrage would keep him alive till then.
The weather in downtown Ottawa on Monday, 28 June 1993, was hot and muggy. Outside the Citadel Hotel, a bland block in the commercial district, a group of officials gathered for the second sitting of the Royal Commission. There were no camera crews waiting for the parade of white-haired old white men, nor had many print reporters gathered. The location was drab and the lack of press interest indicative, so many of the officials said, of a conspiracy to discredit them. Bitterness, recrimination and paranoia were in the air.
The first to take the stand for the officials was Gordon Robertson. In the 1950s, Robertson had been Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, of which eastern Arctic Canada was then a part, and had gone on to become the Clerk of the Privy Council in the national parliament. He had a reputation as a man of fierce intellect and moderate expression, but today he felt no compunction to moderate his language. The Royal Commission hearings, he said, were a “travesty of justice” which had “wantonly destroyed” the reputations of the civil servants involved. It was an inauspicious start.
Gordon Larsen, Henry Larsen's son, appeared
dazed by the turnaround in his father's posthumous fortunes. Henry had died a hero but after the Inuit testimony in April he was looking more like a fool. Larsen spoke for a long time of his father's affection for the Inuit people, an affection so deep that Larsen had frequently kept his wife short of her housekeeping allowance while he bought bolts of cloth to give to the Inuit to make their clothes. Henry knew how difficult Inuit lives had become by the middle of the twentieth century and was conscious of the degree to which that had resulted from their contact with whites. Only a year after he had taken office as the superintendent in charge of the Arctic Division of the RCMP, he had advocated a Royal Commission on Inuit affairs, but his request had been turned down. After the decision had been taken to move the Inuit from Inukjuak, Larsen thought it best to send them somewhere where they would be able to live their lives away from qalunaat influence and at the same time benefit Canada. It was the Department officials who were guilty of rushed decisions and poor planning, Gordon Larsen hinted, but an unfair portion of the blame had landed at Henry Larsen's door. He had seen this coming, in the Department's subtle manoeuvres to shift the blame to the RCMP, and it had hurt him deeply. Shortly before he died in 1964, Larsen had said, “I shudder to think of the criticism which will be levelled at us in another fifty years' time.” It appeared that time had now come.
Ross Gibson testified by phone from his hospital bed in British Columbia. The ex-Mountie was not the same defiant, bullish man who had read the reports of the April hearings in the newspaper. This bitter finale to his last months had left him too crushed to be angry. His voice sounded shaky with sickness or misery or a combination of the two. He was not a bad man, nor a dishonest one, but from the start he had betrayed his ignorance of the people whose lives he had for so long and so dictatorially managed. “From my world travels,” he began, “I found the native people always gave me the impression of being happy regardless of the circumstances under which they were living. The Eskimo always greeted you with warm handshakes and a smile. I never had so many handshakes. It's like … it's like royalty.” Gibson relived the dismal forays he'd made to the camps in rotting snow in his attempts to persuade the Inuit to move north, without comprehending that his descriptions might condemn him. “I just sold them a bill of goods,” he said. “I was a salesman or a real estate man whatever you want to call it, and it was my responsibility to get across to these people the advantages.” He admitted that the planning for the move had seemed deficient even at the time. “I always suspected a pipeline to the Department of Northern Affairs of which I knew nothing. They never told me what was what or what was going on. I was a low man on the totem pole. Commissioner Nicholson said, 'You must make this a success,'” Gibson continued.” 'You must keep these people out on the land. This is what they are. This is what we want.'” In Gibson's mind, clouded by time and illness, he and the Inuit had been fellow travellers who had quite literally found themselves in the same boat. The control he had exercised over the lives of the Inuit in Resolute Bay seemed to suggest to him no contradiction. “They didn't know what I was really up to and I wanted to keep it that way. I had things under control.” The Inuit had never been abandoned, he said, because “I was always present. The white man would be there to help them to better their way of life.” He had never doubted that as one of those white men, he, Ross Gibson, knew best, and he did not doubt it now. “I never felt… in my culture, my upbringing, could never bring myself to their leveland I don't like to use that word level, but it is the only way I can explain it,” he said. He was proud of his achievements. “[Henry Larsen] patted me on the back and he said, 'Commissioner Nicholson and I think we picked the right man'… I will never forget that.” Looking back, he realised that it was he, Ross Gibson, who had truly been left alone. Throughout the previous few months, during the terrible accusations against him, and through his final illness, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to which he had given the best years of his life, had turned its back on him.
Of all the testimony given on that day, Ben Sivertz's made what few headlines appeared the following morning. A civil servant of Icelandic extraction, Sivertz had been working at the Department during the 1950s. The intervening years had hung heavy on him. He now walked on sticks and his face was in parts both bloated and hollow. Back at the beginning of the fifties, Sivertz had discussed the relocations with James Cantley, Alex Stevenson and Henry Larsen, and it was he who had suggested that his superior, the deputy minister of the Department, General Young, meet to discuss the idea with Commissioner Nicholson of the RCMR Like Cantley and Larsen, Sivertz was an incomer into Canada and it had shocked him a little to see how few southern Canadians were living or working in the Arctic or knew much about it. The Barrenlands appeared to be overrun with Americans. In Sivertz's view, it made perfect sense to ship Inuit up to the High Arctic since they were the only Canadians likely to be able to survive there. At the time he had every faith in the programme, and he defended it now. Well into the 1960s, when Resolute Bay was being ravaged by alcohol and children were dying at Grise Fiord for lack of medicines, Ben Sivertz was planning new colonies, as he called them, at Mould Bay, Isachsen, Eureka and Alert, and he regretted that those colonies had never come into being. He dismissed out of hand the notion that any Inuk had suffered any misfortune as a result of being moved. On the contrary, he said, the Inuit believed they were a superior race and that qalunaat were an “astonishingly ignorant people.” When Commissioner Mary Sillett pressed him on the point, he insisted, “There was no hardship, madam, in 1953,1954,1955,1956,1957,1958. There was only great satisfaction by all Inuit people at Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord.” It was a comment Ben Sivertz would live to regret.
The following morning every newspaper carried the headline, “There was no hardship.” More than anything else said or done, this one remark swung public opinion resolutely to the side of the Inuit. It made the officials sound like a bunch of bitter old men clinging desperately to the past. Over the next few weeks, the unthinkable happened, and the bureaucrats, all men accustomed to the quiet regard of their peers, found themselves rising in the mornings to hate mail and death threats. In Ben Sivertz's outburst a generation of civil servants, most of them fiercely bright, committed and well-intentioned men, had been discredited. Few ever regained their pre-hearing reputations. Some, among them Ross Gibson, went to their deaths in disgrace. The hearings shook Canada's bureaucracy to its foundations. They put into question, perhaps for the first time in Canada's history, the idea that, when it came to government ordinary Canadians were prepared to believe that good intentions necessarily produced good effects. A powerful principle had been evoked. The hearings capitalised the idea that in the free world, people had an absolute right to determine their own futures. This was democracy. Anything else, however well meaning, was despotism.
If this seems obvious now, in 1993 it was quite fresh and timely. In 1993, negotiations on the establishment of the Inuit territory of Nunavut were just entering their final phase. The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, which was signed in May, a month after the Inuit hearings, gave the Inuit title to 137,355 square miles of territory, an area nearly as large as the state of California, along with a share of federal government royalties from oil and mineral development on federal lands and the right to harvest and manage wildlife in the territory. The Agreement put the future of the Inuit people in their own hands for the first time since the Vikings had arrived in the Arctic a thousand years ago. It also made Inuit the largest private landowners in North America. One of the chief negotiators for the Inuit, and the man they now call the Father of Nunavut, was John Amagoalik, who had been taken as a child with his family from Inukjuak and brought to live in Resolute Bay.
The April hearings were nothing short of the rebirth of a people. At the time of the relocations, forty years before, the Inuit had been broken and demoralised. Inuit voices had been voices in the wilderness, they went unheard, often they went unsaid. Years of quiet and sometimes unintentional but nonetheles
s ruthless disregard had colonised their hearts, and had made them, on the surface at least, the smiling inscrutable happy-go-lucky Eskimos of Robert Flaherty's Nanook oftheNorth. After hundreds of years of patronage and domination, they had finally shrugged off that legacy. It had taken forty years, but the dignified, insistent voices of the Barrenlanders had won through. At last their truth had been accepted as a matter of public record, and no credible history book would ever dare deny it. Those thirty-five men and women who turned up at the Chateau Laurier, and the others who had, over their long exile, stood up and spoken out, had put the Arctic on the map in a way hundreds of years of European exploration had never been able to do. They had given the Arctic back its authentic voice, which was not the voice of the great white explorers or the drama of expeditions and heroism and derring-do, but the quiet, still voice of the men and women whose antecedents had meandered across the Arctic from Asia and who had loved it enough to make it their home. The history of the Arctic had been given back to the people it belonged to. In the most profound sense, the people of the Arctic had, finally, come home.
The Royal Commission helped change Lower Canada's perspective on its upper reaches. Many southern Canadians now embraced the idea that the Barrenlands were just that, lands, as diverse and various as those to the south. They came to understand that the world which lay beyond the 6oth parallel was not the great white wasteland of movies and explorers' tales, but rather a series of distinct and dynamic regions which were highly interdependent and also vulnerable. It was an insight that served only to make the Arctic seem more extraordinary, more worth protecting.
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