The Long Exile (13 page)

In all his years voyaging around the Arctic, Larsen had developed a particular attachment for the Inuit. He'd seen how tough their lives could be, and with what great stoicism they bore their hardships. He agreed with Robert Flaherty that their contact with white men had done them more harm than good, but it was too late to turn back the clock. From now on white men and Inuit were in the Arctic together. The task was to find a way they could live together amicably and to their mutual benefit.

Three years after Larsen's promotion to commander of “G” division, in the spring of 1952, the new Northern Affairs Department of the Canadian government organised the first ever Eskimo Affairs Conference in Ottawa. Its mission was to find a solution to the “Eskimo Problem,” which is to say, what white men considered to be the Eskimo Problem, the poor and uncertain living to be made trapping fox pelts. The “Problem” impacted on the Department when the Inuit, demoralised and frustrated by the instability of the fox-fur
trade, began to look to the government for welfare payments to keep their children fed. There seemed to be no simple solution. Prior to the conference itself, the Department invited various experts, among them Henry Larsen and James Cantley, to comment on the problem and to propose their own solutions. In his briefing document, Henry Larsen wrote:

Larsen went on to argue that the Inuit must be provided with the same access to schools, medical facilities and wage employment as any other Canadians, even if this meant an end to their traditional way of life. His vision was of small Inuit villages scattered around the northern fringes of the continent, not simply where fur traders wanted them to be, but where the Inuit wanted to put them. He wanted the villages equipped with municipal buildings, schools, cooperatives and small, autonomous industries. Welfare dependency, in Larsen's view, was the direct result of fluctuating fur prices.

To counteract these, he proposed the government set up a Crown Trading Company to ensure the stability of the prices of fox pelts.

James Cantley took a different view. In Cantley's mind, the problem was as simple as its solution. The Inuit had gone soft. “Goods considered luxuries less than forty years ago are now considered as necessities,” he wrote. Why should the Inuit expect to be able to buy Coleman stoves or working rifles? For thousands of years they had got by on seal-oil lamps and bone harpoons. They should be forced to hunt and trap, reckoned Cantley, but that would be possible only in those settlements where the Hudson Bay Company held a monopoly on fur supply and could control not only the price of pelts but also which trappers got credit and for what. In Cantley's mind, the damage had been done by the RCMP because the Inuit had come to expect that the police would bail them out rather than see them starve. By releasing the Inuit from their historical dependence on the Hudson Bay Company the police had wiped out centuries of effective governance by the Bay in the Arctic. In Cantley's book, it was the police not the Bay who were responsible for wrecking Inuit traditions. The Barrenlanders were used to uncertainty, they were accustomed to starvation. This was their life, their culture, their whole history.

The solution, Henry Larsen and James Cantley agreed, was to move Inuit away from problem areas. The idea was not new. For many years, whalers moved the families to wherever they could be of most use to them, returning them to their homes at the end of the whaling season. In the 1930s, Inuit were moved experimentally on the
Nascopie
to Dundas Harbour. The idea of moving people as a solution to the problem of fur prices had first been mooted two years prior to the Eskimo Affairs Conference, in 1950, when Alex Stevenson, an administrator working under James Cantley, asked Henry Larsen whether some Inuit families might be moved from Baffin Island and re-established on Devon and Ellesmere islands. “It would even be possible to go up from Craig in the spring, spend the summer at Bache then return in the fall or early winter,” wrote
Stevenson in a memo to Larsen. The presence of the Canadian Inuit might deter Greenlanders from crossing over into Ellesmere to hunt musk ox and polar bear and the Inuit would have the chance to hunt and trap on virgin land. Stevenson's boss, James Cantley, encouraged the idea and took it further. “There is no reason why more [Canadian] Eskimos should not be moved over to Ellesmere Island,” he said. In reply, Alex Stevenson wrote, “If police detachments could be maintained at both Craig Harbour and Cape Sabine …ten or twelve families could be transferred to Ellesmere Island and use made of the natural resources that are undoubtedly available there. The occupation of the island by Canadian Eskimos will remove any excuse Greenlanders may presently have for crossing over and hunting there.”

Henry Larsen and James Cantley repeated their ideas at the conference that spring, to an audience of northern administrators, missionaries, policemen and fur traders. The Inuit were not asked for their opinion.

And by the time Ross Gibson stepped off the ski-plane at Inuk-juak a decision had already been taken. The Inukjuamiut were to be sent north.

I
T IS ALREADY
halfway through April 1953, and Ross Gibson is sitting in the detachment building figuring out how best to find his volunteers in time for the arrival of the C.
D. Howe
in July. Out at sea, the ice is breaking into small floes and the Inukjuamiut are widely scattered at camps up and down the coast. To scout out all the camps around the settlement in search of volunteers, he will need to travel 100 miles to the north and 70 miles to the south by dog sled, a round trip of 340 miles. The more he thinks about this the more daunting the whole thing seems. Is the Inukjuak detachment required to find the families or merely advised to do so? What if there are no “volunteers"? Does the Department plan to carry out the relocation anyway? How much pressure can he, Ross Gibson, reasonably be expected to apply to force people to go?

He has been in the Arctic long enough now to know how hard the move will be to explain. It is always said that the Inuit are nomadic but that doesn't really capture it. Rather they move around a territory and familiarity is part of their armoury of survival. In the few months Gibson has spent in the Arctic he can see how strongly they are bonded to the land they know. They rarely venture outside it, and when they do, it is always to travel with someone who has already made the journey. Without that strong sense of knowing they are vulnerable. Their only maps are the ones they carry in their memories.

Gibson studies the charts, reads up on Ellesmere Island. The
place is as far from Inukjuak as Inukjuak is from Ottawa. It is forbiddingly remote, the ninth largest island on the planet, but for more than ten months of every year surrounded on all sides by ice. On 4 May he crosses the Innuksuak River and pops into Rueben Ploughman's place, to ask if he would mind hosting a meeting to discuss the issue later in the day. From the Hudson Bay Company post he wanders up to the teacher's house, then to the nursing station, returning, finally, to the detachment building to make his preparations for the meeting. He does not think to extend invitations to the settlement Inuit. In the late afternoon, he returns to the Bay post and, over tea and biscuits, relates the content of Henry Larsen's telegram. Discussion begins convivially but soon enough the
qalunaat
residents of Inukjuak are bickering and at odds. Margaret Reynolds wants to know what the Inuit will do for medical facilities up on Ellesmere Island and hopes that
she
is not going to be the one to have to give them all a medical before they leave, since she has had no word from the Department of Health to this effect and is, in any case, hardly qualified for such procedures. Margery Hinds is more concerned about how the Department plans to give the children an education there. And who will ensure they will have the correct clothing and equipment? As welfare teacher the responsibility devolves to her, but she has had no official instructions in the matter and is unwilling to act without them. Rueben Ploughman wonders what will happen to his fur business if all the best trappers are sent away. He understands that it is Gibson's duty to find these volunteers; he's only hoping that Gibson will keep the interests of the Hudson Bay Company in mind when he does so. On the other hand, all seem agreed that this will be a fine opportunity to rid the settlement of some of its bad eggs: the gripers, the ne'er do wells, the men whose hunting and trapping activities never seem to keep pace with their families' stomachs, the family allowance dependents …and Paddy Aqiatusuk. It will do them a world of good to have to put their backs into hunting and trapping again. A moral wash and brush up, a hauling of boot straps, a collective pulling-up of Inuit socks.

A message awaits Gibson back at the RCMP detachment. Henry Larsen requires the list of volunteers by the beginning of June. Gibson has less than a month to find seven families to move a vast distance to an uninhabited spot they know nothing about in the middle of the north polar desert. By now he has been in the RCMP for six months. This is the first major test of his new career.

What Ross Gibson does not know is that white men have a long history of removing Inuit people from their homelands. The trend, if that is what it can be called, began with Martin Frobisher at the end of the sixteenth century. Frobisher arrived at Hall Island in the eastern Arctic on the
Gabriel
in 1576. The Inuit living there had never seen white men or ships before and they convinced themselves that the vessel was some kind of giant sea mammal on whose backs strange, colourless creatures rode. Nine of these lowered themselves into the
Gabriel's
skiff and made for the shore. The Inuit met them on the beach. The Englishmen handed the Inuit each a metal needle. Using sign language, the two groups agreed that one of the Inuit would board the
Gabriel
if two of Frobisher's men remained on the beach as surety. When the Inuk returned safely, the villagers grew more confident and nineteen went on board the
Gabriel
, where they exchanged sealskin and bearskin clothes for mirrors and bells. The following day, another Hall Islander went on board and was given a bell and a knife. A group of five crewmen volunteered to row this man back to shore, but instead of putting the Inuk down on the beach within sight of the
Gabriel
, as Frobisher had ordered, the men rowed towards the Inuit village, disappeared from view and did not return. For several days, Frobisher could get no word from or of them. Seriously concerned, now, for their safety, he decided to set a trap. Using bells and beads as lures, the crew of the
Gabriel
managed to entice an Inuk man to approach the ship. As the man swung alongside in his
kayak
, the
Gabriel's
crew scooped him out of the water, and tied him fast, hoping they could use him in a prisoner exchange, but the remaining villagers refused to discuss
the disappeared crewmen or the Inuit captive. Frustrated, Fro-bisher set sail back to England with his prisoner still on board. The unnamed Inuk survived the trip but fell ill almost the moment he stepped ashore. A coffin and a grave were purchased for him for the sum of eleven shillings and four pence and he was laid to rest in St. Olave's Church in Hart Street, London, where he remains to this day.

The kidnapping of Inuit as surety or simply for their curiosity value became so commonplace over the next 150 years that in 1720 the Netherlands adopted a resolution banning the transporting of Greenlanders to Europe and in 1732 Denmark followed suit. Neither of these well-intentioned edicts had much effect and Inuit continued to be taken from their homes and families.

In 1897, the American explorer, Admiral Robert E. Peary, shipped six Inuit from northwestern Greenland to New York for “scientific scrutiny” but within months of their arrival, four of the six were dead, leaving only a man, Uisakassak, and a boy, Minik. Uisakassak sailed back to Greenland with Peary on the
Windward
the following year, but Minik's father being among the dead, the boy remained behind in New York as the adopted son of William Wallace, the building superintendent of the American Museum of Natural History. While wandering round the museum one day, Minik came upon an Inuit skeleton, strung up in a glass case for exhibition. Drawn to the sign on the case, Minik discovered to his horror and shame that the bones were those of his father. This puzzled him particularly because he had been to his father's funeral and seen the coffin lowered into the ground, but it did not take him long to work out that the interment had been a ghastly trick to keep him from the truth. Minik begged to be allowed to give his father a proper funeral. He would take the bones back to Greenland himself and bury them under a cairn in accordance with tradition. It was not to be. The skeleton remained, in all its immodesty, hanging from a hook on display. “I felt that I must go North, back to Greenland some how, some way,” Minik wrote in a letter, adding,