The Necessities of Life

The story is a familiar one, certainly to Inuit who were living on the land in the 1950's: a diagnosis of tuberculosis, followed by transport to a southern hospital, treatment that sometimes lasted for years, and then -- if one survived -- an abrupt return home. The medical system of the time was utterly insensible to the cultural and emotional trauma of this treatment, which has come back to haunt many who underwent it.  Alootook Ipellie was one, as a child, and so was Natar Ungalaaq's grandfather, as he describes in this radio interview.  It's been depicted in film before, most memorably in Vincent Ward's brilliant Map of the Human Heart, whose main character, Avik, is sent south in the 1930's, an era in which antibiotics for TB were unknown, and the treatments were accordingly longer, more painful, and less successful.  The approach of director Benoît Pilon here is less melodramatic, as befits his own background as a documentary filmmaker; we see the story unfold through the eyes of Tivii (Ungalaaq) is straightforward order, without adornment; the tone is both bleak and beautiful.  Ungalaaq's expressive face and voice are the stars of this film, for which he won the Canadian Genie award for Best Actor in 2009.  We also see, though only for a short time, something of the life of the Inuit during the time just before the move to forced settlements, when a name was less important than a number (you can see the "Eskimo Tag" Tivii is wearing in the still above).  There's also testimony to the saving power of story, when lost in an environment where nothing seems familiar.

Prime Minister Trudeau with Alacie Joamie

And the actual stories of Inuit often had far worse outcomes than Tivii's: many Inuit died and were buried in unmarked graves, while their families were never notified. Others, though they returned years later, had been given up as dead by their families; very few were able to communicate with their loved ones as Tivii does in the film. And yet it was not until March of 2019 that the Canadian government finally apologized for these decades of emotional abuse in the name of treatment. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau -- arriving a day late after his first flight was forced to turn around due to a blizzard -- arrived in the capital of Iqaluit and delivered what was, by all accounts, a heartfelt and eloquent apology. The outpouring of feeling among those gathered to hear him in the lobby of the Frobisher Inn was overwhelming, and the sense was, for most, one of acceptance of Trudeau's words.  TB is still a problem throughout Inuit Nunangat (a phrase which encompasses Inuit in Nunavut, Nunavik, and the Northwest Territories), and even the government agencies charged with tracking cases admit they haven't kept up with that work. New medications requiring a less lengthy course of treatment offer some promise, but there's still a great deal of work to do. It's a reminder that, in Canada as well as here in the U.S., the past is not only still with us -- it isn't really past at all.

A note on our film: The Necessities of Life can be streamed via AMC+ or DirectTV if you have a subscription to any of these; if not, it can be rented ($3.99) or purchased ($12.99) via AppleTV. If you can't access one of these, you can watch Map of the Human Heart as a backup; it's much more widely available and covers this same kind of story (though quite differently).