The High Arctic Exiles

The story of the High Arctic Exiles is one of the most awful and painful tales of the eastern Arctic Inuit, a parable of sorts about how a government used to treating its native inhabitants as mute collateral, and a native population with a culture of deference to abstract and distant authority, can lead to a destructive dislocation for which no apology, and no compensation, can atone.  To be uprooted from a home one's people have hunted and thrived in for ten thousand years, and relocated to a place utterly devoid of game, of life, of anything more than mere dependance, is not something that can be measured in dollars, in words, or in any known currency of the soul. Canada has their anguish on its hands, and it always will.

And yet, like so many other roads to hell -- the forcible taking of Inuit south for TB treatment, or the establishment of permanent settlements and schools for native peoples -- it was richly paved with good intentions.  For the federal government of Canada, there was a great anxiety about the regions north of the Barrow straits -- the Queen Elizabeth Islands, and the northern stretch of Ellesmere Island.  You might be nervous too, if your powerful southern neighbor -- the United States -- had sent explorers into your lands, naming vast tracts after George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.  And for the Inuit, who had shifted with skill from a subsistence hunting model to one which emphasized hunting animals for fur for trade, the prospect of co-operating with the Qalunaat had, at least until then, generally led to what seemed like good results.  After all, as Tiivi says in The Necessities of Life, "what if their stories are true?"

So, as often happened, the RCMP came together with the traders, asking the Inuit of Ungava if they would be willing to re-locate farther north.  It was a land of abundance, they were told, and the move was not permanent -- they could go back in two years if they didn't like their new home -- such were the lies.  Well, why not? thought many -- we will see what this will bring, and if we don't like it, we will go back.  Yet no such possibility was in fact allowed for.

As quoted in a story in the Nunatsiaq News, Markoosie Patsauq vividly remembered the day his ship arrived and his exile began in 1955, when he was only 12 years old: “My impression of Resolute was that we had arrived in a dead land,” he said. “There was no sign of any life, not even the seagull.”  And so it was to be; there was little if any game to hunt, and the Inuit who arrived in Resolute and Grise Fjord found themselves to be abject dependents of the adjacent Canadian bases.  They were forced to rely on the leftovers of the Qalunaat, their garbage really -- proud men who had been used to grappling with the daily challenge of hunting and keeping their families alive were reduced to improvising food and shelter out of packing crates, tinned food, and military surplus.

And, in one of the harshest ironies of history, Josephie Flaherty -- the son of filmmaker Robert and the woman credited on camera as "Nyla, the smiling one" -- along with his wife Rynee and their children, were among the Inuit taken from Ungava to nowhere. Rynee still remembers:

She bundled up a few essential belongings, a canvas tent, pots and pans and some blankets, along with her three kids, Martha, 5, Mary, 3, and Peter, aged 6 months. Her family had to move without sled dogs, crucial to survival in the High Arctic, because theirs died before the voyage began. The government offered no help, not even boxes for their things, she says. During the journey, the ship's doctor diagnosed Rynee's daughter Mary with pulmonary tuberculosis. When they reached Churchill, Maniyoba, on the west coast of Hudson Bay, Mary was one of several children taken away for treatment. There wasn't anyone to translate the nurses' English into Inuktitut, so Rynee couldn't understand what they were doing with her daughter.

"I thought they would bring her back right away," she says. "They didn't tell me anything, except that she was leaving."

More than two years passed before she saw her child again. After six months in a sanitarium, Mary was moved to Montreal to wait for the next voyage of the C.D. Howe, which mistakenly dropped her off at Inukjuak. Even though Mary had a number, and an ID tag around her neck, the system somehow forgot her family had moved to Grise Fiord. After the sanitarium, she ended up in far-flung foster families for a few years. She was finally reunited with her family on one of the first flights to land in Grise Fiord. She had forgotten how to speak Inuktitut. The only words Rynee could understand of her daughter's English were "dirty," when she complained about her new home, and "water," when she was thirsty.

‏"She didn't want to be with us," her mother says, the wound still raw. "She didn't want to get off the plane. She wanted to be with qalunaaqs. She used to cry a lot because we were strangers to her."

‏After losing Mary, then Martha – who was sent to residential schools for several years – as well as his self-respect, all to a treacherous system, Josephie lost his mind. By the early 1970s, he was always pacing and whispering to himself. Going silent, and blank, when his wife tried to help.

‏"He got sick of being poor, struggling," Rynee says.

‏He died in 1984, before he could persuade the RCMP and the government to keep their promise and let him take his family back to Inukjuak, their home.

‏"We were guinea pigs," his widow says. "It didn't matter whether we died or not as long as there were Canadian bodies up there to prove the islands belonged to the Canadian government."

NB: For your convenience here are links to some relevant readings and viewings (also on our sidebar): Excerpt from The Long Exile; the Cryropolitics Blog; the short film Exile; Wikipedia page on the Territorial Evolution of Canada; Community Visit to Grise Fiord); as with the Cryropolitics Blog, feel free to browse as much (or as little) as you like.

p.s. I also finally found a link to the video of Tudjaat, a throat-singing pair of cousins descended from the High Arctic Exiles, singing "Kajusita (When My Ship Comes In)"; the woman in the video is their grandmother, herself one of the Exiles.

Shamanism meets Christianity

For thousands of years, Inuit belief was centered around a shamanistic belief system. When there was trouble, one paid a visit to the local angekoq. He -- or she, there were a great many women shamans -- might ask a few questions; had you and your family broken a taboo? If so, ritual cleansing might be in order. If not, the shaman might speak with others in the band -- had they? All else failing, the angekoq might summon one of her tongait, or spirit helpers. These were often embodied in a small charm worn on the belt, and might be made of an old piece of animal skin or bone. Brought to life, the spirit helper would enable the angekoq to travel wherever he needed -- to the bottom of the sea to visit Sedna, to a neighboring band, or even to the Moon -- as Kenn Harper once pointed out, Neil Armstrong wasn't the first man to set foot there -- Inuit had been visiting for milennia!

When missionaries finally arrived in the more remote areas of the Arctic, the shamanistic system faced a challenge. Shamanism had always had practical as well as spiritual value -- what could Christianity do if the seals didn't come to their breathing holes? -- but at the same time shamanism worked mainly by fear, and brought with it "numerous and irksome" taboos, as recounted in the introduction to our book. Perhaps understandably, while attending church and even becoming catechists and preachers, Inuit quietly kept shamanism alive, like a fire extinguisher in a closet, in case of necessity.

Isuma productions has dramatized the onset of Christianity, showing both its attractions and its coercive elements, in an episode of its Nunavut series, Avaja. In it, the priest offers his Inuit neighbors gifts of tobacco, attaching the promise that when they hear the bell, they must come to the church. He preaches a sermon about "Mosesesee" and the Burning Bush (a tough sell for people who have never seen a bush), and they seem to comply with his wishes, singing along loudly with every hymn. Nevertheless, it's clear that one reason they chose to attend was the anxiety of not being impolite, and (perhaps) the fear of offending the new God and his ministers. For Inuit who were there to witness this development, there has always been a sense of doubleness, of living between and yet within two worlds.

The spread of this new faith was uneven at first, and often the text of the Bible or other religious texts arrived well before any context with which to understand them. Perhaps the worst case of this was the Belcher Islands incident of 1941, in which a hunter named Peter Sala -- the only man on the islands who could read syllabics -- decided that he was God and his son was Jesus. Those who would not follow his orders were killed. His sister even claimed to have a vision of the second coming, and declared that Jesus was going to float down in his kayak from the sky -- and Inuit needed to be naked in order to receive his blessings. Perhaps needless to say, many of those who listened to her froze to death.

This and many other stories are told here, by Kenn Harper, based on installments of his long-running column, Taissumani ("in those days") in the Nunatsiaq News. Read them -- many are strange indeed -- and unlike the tales in Kayak Full of Ghosts, most of them are true stories. In your comments, choose one of them, and describe your reaction to it.

Nanook of the North

Nanook of the North has been hailed as the first and greatest documentary film, and although I would not necessarily agree with either claim (it's certainly not the first, in any case). But yes, Nanook rewrote the book for documentary film, and it did so by taking a number of pages out of the history of dramatic film.

Robert Flaherty had actually compiled two different sets of footage in the Arctic in the years before Nanook, and had at first intended to use this material to make his film. And yet, although this material clearly showed the "actual" Arctic, it did so piecemeal, and without any strong central narrative. When the working print caught fire and was destroyed (early nitrite film stock was highly flammable), Flaherty decided on a whole new plan. Instead of simply pointing his camera at things that were actually happening, he decided to "cast" specific Inuit as members of an imaginary family, and then deliberately create a narrative which not only included the "incidents" he'd earlier filmed, but extended the story through a complete dramatic arc, much as would a feature film. The idea was revolutionary, but still he needed backers to provide the resources.

He found a willing sponsor in Revillon Frères, a fur concern which operated a series of trading posts; the "friendly trader" in the early scenes is from one of these. The company simply asked that they be portrayed in a positive light, a seemingly small request, but one which nevertheless does affect the film's objectivity. Flaherty also wished to depict Inuit life from the era before the adoption of modern weapons such as rifles; thus, although one of the main reasons the Inuit traded with the white man was to obtain guns and ammunition, this was not shown, and "Nanook" hunts only with a spear. He

even persuaded them to conduct a walrus hunt with traditional weapons, something the local Inuit had not done for more than a generation, and which they were reluctant at first to re-enact. As Inuit writer Alootook Ipellie pointed out, it would be as though someone came to modern Toronto to ask the locals to show how everyone lived in the 1800's!

And of course Nanook himself, his wife Nyla "the smiling one," and the rest of the family depicted by Flaherty were in fact actors, Inuit playing an Inuit family. Nanook was portrayed by Allakariallak, whom Flaherty chose for his patience and rugged appearance; Nyla was played by a young Inuk woman, Maggie Nujarlutuk, who was, actually Flaherty's common-law wife at the time the film was made, and one of the babies shown may have been their child, Joseph (or Josephie; the Inuit added an -ie or -ee to many western names). Like many other explorers and travelers before him, including Peary and Henson, Flaherty left his child behind when he headed back south to take up a career as a filmmaker. Josephie Flaherty was, as fate would have it, one of the Ungava Inuit who was to be forcibly relocated to Resolute and Grise Fiord in the 1950's in a misguided attempt to strengthen Canadian sovereignty in the North. This group, known as the "High Arctic Exiles," finally received a financial settlement offer from the federal Canadian government a few years ago, but no apology was made then, or has been made since.

And to be fair, Flaherty could not necessarily have anticipated the worldwide response to his film. Although Revillon Frères thought of it more or less as a promotional venture and did not even expect to recover their costs, Nanook was picked up for distribution by Pathé, given a New York premiere and went on to be one of the most successful films of 1922. Flaherty was given a contract by Paramount, and headed off for Samoa to make a film about the native people there; this second film took three years to make, and was not as successful as Nanook, although it was in reference to this film that the word "documentary" was coined (such films had previously been known as "actualities"). Flaherty was next paired with W.S. Van Dyke to make another south seas film, but they had a falling out (Van Dyke was later to make 1933's "Eskimo," the first big-budget, big-screen northern epic of the sound era). After parting ways with Van Dyke, Flaherty was sent to work with German visionary F.W. Murnau to work on a film called "Tabu," but they too soon had a falling out. Flaherty next moved to Britain, and worked on some shorter films as well as "Man of Aran," which was set in the remote Aran islands. He then went to work for producer Alexander Korda on a film set in India, to be titled "Elephant Boy," and yet again was fired from the project. Back in the U.S., he worked on several more documentaries, but problems with financing and distribution meant that few of them were ever seen in his lifetime.

One of the stories that Flaherty liked to tell was how Allakariallak, less than two years after Nanook was filmed, had starved to death in the frozen wilderness that was his home. The press loved this story, and it's still frequently repeated today. But it's not true; according to testimony from his son and other family members, Allakariallak died from "white man's disease" -- probably tuberculosis -- at home with his family. He may well have been exposed to it during the time he worked with Flaherty on Nanook.

NB: To watch Nanook online, the best link is this one. You may also be interested to see "Flaherty and Film," an old television broadcast which features a fascinating interview with Flaherty's widow.

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).