After the Ice Read online

  I knew that Grise Fiord was the most northerly community in the whole of Canada, home to just 160 people. But landing that first time, I understood nothing of Inuit life, nothing of Grise Fiord’s dark history.1 I didn’t yet grasp its importance in the struggle for the rights of the Inuit people, nor of the High North’s connection to an Inuit leader, John Amagoalik,2 whose work to bring self-government to the Inuit had helped create the vast new territory of Nunavut.

  The houses of Grise Fiord run along the shoreline, trapped between a gravel beach, where wave-sculpted pieces of ice wash up in the surf, and the steep mountains behind. In August, veins of white snow fill the shadowed gullies in the mountainside, above a steep scree of loose rock that the winter freeze has broken from the slopes.

  Approaching by sea, the eye first picks out the dull blue of a pair of giant fuel storage tanks. The wooden houses, painted white, pale blue, and shades of brown, sit on stilts to avoid contact with the frozen ground and blend into the colors of the vast landscape so well that they emerge only as the ship draws nearer.

  On shore, among the houses, there is the familiar homely confusion that you’ll find in any self-reliant farming community down south, where no bit of machinery, piece of old timber, box, rope, or string is thrown away because someday it might come in handy. Instead of tractors there are snowmobiles and bits of snowmobile as well as innumerable sleds that can be towed behind them, some carrying a little wooden house designed to provide shelter out on the ice.

  But that is as far as the similarities to southern communities go. This is a community of hunters, not farmers. Out along the beach and sitting among the houses are the fruits of the hunt: dead animals and bits of animals left out in what is, after all, a giant freezer. The head of a walrus sits on its fat, wrinkled neck. Its dark, liquid eyes are almost closed and stare straight up at the sky. The two pure white giant tusks, fringed with delicate hairs that would have helped sense clams on the sea bottom, are now material for local carvers. The skull of a polar bear with its massive incisors lies nearby. From below someone’s porch a couple of horned, furry musk ox heads look out at you with still-open eyes. Further along the beach there is the head of a narwhal, sitting in a pool of its congealed blood with its single, spiral lance pointing ten feet up into the sky. I had always wanted to see a narwhal, the inspiration for the mythical unicorn, but had never really expected my first encounter to be like this. Alongside are piles of seals, some still fresh and looking as if they might just be resting on the beach. Others have been cut up. Their gray and white dappled skins are stretched out on rectangular wooden frames and left propped up to dry on the beach while their flesh lies in bloody piles nearby.

  A little later, I traveled back to Resolute, Canada’s second most northerly settlement, arriving soon after a beluga whale hunt had ended. The whales, favorites of aquaria down south, were hauled up on the beach. Their white outer skin had been peeled off, leaving a red-raw body. That top layer of skin and meat is a prized delicacy. Only the white head and the beluga’s famous smile was left intact. Just a couple of days earlier, I had seen hundreds of the same whales in the shallow waters of an inlet on Baffin Island. I had been sitting in a tiny boat in the shallows, watching their white shapes streak around and under my boat as they rubbed themselves along the gravel bottom to renew their pure white skin. That day was pure magic.

  To meet them again, dead on the beach, was a shock, but there is more than one view of wild animals, as I gradually learned. A year or so later I was in Alaska and talking to some hunters about the tourists who come to Alaska to watch whales. “You know,” one of them said, “we really don’t much like people coming here to stare at our food.”

  Even Inuit who no longer actively hunt still crave these “country foods” and have a special attachment to them. George Edwardson, president of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, a huge stretch of the most northern part of Alaska that includes the famous whaling community of Barrow as well as many big oil developments, explained it to me this way: “The ocean is what feeds us. There is fat in the animals that live in the ocean that gives them the ability to live in the cold. We have learned as a people to borrow that fat from the animals of the sea, and that has given us the power to live in this environment.”3

  Country foods and all the tools of the hunting life are obvious signs of the link between the Inuit and the land and connect back to a time, only one or two generations ago, when success at the hunt was essential to survival. So too was sharing. A successful hunter would expect to distribute the spoils of the hunt among relatives and the wider community. Sharing remains an important part of Inuit culture, I learned as I talked to hunters. The Arctic Council’s Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic says the same.4 In Alaska, “most products of hunting, fishing, and gathering do not enter the market economy,” it notes. “Rather, subsistence products are directly consumed by the harvesting household, given away or exchanged. Money buys snow machines, gas, and ammunition.” In places where many people have jobs and few now hunt, the selling of country foods in markets, rather than their exchange through networks of friends and relations, can still be controversial. In Iqaluit, the Canadian north’s largest town, there was a long debate over whether markets that sold country foods should be encouraged. The worry was that the fruit of the hunt would become “just meat” and lose its cultural value of cementing relationships among people.

  On that first visit to Grise Fiord I also began to learn that this small place and its neighbor at Resolute share a darker story, one that is critical to understanding the past and the future of the Inuit. In these communities, the long relationship between the white men who ruled Canada and the Inuit hunters of the Arctic entered its final phase before a transformation in which Inuit began to take control over their own affairs. In the history of these northern settlements are some of the worst examples of colonial paternalism as well as some of the proudest testaments to Inuit qanuqtuurniq (resourcefulness) and piliriqatigiinniq (capacity to work together for a common cause). The story of Inuit survival at Grise Fiord and Resolute is now taught in northern schools to foster these and other critical values of Inuit culture.

  Grise Fiord is not an old community, as I naively assumed when I landed there, but was created in 1953 as a result of a government plan to relocate Inuit into the very northernmost part of the Canadian Arctic. Some thirty-five Inuit families were told to move 1,400 miles north by ship from their settlement at Inukjuak (formerly Port Harrison) in northern Quebec, along with sixteen people who were picked up on route from Baffin Island, to two new settlements, one at Resolute on Cornwallis Island, and one farther north, at Craig Harbour on Ellesmere Island. The Craig Harbour settlement was later moved a little west to Grise Fiord.

  Government records show that the move was motivated by the need to bolster Canada’s claim to the High Arctic. No Canadians lived here. In the 1950s, with the Cold War in progress and U.S. early warning stations being built throughout the Arctic, the Canadian government was growing anxious about demonstrating its sovereignty. Moving Inuit up to the High North would be a cheap way to show the flag, as they would be able to live off the land and require fewer of the facilities that would have had to be provided if white people were sent.

  This is not what the Inuit families were told. The government explanation was: “This is a purely voluntary migration…. Under this scheme Eskimos are moved from poor hunting areas to regions where game supplies and other necessities of Arctic life are more readily available.” Forty years later this “purely voluntary migration” was found by a Royal Commission to have been “one of the worst human rights violations in the history of Canada.” No one consulted Inuit about what was best for them. Their fear of white people kept them obedient to the orders of government officials.

  John Amagoalik was just five years old when his family was moved up to Resolute. A year or so after I visited the High North, I tracked him down at the Qikiqtani Inuit Association in Iqaluit where he no
w works as Director of Land and Resources. He kindly gave me some time to chat on the phone about the past and future of Nunavut. Amagoalik is popularly known as the “father of Nunavut” for the twenty-five years he spent negotiating the territory’s creation. “I didn’t ask for the title,” he says, “but it makes me proud.”

  He remembers vividly the relocation, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers coming to his camp to persuade his parents that they must move to a place where the hunting would be better, the long journey north by ship up the coast of Baffin Island and the terrible news that their extended families were to be split between two locations.

  “They described this new place in very glowing terms, but it turned out to be just the opposite of what we were told,” recalls Amagoalik, “and they agreed to two conditions that we insisted on, the first was that we would be allowed to return home if we didn’t like this new place, and secondly we would all stay together as one group. Those two promises were broken even before the year was over. When we were told our families were to be separated the women were upset and crying. I remember that the dogs started howling; that always happened when there was sadness in the family, because they were very close to us.”

  When they arrived at their new homes, the landscape was totally unfamiliar. Game was scarce. They had the wrong clothing, the wrong hunting equipment, and many of the promised government supplies had not arrived. They had to live in tents and hunt at a desperate speed to get in stocks for the approaching winter, when temperatures would fall to-50 °C. The winter was a time of unremitting horror, when shortage of food forced them to hunt out on the ice in the twenty-four-hour darkness that in this extreme northern latitude lasts from October to March.

  Among the people who went to Craig Harbour from Inukjuak was a man called Paddy Aqiatusuk who was both an expert hunter and an exceptionally skillful carver.

  After a year passed, Aqiatusuk (also known by his Inuit name of Akee-aktashuk) died. Forced to hunt with his nine-year-old daughter out on the ice in the winter dark, he is said to have gradually lost the will to live. Eventually he died in a slip from an ice floe. Nothing could illustrate the powerlessness of Inuit more strongly. Aqiatusuk died at a time when his carvings, sold through intermediaries, were being exhibited in Europe and America as the works of a master. One of his works was used to illustrate a Canadian 3-cent stamp the very year that he died. Abandoned and deceived in the High Arctic, struggling to feed his family, he knew little of the value being placed on his work by “Eskimo primitive art” collectors, nor would he ever have imagined that he had achieved such celebrity that Time magazine would carry an announcement of his death, describing the “fluent, uncluttered simplicity” of his work just under an announcement of the young actress Audrey Hepburn’s wedding.5 Museums throughout the world hold his carvings now.

  Those who remained gradually overcame the difficulties that surrounded them. The year after Aqiatusuk’s death, the police moved members of the Craig Harbour community, along with their tents, some thirty-five miles west to Grise Fiord where it was easier to find seals, whales, and caribou. In the 1960s houses were built and then a school. As the years passed the community gained an astonishing knowledge of their new land.6 Hunters ranged over an area the size of Connecticut, far larger than that used by any other Inuit community, harvesting ringed seals, walrus, narwhal, beluga, polar bear, gull eggs, Arctic char, caribou, and musk ox.

  The families who had gone to Resolute suffered a different but equally dismal fate. They had ended up scavenging from an air force base dump to survive; later it was revealed that letters of complaint they wrote were never delivered, money was stolen, and sexual favors were taken by those who were supposed to care for them. Amagoalik remembers the dump. “I was there almost every day,” he says, “looking for newspapers and comic books. I got an early start learning to read from that. We didn’t have a school in Resolute Bay then.”

  Many decades later the truth about the relocation came out, and the government was forced to begin a series of enquiries that eventually recommended that the survivors receive $10 million in compensation and an apology from the government. That apology proved too much at the time; instead the government agreed to a reconciliation statement that officials “were acting with honourable intentions in what was perceived to be in the best interests of the Inuit at that time.”

  Other indignities that were well meant “at that time” were suffered by the Inuit population. Because Inuit names were unfamiliar and surnames were not used, Inuit were issued numbered leather disks so that they could be identified and addressed by their numbers by white officials. The carver Paddy Aqiatusuk’s “Eskimo number” was E5–715, and he signed many of his works with his number, rather than with his name. For over a century, many Inuit children were taken away from their families to live in residential schools in an attempt to assimilate them quickly, just as was tried elsewhere in North America and in Australia, and some children suffered abuse there. Amagoalik was sent off to school in Churchill in 1964, but it was the tail end of the residential school era when conditions had already improved. It was a period of change and many young Inuit became involved in political action; Amagoalik remembers listening to Martin Luther King’s most famous speech on a short wave radio in Resolute. In 1974 he joined the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC), an organization representing Inuit throughout Canada, and he eventually served twice as its president. Over a period of twenty-five years, negotiations with the government involving the ITC and other organizations led to the settlement of a land claims agreement for Inuit in 1993 and then to the creation of the territory of Nunavut in 1999.

  “The attitude of the government at the start was very, very negative,” recalls Amagoalik. “They thought that we had no right to be sitting there, negotiating anything. I remember the first time we sat down with them, all they wanted to do was to talk about hunting and fishing, and soapstone quarrying. We wanted to talk about regaining control of our lives and our land and resources. We wanted institutions of public government; we wanted to create our own territory. We wanted financial compensation, and we wanted the protection of our language and culture and our hunting rights. It took a long time to close that gap.”

  In the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (NLCA) the Inuit gave up their ill-defined native title to the land in exchange for a set of carefully laid out rights and guarantees. This included rights to vast areas of land (but only a small percentage of the total); mineral rights to some promising areas for mining; three new national parks; guaranteed equal membership with the federal government in new bodies that would manage wildlife, land, and water; and over $1 billion for a fund to invest in development.

  The land claim agreement is designed to compensate the Inuit and give specific rights to them as an indigenous people, unlike the government of Nunavut, which represents everyone who lives in the territory, whether Inuit (85 percent of the total) or not. This peculiarity is important; the Nunavut government and an organization called the Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI), which looks after the Inuit’s own land claim agreement, remain two powerful and separate political forces in Nunavut.

  The tale of the High Arctic relocation, of Grise Fiord and Resolute, thus came close to its end in 1999 with the birth of Nunavut, but a deeper resolution was still waiting. In June 2008, soon after the Australian government apologized to its own “stolen generation,” the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, asked “the forgiveness of the aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly. We are sorry.” “It was a very emotional moment for many “people,” says Amagoalik.

  Mary Simon, the current leader of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK, formerly the ITC), the organization of which Amagoalik was twice president, was in Parliament to hear the apology. I had seen photographs of her on the day, wearing a sealskin waistcoat, and had read several of her fiery political speeches, along with a piece she had written on the pleasures of berry picking, before I finally got to meet he
r on a cold winter’s day in Quebec City in 2008. So I wasn’t so surprised to find her a powerful mixture of forcefulness and warmheartedness. I asked her what the apology meant.

  “It is very important. A lot of people have carried the legacy of those residential schools. An apology begins the healing process. A lot of people don’t want to go to school because of the experience their parents had.” In her own case, she explains that she was not sent away to school, but in her community (Kangiqsualujjuaq in Nunavik), children were not allowed to speak their own language on school grounds. “If we were caught speaking Inuktitut we were punished,” she says.

  And how important was the emergence of the territory of Nunavut? “It was a profound change. The majority of the Inuit live in that part of the eastern Arctic and they had always felt that the government was much too far away and didn’t understand their culture and their values and their language.”

  At the time I met Mary Simon, the territory of Nunavut was just coming up to its tenth birthday and it had been almost fifty-five years since the High Arctic relocations. “Fifty years ago our culture was completely different and our way of life was completely different,” said Simon. “We were generally afraid of the white man. We were very subservient people in many ways. That has changed. The big challenge now is for the young people to embrace their own culture and to embrace other cultures without losing their identity. We have a lot of social and economic issues to overcome.”

  Nunavut is not the only region of the circumpolar lands where Inuit are in the majority, but it is where the largest number of the Canadian Inuit live (49 percent of the 50,500 total). It is the only area that has gained the status of a “territory.” (Canada is divided into ten provinces and three territories, with the provinces having greater devolved powers.) Elsewhere across the Canadian Inuit Nunaat, or Inuit homeland, there are the regions of Nunavik in northern Quebec (19 percent of the Canadian Inuit), Inuvialuit in the Northwest Territories (6 percent), and Nunatsiavut in coastal Labrador (4 percent). In all three of these areas, Inuit have succeeded in finalizing land claim agreements and have gained degrees of self-government. Nunavik is well on its way to gaining autonomy within the province of Quebec, and Nunatsiavut has already formed a regional ethnic government within its province of Newfoundland and Labrador.