The Long Exile (27 page)

He edged past the landing dock that fed boats in and out of the waters of Hudson Bay. In the summer, a collection of ramshackle
kayaks
and
umiaks
were always tied up there and the air smelled of the fishing nets which were usually strung between the boats to dry. Men came down to the shoreline at this point to fish for bait or mend their nets and, in the navigation season, small groups of women often left from the same spot in their
umiaks
for the Hope Islands where they would go jigging for tommy cod or hunting eider ducks. Most of the river traffic was from Inukjuak, but from time to time an old boat would come growling in from Qikirtaq or the Sleeper Islands laden with hunters eager to trade skins and walrus ivory at the Hudson Bay store. It was losephie's usual routine to pass the time with the fishermen or whoever else was there as he went by. Today he merely nodded a greeting. His mind was full of the letter.

In the year since Aqiatusuk's departure, much had changed. The Bay store was still the large, unkempt clapboard building with a red roof it had always been, and the Bay factor's wife, Lily Ploughman, had just given birth to the couple's first child.

Beside the Bay stood the cold clapboard Anglican church and beside that the unimposing minister's house, now empty, the job of
minister having lain vacant for some months after the incumbent, the Reverend Donald Whitehead, had caused a scandal (at least among the whites) by running away from his fiancee, a young Inuk woman by the name of Sarah, and, so far as anyone could tell, disappearing off the face of the planet. Bishop Marsh, otherwise known as “Donald of the Arctic,” who was head of the Anglican Church in the region, had threatened to separate Whitehead from his vocation if he did not return to keep his promise to Sarah but Whitehead remained missing and no one had yet been appointed to replace him. The little church still opened its doors a couple of times a week and services in Inuktitut were led by the lay catechist, an Inuk known as Old Willya, but the wool had been pulled from the eyes of the locals and the days when the place had managed to exude a sense of sanctimonious holiness were over. The Inuit were happy to go along for the music and for the Bible, too, but they kept their amulets tucked away under their sleeping skins.

The rules by which the settlement lived were now set by the police detachment. The clapboard building and its outlying sheds and stores served not only as the settlement's police station, but also as its post office and its departments of game and welfare. In 1954, the detachment Mounties were Corporal J. E. Decker and Constable Doug Moody, who had replaced Ross Gibson the year before. No one liked Moody much, but he was considered an improvement on his predecessor, whom the locals now openly referred to as Big Red. They did not miss him.

In spite of Moody's vigorous efforts to keep them out, there were more Inuit living in the settlement in 1954 than there had been in 1953, but these were still, by and large, employees and servants of the
qalunaat.
Noah worked as a choreboy at the school, Elijah from Labrador assisted Margery Hinds, Minnie helped out at the police station. There were others too. Until the year before, losephie, Rynee and their family had occupied the choreboy's hut beside the Radiosonde station, but losephie had been fired for refusing to fill the station manager's wife's coal bucket, and the Flaherty family
were now living out at Lazarusie's camp. Trade or the weekly family allowance brought Josephie into the settlement from time to time.

The coal bucket incident remained something of a puzzle. Not long after Paddy Aqiatusuk's departure, Josephie had been working in the kitchen at the manager, Carter's, house. Mrs. Carter had been given the responsibility for preparing meals for a half dozen construction workers who had come up from the south to work on the station over the summer and she resented both the sudden intrusion on her time and the fact that she could not palm the job off on an Inuit woman because an Inuit woman would be unfamiliar with the kind of food the construction workers expected. It was a Sunday, supposedly the day of rest, and Mrs. Carter was in a funk about that, too. She had asked Josephie to keep the range topped up with coal from the coal store in the shed beside the station, but the coal bucket was tiny and all the shuttling to and fro was taking his time away from other tasks with Mrs. Carter barking at him that he wasn't working hard enough all the while. Josephie had seen plenty of managers and their wives come and go during his twelve years at the station, but there was something about the Carters, about Mrs. Carter in particular, which rubbed him raw. On that Sunday some long dormant rage stirred in him and when Mrs. Carter started shouting at him for allowing the bucket to run out of coal, the anger found its outlet and, almost before he was aware of it, he heard himself telling Mrs. Carter where to put her bucket. And, well, that was that. As Mrs. Carter later told Margery Hinds, the welfare teacher, Josephie's outburst was just one in a long line of prior insubordinations. From that point on, he was out of a job and out of a home and, so far as working in Inukjuak was concerned, out of a future, too. No
qalunaat
would take it on himself to employ another white man's reject.

Josephie missed his job or, rather, he missed the money, and he missed Inukjuak. He knew the old place as well as he knew the taste of Arctic cranberries or the patterns made by clouds. But he was no longer welcome in his former home. As soon as his business there
was done, he was hustled out by the detachment police. He traipsed out along the river to where the granite gathered itself into a gentle hill and he often picked berries as a boy. At the summit of this hill he saw the neat clapboard home of Margery Hinds.

One of Margery Hinds' jobs had been to inspect the clothes, food stores and equipment of those Inuit heading north in 1953. That summer, just before the
Howe
arrived, she had borrowed the police detachment boat and gone on a long trip up and down the coast with Special Constable Kayak and the report she sent to the Department had made for rather stark reading. She recognised the Inukjuamiut were struggling and approved of moving them, but thought it was irresponsible to send the families north with so few caribou-skin clothes and such limited equipment.

If Margery Hinds had been writing a year later, in 1954, her report would have looked rather different. The winter of 1953 had been a very productive one for trapping around Inukjuak. Some of the better trappers had been able to order sewing machines and new dog chains, even to buy shares in whaleboats and outboard motors, with the proceeds of their winter catches, and by March 1954, so many Inuit had racked up credit at the store that Rueben Ploughman had almost run out of supplies. Certainly, no one was talking about starvation any more. For most of the Inuit living around Inukjuak, life was looking up. If the idea of moving Inukjuak to new hunting and trapping grounds had been mooted in 1954, rather than a year earlier, it would have seemed crazy.

That year had not passed so happily for the Flahertys though. For the past eleven months, losephie had been trying to provide for himself, his wife Rynee and his little daughters Martha and Mary by living on the land, but in twelve years of choring he had lost a good deal of the hunting knowledge he had learned as a young man from Aqiatusuk and others and, in all those long months, he had barely been able to feed his family. Even as his neighbours were trapping more foxes and earning better credits in the store, he had seen his own income dwindle almost to nothing. His hunter's aggression,
never pronounced, had been dulled by years living in the settlement. He was by nature too self-effacing, too sensitive ever to be able to pursue game as Alakariallak or even Aqiatusuk had. He would never have made a great hunter, but in the past he had had the support of Aqiatusuk and his job. Now he had neither. His only real recourse during the past year had been the government. Like all Canadians, the Flahertys were entitled to a family allowance. It was a very modest sum, particularly in the north where the price of everything from butter to ammunition was four or five times higher than it was in the south, but it was enough to buy a bag of flour and a few tins of powdered milk for the children and this, coupled with whatever Josephie and Rynee could catch, was what had been keeping them alive. For months together he and Rynee and the two children had lived on little more than flour-and-water bannock bread, supplemented by soup boiled from the meat of the foxes Josephie caught. Neighbours had sometimes brought round gifts of beluga skin or walrus fat and every so often Josephie had bagged a seal, but there had never been enough to keep everyone full for long and food remained a constant source of worry and insecurity, particularly as Rynee was pregnant once more. For Josephie, the year had been one long slide into frustration. If “to love” was the same as “to care for,” as Inuktitut had it, then he wasn't doing a good job of loving his family.

It was summer now, and the berries would be ripening and the migratory birds would be passing on their way back down south, but soon it would be winter again, and there would be a new baby to feed. No amount of bannock bread and powdered milk would keep out the cold then. They would need meat and animal fat and the prospect of being unable to supply enough of either pressed against Josephie like a cold wind. Unless something changed and soon, the Flahertys might well find themselves standing on the precipice, overlooking a long, slow starvation. It would begin the way it always did, as a thinning of the nails and hair and a certain yellowing of the eyes, and for a while they would be able to stave it off but gradually,
bit by bit, it would wear them down, so subtly, so softly, they would hardly know they had got to the end until they were already there.

The irony of all this was not lost on Robert Flaherty's son. If Ross Gibson had not strong-armed Aqiatusuk into going north in search of a better life, Aqiatusuk, his family and Josephie would almost certainly have found one right here at home in Inukjuak. Had they all stayed put the family might well have been looking forward to a bumper winter of hunting, trapping and carving. As it was Josephie could not see how his own situation was going to improve without his stepfather and stepbrothers. Besides, he loved Aqiatusuk and felt duty-bound to him. He did not want to leave Inukjuak. It was his family's
nunatuarigapku
, their homeland. His children had been born there, another child was on the way and the whole family had always expected to live out their days in Ungava. But the more he thought about it, the stronger his sense became that he had no option.

Paddy Aqiatusuk's letter was not the only thing waiting for Josephie on the C.
D. Howe
that year. David Flaherty was Robert's younger brother and collaborator. He was also Josephie Flaherty's white uncle. Exactly why he was on board the
Howe
remains unclear. When Rynee was asked about it many years later, she said simply that the man had come to take a photograph.

What really happened during this unlikely meeting between the two men will probably never be known. David Flaherty certainly took a picture of his half-breed nephew. What else went on can only be a matter of speculation. Irrespective of what was actually said, it can't have been easy, this coming together of two men joined by blood but sharing no ties of history, culture, values or habits. It is perfectly possible that David took Josephie's picture, shook his hand and went back on board the C.
D. Howe
and that was the end of it. Indeed, this seems most likely. Josephie had been brought up to be both wary and a little fearful of white men. His English was patchy and in the presence of
qalunaat
he found it hard to talk, still harder to assert himself. Many decades later, one of the white men who
knew Josephie around this period described him as seeming “almost retarded” and this impression, if Josephie was aware of it, could hardly have encouraged Robert Flaherty's son to have been forthcoming. More likely than not, the meeting was an awkward encounter, full of thoughts and sentiments on both sides for which there is no language.

What does seem clear is that this was the moment Josephie first learned of his father's death. We can only guess what he thought and felt about this. Robert Flaherty must have seemed very abstract to Josephie, a concept, almost, rather than something he could call his own, his blood. He had never met the man, nor had he had any contact with him over the years. In 1954 Josephie wasn't even officially a Flaherty. That surname came later, after the Canadian government required Inuit to adopt surnames, in the 1960s. He was simply Josephie, E9701, the number handed to him by the Department as an identifier.

What is also clear is that not long after the arrival of the letter and the meeting with David Flaherty, Josephie decided to take his family north to join Paddy Aqiatusuk on Ellesmere Island. He did
not
know when he made this momentous decision that the man he was planning to join, the man who was his father in everything but blood, lay dead and buried under rocks. Nor did Josephie, E9701, have any idea that the trip would be his last and that he would never again set foot on the grey hills, the gravel eskers and dun-coloured tundra of his beloved homeland, his
nunatuarigapku.