Authors: Melanie McGrath
As the C.
D. Howe
sat in Jones Sound, the Flahertys tried to prepare themselves for every eventuality. They heard the sound of an engine starting up and saw the detachment Peterhead begin motoring towards the ship. Moments later a handful of crew members came up on the C.
D. Howe's
deck and began untying ropes. The Peterhead disappeared round the far side of the ship and the two detachment Mounties reappeared on the deck of the C.
D. Howe
accompanied by some other
qalunaat.
The men appeared to be in conversation for a while before disappearing back down below. Sometime later, the Flahertys saw figures moving beside the ship's hull and caught the cough of the Peterhead's engine. A puff of blue exhaust fumes made its way into the sky as the boat began to swing round towards the shore. She dropped anchor shy of the beach and Constable Bob Pilot transferred to the skiff and took hold of a bundle passed over the side, then the boat began to edge towards the beach. At the shoreline, Pilot got out and lifted the bundle, which, it was now clear, was a girl of about five or six, on to the shale. No one dared approach. Pilot stood there for a moment, then, taking his charge's hand, he began to move towards them.
Josephie and Rynee Flaherty exchanged a worried glance. The girl was swinging her head about, trying to take in the mountains, the red cliffs and the row of little huts. She seemed distressed. Could it be?
“Mary?” said Josephie.
In all the flurry it was hard to recall exactly what happened next. At some point the girl tried to loose herself from Pilot's grasp and began to call out for Jackoosie Iqaluk.
Josephie and Rynee stood on the beach and said nothing. Was this their daughter after all? They were not the people she was crying
out for. The little girl looked terrified. There was no glint of recognition in her eyes. Again, she called for Jackoosie, and began to scream and kick out.
Josephie and Rynee looked at one another. Rynee nodded. The wind brought a cold blast down from the mountains. They took Mary back to their tent. When the girl had run dry of tears, she fell into a fitful sleep broken by gasps and sobs. She refused to eat or drink or even to catch anyone else's eye. Eventually she stopped protesting and sank into a profound gloom, as if she hoped they would forget about her.
It would be difficult to believe what had happened to Mary during her time away, were it not the incontestable truth. She had been transferred from Churchill, Manitoba, with Dora and Mary Iqaluk to the tuberculosis sanatorium. The three girls were quickly separated, stripped, bathed, deloused and put into different wards. None of the nurses in the sanatorium spoke Inuktitut and the girls spoke no English, so they had no idea what was happening to them. At one point, Dora found Mary Flaherty strapped to a bed and sobbing. She was two years old. Luckily for Mary, her illness had been caught early. After some months at the sanatorium, she had made a swift recovery and had been transferred in due course to Montreal. In luly 1956 she was placed on board the C.
D. Howe
for the trip north and was put ashore at Inukjuak. According to the records, the Flahertys were still living in the settlement and Mary was then three years old and not in a position to argue with anyone about it. By the time the mistake was spotted the C.
D. Howe
was already making her way across Hudson Bay and it was too late to call her back.
For a year, Mary lived with relatives. In 1957, when the C.
D. Howe
returned to Inukjuak on the annual supply, the little girl was put back on board the ship and sent north. For forty days she sailed without parents or guardians until the C.
D. Howe
finally put in at Resolute Bay. The C.
D. Howe's
own records seemed to suggest that losephie and Rynee Flaherty had been landed at Resolute Bay and they were now living at the Inuit camp there. A quick check
would have established that this was not the case, but no one made it. Four-year-old Mary was left with the cargo on the beach. Mary was taken in by Dora's family, the Iqaluks. For a year, she lived with the Iqaluks in Resolute Bay. No one bothered to contact her real parents. Confused and full of contradictory impressions, she took the Iqaluk family to be her own. She was now five and had been in transit from Manitoba to Grise Fiord for more than half her life. When she finally arrived in Grise Fiord she had no idea who her parents were. No one apologised to Mary or to her parents for her treatment and there was no investigation of the incident.
As the fifties ground into the sixties, obscure and lonely though it was, the settlement at Grise Fiord began to transform itself into a remote but respectable little community. On her 1959 visit, the C.
D. Howe
dropped off a pallet of 12-foot-by-6-foot prefabricated houses, which the Inuit modified for the extreme conditions by reangling the slope of the roofs and altering the guttering, then reconstructed them along the beach facing the sea. A year or two later, a few more of the prefabs arrived and, pretty soon, Grise Fiord boasted eight houses arranged in two parallel streets and the scrap-timber huts that had formerly been their homes were converted into stores or torn down. In 1962, a day school opened and a welfare teacher endeavoured to instruct children who had had no schooling at all for nine years, using the only two books the Department sent him,
How to Run a Successful Bank
and
The Roads of Texas.
While he struggled with his lessons, the teacher's wife organised adult classes in sewing, cooking, art and music and was surprised when women turned up at some of them. In the spirit of community, the police detachment set up a branch of the Wolf Clubs where young Inuit boys learned how to skin seals and put up summer tents. Twice a month they screened a film at the detachment and when CBC Radio began broadcasting Anne Pedlo's weekly show in Inuktitut, they invited everyone along to the detachment to listen.
Grise Fiord developed politics. Agendas emerged and competed. Men and women took positions and argued them out among themselves.
Disputes were resolved, reparations made and alliances forged. Leaders sprang up and followers followed them. Hunters accustomed themselves to the terrain and began to be more successful at their hunting. More fox were trapped. The settlement remained poor, people continued to die in accidents and of the cold and disease but, for most, everyday existence no longer teetered on the edge of survival. But Grise Fiord was never able to escape the fact that it was a made-up world, a
terra nullius
whose population had been tricked into living there. It remained somewhere with no history, no context, no soul and nobody really wanted to stay there.
Ever since the deaths of the Amagoalik boys, people had been asking the detachment when they could go back. Some wanted to return to Inukjuak to look after elderly relatives or to be reunited with their families or they needed wives or were homesick or feared that the fate of the Amagoalik boys would fall on their children, or they simply found the life on Ellesmere Island too lonely and difficult and remembered that they had been promised they could go back. Bob Pilot, who took over the post of head of detachment after Glenn Sargent left, had no doubt that such a promise
had
been made, but his hands were tied. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Department refused to do anything.
There were only two ways out of Ellesmere Island, by ship or dog sled. The only ship that ever called into Ellesmere, the C.
D. Howe
, would not have time in the navigation season to call into Inukjuak on its way back to Montreal. If it took the Inuit all the way down south, they would have to support themselves until the following year, when the C.
D. Howe
set off for the north once more. To leave the settlement by dog team, each family would have to carry themselves and all their equipment to Resolute Bay. losephie Flaherty knew first hand how perilous that journey was. With children, it might well be impossible. Supposing the families made it to Resolute Bay, they would have to wait for the RCAF plane which left Resolute air base four times a year for the air base in Kuujuak in northeast Ungava. The plane always carried a lot of air-force cargo,
so there would not be room to take Inuit equipment. Once they were landed at Kuujuak, any Inuit family wanting to get to Inukjuak would have to travel by dog sled inland across Ungava, a trip which had nearly ended the lives of both A. P. Low and Robert Flaherty and
had
killed Alakariallak forty years before. The Inuit would have to pay their own passage. And if all that were not sufficient, the Department inserted a new condition. Every family who left Ellesmere Island would have to recruit another family to take their place. It was important to Canada that the settlement remain populated.
What the people of Grise Fiord were never told was that from Montreal, the Inukjuamiut could have travelled by train to the railhead at Moose Factory in lames Bay and from there picked up one of the Department of Transport's Norsemen which made supply flights to Inukjuak every two months. The journey would have taken some energy to organise but it would have been relatively cheap and easy. This option was never offered to the Flahertys or to anyone else because despite their assurances of a return, both the Department and the RCMP had interests in keeping the Inuit right where they were. The most northerly settlement in the Americas had become, in effect, an icy prison, one whose bars were made of space and broken promises.
The Inuit living at Grise continued to ask to leave through the late 1950s and into the 1960s, but the detachment only repeated the argument that it had used on Paddy Aqiatusuk. If the people of Grise Fiord wanted to see their relatives, then the bestand only way would be to invite them up to live in Grise Fiord. This was not what had been promised, and the inhabitants of Grise Fiord did not wish to submit their relatives to the kind of conditions they would find on Ellesmere Island. On the other hand, they felt the separation very keenly. They dreaded dying without ever seeing their homeland or speaking to the loved relatives they had left behind. Their children would grow up cut off, not knowing where they came from, and with no connection to their history or their families. The Ungava Peninsula was and always would be their home. It held their
stories and the spirits of their ancestors. However harsh their lives, and however challenging their terrain, there remained this one great truth which the fiercest winter storm could never take from them. Ungava was who and what they were. Separated from it they were no better than the adventurers who had come from Europe only to discover that their compasses had failed and that they were now adrift.
Josephie and others had gathered themselves many times and, through the police, begged the Canadian government to take them home, but they were afraid of insisting. They looked on those gangling officials with their brisk uniforms, their expensive boats, their baffling laws and jails and they felt
ilira
, awe and unease. If the thousand years of contact between Inuit and
qalunaat
had taught them anything it was never to confront the whites directly.
But as Josephie's desperation grew, so did his courage. He returned to the police detachment several times during 1959 and 1960 and asked in a quiet voice if the Canadian government would help him to get back home. He had six children now, and no matter how often he went out with his sled and no matter how many traps he set or how many seals he harpooned, he could not hunt enough on Ellesmere Island to keep his growing family fed. He was watching his children grow up half starved, isolated and uneducated.
Listening to him, Bob Pilot detected a calm, almost dangerous need. Until recently, he had marked losephie down as meek and malleable. Now the man seemed driven, even obsessed. He appeared to think that the police detachment owed him something on account of that time when he and Akpaliapik had dragged the two RCMP constables out of the snow. Over the years he had become fuelled almost to the point of madness by this determination to see Inukjuak. Although Pilot had a good deal of sympathy for the man, and for all the Inuit living in Grise Fiord who wanted to get back home, he knew that the RCMP would never recognise any such obligation. It was a matter of realpolitik. losephie Flaherty lived in the most isolated settlement in Canada and the RCMP and the Department
wanted him to stay there. He had no power against them. So far as anyone knew, he had no contact with his rather influential family in Vermont and his greatest ally, Paddy Aqiatusuk, was dead and buried. As a Canadian, he had a vote, but only in theory since there was no voting constituency in the eastern Arctic. The man was illiterate and helpless. The reality was that no one was going to do anything for him or for any of the growing band of people who wanted to return to Inukjuak.
By 1960 Josephie Flaherty was becoming unstable. The same thoughts were driving in circles round his head. He saw himself as a choreboy, sitting on the stoop of his little hut mending his nets, surrounded by all the old, familiar hills, watching his children growing up, in the company of his wife, his relatives and his people. The sense of having been cheated out of the life he had been born to began to overtake his days and trample on his nights. All he could think about from the time he first got up in the morning till the time he settled on his sleeping skin was how to get his life back.
Gradually, over the years that followed, this gentle, unassuming man began to turn toxic. For days he would rage like a wounded bear, unpredictable and terrifying, then at other times he would be reduced to a baleful silence punctuated by sighing. When he did open his mouth to speak it was to find fault in everything, until everyone around, even Rynee and his own children, began keeping out of his way, a strategy that appeared to inflame him all the more. Perhaps in revenge for his loneliness he began to hit out, first with his tongue then, later, with his fists. Within the space of a decade, Josephie Flaherty had turned from a gentle, passive man into someone violent, anxious and unrecognisable.