Authors: Melanie McGrath
Laybeddie Amagoalik of Pond Inlet had lost his two-year-old daughter, Merrari, not long after the family's arrival at Resolute Bay. Unrelated to the Inukjuak Amagoaliks, laybeddie and his family had been brought up to Resolute Bay from Pond Inlet, supposedly to help the Inukjuak migrants settle. In the spring of 1954, only six months after their arrival in the High Arctic, laybeddie had been given the job of driving a dog team for two white men, a geologist and a naturalist, who wanted to be taken to Mould Bay to the north of Cornwallis. laybeddie had not wanted to take the job, he said, because it meant having to bring his family along, and he did not
want to expose them to the kind of danger a long trip in hazardous conditions across unfamiliar terrain would inevitably bring. Still, he felt unable to say no to Constable Gibson, so he set off with his wife, Kanoinoo, son, Ekaksak, and daughter, Merrari and the two white men. The moment they reached Mould Bay, two-year-old Merrari fell seriously ill. After several days during which Merrari's condition deteriorated, a plane was scrambled from Resolute Bayan airstrip had been built at Mould a few years beforebut the aircraft got caught in thick fog and was unable to land. A doctor had been summoned on the radio to offer advice but, after her parents' frantic efforts to save the girl, she died and her parents were forced to bury their daughter under rocks, knowing there would be no prospect of visiting her grave in future. After that, Jaybeddie and Kanoinoo desperately wanted to get back to Resolute Bay in case their son Ekaksak fell ill too, but the scientists insisted on staying to complete their work, so the family were forced to remain at Mould Bay for another three months. Soon after they returned to Resolute Bay though, Kanoinoo fell ill and was sent south for treatment, leaving Ekaksak in the care of Jaybeddie. Having no family at Resolute Bay, Jaybeddie had to care for the boy himself, which made it impossible to go hunting. During those long months, he kept himself, his boy and his dogs alive by setting seal nets under the ice, but they were all hungry most of the time. Every so often, the two scientists would come along and borrow his dogs to go out on the land prospecting for oil and minerals, but they never thought to pay him.
During the course of the morning, witness after witness testified before the Commission that they had been trapped in the High Arctic with no way of getting home. Once the true conditions in Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord had become clear, they had begged to return to Inukjuak. Their verbal requests were brushed off. Those who could wrote letters to relatives and to the Department, even to the RCMP, but most were unable even to do this much. In the 1950s only 8 per cent of Canadian Inuit were literate. (At the same time, the literacy rate of Inuit living in Danish-controlled Greenland was
almost oo per cent.) The letters were moderate, in retrospect too moderate, but it was part of the Inuit tradition to underplay misfortune. Officials, perhaps unconsciously, took advantage of this natural restraint because it provided the perfect excuse for Inuit views and wishes to be disregarded. The Inuit looked for other outlets, but they were kept from talking to their relatives by radio and, although they were full Canadian citizens and had the legal right to vote, they had no representative in parliament because there was no constituency in the eastern Arctic. Most of their letters were not taken seriously and went unanswered. Others never made it to their intended targets; pieces of them turned up in the police rubbish dumps. Pretty soon, they had exhausted all the options and there was no one left to turn to. There was no escape. They were living in an accidental gulag.
It was in this wide, icy prison that Martha Flaherty had passed her childhood. Standing to give evidence she recalled the journey north with horror; the shrieking of the C.
D. Howe
as it ground against ice, the pitching of the fore section in stormy swells, the fierce, malevolent mountains and spiny foreshore of Ellesmere Island. But what really stood out in her mind was the grim discovery, made at such a tender age, that her parents were powerless to protect her. It began on the boat, when Dr. Willis had tried to cut off her hair and it had been powerfully reinforced when Mary had been taken from them. She felt exposed and vulnerable, her mind full of the dread possibility, which never entirely left her, that she might be next to disappear.
The family's years at Ellesmere Island had been a long descent into darkness. Martha recalled rising to a breakfast of lukewarm water and heading out with her father across the endless miles of unoccupied ice, looking for polar bear and fox and seal, anything that might fill the pot, overwhelmed by the knowledge that her father was as helpless as she was herself. Over those hard, terrible years on Ellesmere Island, Martha had come to look on her father as her burden. It sometimes seemed that she would never be free of
him. During his final illness, when he knew he was dying, he had asked to see her but she had refused to come, telling him only that she would be better off when he was dead. Now, of course, she regretted that. After Josephie's death, the family had been flung in all directions, like drops of water from a blowhole. It had taken them many years to come together again.
This estrangement was replicated in families all across the High Arctic. Martha was witness to some of it. Twice a year she would pass through Resolute Bay on her way to and from school in Churchill. There was usually a bit of time to wait before the onward journey to Grise Fiord and it was during that time that Martha Flaherty witnessed the almost complete collapse of the Resolute Bay settlement. The prospects of living a traditional life in Resolute Bay, which is what the Inuit had been brought there to do, were dismal. Fighter jets and spy planes screamed overhead, scattering what little game there was and making hunting there more or less impossible. By the late fifties, just after Ross Gibson left to return to Inuk-juak, most of the men were already working day rate at the air base as janitors and porters, just as Henry Larsen had dreaded and predicted.
During July and August and part of September, when activity at the base was at its height, a fleet of jeeps would arrive at the Inuit camp at six every morning to pick up the Inuit men and take them to the base. They would work a twelve-hour day cleaning the mess rooms and the barracks, sweeping out the stores, setting traps to catch the foxes which frequented the dump, mending the bear-proof fences, hauling coal and equipment and keeping things painted and greased. In return, they would receive the equivalent of a third of the average white man's pay. This they were free to spend at the base's Arctic Circle bar. And spend it they did.
By the mid-sixties, when Martha was passing through Resolute, unscrupulous airmen had set up gaming books and were regularly persuading drunk Inuit to lay down their day's pay on hockey games in Ottawa and Edmonton, the outcome of which the airmen already
knew. Others had joined in, with card scams and dice cons. Inuit women began to appear at the Arctic Circle bar to reclaim their men, and soon enough, they also began to drink. The airmen quickly discovered these women could be bought for booze, cash or promises and the women were often too drunk to say no, or did not know how to say no to white men. When the first group of women had been used up, there were plenty more, and younger, down in the camp. And so it went on. A great many half-breed babies were born during that time, a good number of them with the tiny, shrivelled bodies indicative of foetal alcohol syndrome.
Fights broke out between jealous men and their wives, between husbands and between older and younger women. Inuit stumbled out of their huts into freezing nights high on rage and booze and too drunk to be able to feel frostbite setting in. There were a lot of amputations in those years.
By the mid-sixties almost every Inuit family in Resolute Bay had been affected by alcoholism. Things got so bad at the Inuit settlement that in some homes there was nothing to eat for days except the chewing gum the airmen handed out to the children to keep them quiet while they had sex with their mothers. A whole generation of Inuit children were left to bring up themselves while their fathers and mothers descended into squalor and depression. In the absence of any help, the children dealt with all this in the only way they knew how. Some learned to dissemble and lie, others sunk into states of apathy and denial. In the nine years from 1953 to 1962, fifty Inuit girls and boys were born in Resolute Bay. Thirty years later, nearly a third of them were already dead. Remembering it all brought Martha to tears. It gave her no comfort at all to know that, when it came to raw despair during those years, Resolute Bay had probably had the edge on Grise Fiord.
The testimony continued, and when the Commission broke for lunch, many of those who had heard the morning's witness simply sat in their seats, no longer able to trust their legs to carry them anywhere, while men and women of the press raced back to their
downtown offices to file their copy. The off-camera session which followed did nothing to lift the mood. The accusations were widespread and devastating. Airmen were accused of assault, teachers of paedophilia. Ross Gibson, it was said, had sexually exploited women at the Resolute Bay camp and threatened them when they protested. There were allegations that Bob Pilot had paid for sex with, among others, Rynee Flaherty, with promises of extra food. While Pilot admitted to having consensual sex with Inuit women, he laughed off the allegation that he paid for the sex.
A subdued crowd left the Chateau Laurier that evening. At home in the smarter Ottawa suburbs, those officials who had been directly involved in the relocation sat watching the on-camera proceedings on television. Of the principal actors, only Ben Sivertz of the Department, Gordon Robertson, the former Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, Rueben Ploughman, the old Hudson Bay factor and the former Mounties Clay Fryer, Bob Pilot and Ross Gibson, were still alive. They were floored by what they heard. These men had always seen themselves as friends of the Inuit, and it seemed to them now that their former friends were turning on them. It was bad enough that, forty years on, their decisions were suddenly being brought into question, but it now looked as if their reputations as men of honour were under review too. Few slept soundly that night.
Everyone woke the following morning to a series of shrill newspaper headlines. The
Ottawa Citizen
printed a quotation from the co-chair of the Commission, Rene Dussault, calling the High Arctic relocation “one of the worst human rights violations in the history of Canada.” The paper went on to quote Dussault's colleague, Bertha Wilson, telling the exiles that no one could “fail to be outraged by the injustice [or] not be grieved by the pain and suffering that you and your relatives have been exposed to” and that there could have been no justification for the “cruel and inhumane” government policy of moving them. The officials and bureaucrats involved in the relocation got the brunt of it. Sivertz, Gibson, Larsen
and Cantley were all mentioned, in scathing terms. Comparisons were made to the notorious internment of Canadian Japanese during the Second World War. “What had it all been for?” the
Ottawa Citizen
quoted Bertha Wilson as asking. “This is the question only the government can answer.”
Over the weeks that followed, gossip spread and rumour countered rumour about what exactly had been said in the off-camera session. Snippets of information began to leak out from informants and others claiming to be in the know. They did not make the headlines, but Ottawa is a small town and people talk. Of all the officials accused of sexual misconduct, ex-constable Ross Gibson was the most vulnerable to attack. After years of exposure to the pitiless Arctic sun, the freezing wind and constant brushes with frostbite, the man who had set so much store on being a credit to the force had developed melanoma and the cancer had spread to the rest of his body. He knew he did not have long to live, and he was desperate to die with his reputation intact. By the time of the hearings, he was in a good deal of physical pain but this was nothing compared with the psychological anguish visited upon him by the rumours. But by denying them, Ross Gibson knew he would only be serving to stoke press interest in the case. His one option was to wait out the months until the end of June, when the Commission would take testimony from the officials involved in the case. He had to hope that his sense of outrage would keep him alive till then.
The weather in downtown Ottawa on Monday, 28 June 1993, was hot and muggy. Outside the Citadel Hotel, a bland block in the commercial district, a group of officials gathered for the second sitting of the Royal Commission. There were no camera crews waiting for the parade of white-haired old white men, nor had many print reporters gathered. The location was drab and the lack of press interest indicative, so many of the officials said, of a conspiracy to discredit them. Bitterness, recrimination and paranoia were in the air.
The first to take the stand for the officials was Gordon Robertson.
In the 1950s, Robertson had been Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, of which eastern Arctic Canada was then a part, and had gone on to become the Clerk of the Privy Council in the national parliament. He had a reputation as a man of fierce intellect and moderate expression, but today he felt no compunction to moderate his language. The Royal Commission hearings, he said, were a “travesty of justice” which had “wantonly destroyed” the reputations of the civil servants involved. It was an inauspicious start.
Gordon Larsen, Henry Larsen's son, appeared dazed by the turnaround in his father's posthumous fortunes. Henry had died a hero but after the Inuit testimony in April he was looking more like a fool. Larsen spoke for a long time of his father's affection for the Inuit people, an affection so deep that Larsen had frequently kept his wife short of her housekeeping allowance while he bought bolts of cloth to give to the Inuit to make their clothes. Henry knew how difficult Inuit lives had become by the middle of the twentieth century and was conscious of the degree to which that had resulted from their contact with whites. Only a year after he had taken office as the superintendent in charge of the Arctic Division of the RCMP, he had advocated a Royal Commission on Inuit affairs, but his request had been turned down. After the decision had been taken to move the Inuit from Inukjuak, Larsen thought it best to send them somewhere where they would be able to live their lives away from
qalunaat
influence and at the same time benefit Canada. It was the Department
officials
who were guilty of rushed decisions and poor planning, Gordon Larsen hinted, but an unfair portion of the blame had landed at Henry Larsen's door. He had seen this coming, in the Department's subtle manoeuvres to shift the blame to the RCMP, and it had hurt him deeply. Shortly before he died in 1964, Larsen had said, “I shudder to think of the criticism which will be levelled at us in another fifty years' time.” It appeared that time had now come.