The Long Exile (37 page)

Ross Gibson testified by phone from his hospital bed in British Columbia. The ex-Mountie was not the same defiant, bullish man
who had read the reports of the April hearings in the newspaper. This bitter finale to his last months had left him too crushed to be angry. His voice sounded shaky with sickness or misery or a combination of the two. He was not a bad man, nor a dishonest one, but from the start he had betrayed his ignorance of the people whose lives he had for so long and so dictatorially managed. “From my world travels,” he began, “I found the native people always gave me the impression of being happy regardless of the circumstances under which they were living. The Eskimo always greeted you with warm handshakes and a smile. I never had so many handshakes. It's like … it's like royalty.” Gibson relived the dismal forays he'd made to the camps in rotting snow in his attempts to persuade the Inuit to move north, without comprehending that his descriptions might condemn him. “I just sold them a bill of goods,” he said. “I was a salesman or a real estate man whatever you want to call it, and it was my responsibility to get across to these people the advantages.” He admitted that the planning for the move had seemed deficient even at the time. “I always suspected a pipeline to the Department of Northern Affairs of which I knew nothing. They never told me what was what or what was going on. I was a low man on the totem pole. Commissioner Nicholson said, 'You must make this a success,'” Gibson continued.” 'You must keep these people out on the land. This is what they are. This is what we want.'” In Gibson's mind, clouded by time and illness, he and the Inuit had been fellow travellers who had quite literally found themselves in the same boat. The control he had exercised over the lives of the Inuit in Resolute Bay seemed to suggest to him no contradiction. “They didn't know what I was really up to and I wanted to keep it that way. I had things under control.” The Inuit had never been abandoned, he said, because “I was always present. The white man would be there to help them to better their way of life.” He had never doubted that as one of those white men, he, Ross Gibson, knew best, and he did not doubt it now. “I never felt… in my culture, my upbringing, could never bring myself to their leveland I don't like to use that word
level, but it is the only way I can explain it,” he said. He was proud of his achievements. “[Henry Larsen] patted me on the back and he said, 'Commissioner Nicholson and I think we picked the right man'… I will never forget that.” Looking back, he realised that it was he, Ross Gibson, who had truly been left alone. Throughout the previous few months, during the terrible accusations against him, and through his final illness, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to which he had given the best years of his life, had turned its back on him.

Of all the testimony given on that day, Ben Sivertz's made what few headlines appeared the following morning. A civil servant of Icelandic extraction, Sivertz had been working at the Department during the 1950s. The intervening years had hung heavy on him. He now walked on sticks and his face was in parts both bloated and hollow. Back at the beginning of the fifties, Sivertz had discussed the relocations with James Cantley, Alex Stevenson and Henry Larsen, and it was he who had suggested that his superior, the deputy minister of the Department, General Young, meet to discuss the idea with Commissioner Nicholson of the RCMR Like Cantley and Larsen, Sivertz was an incomer into Canada and it had shocked him a little to see how few southern Canadians were living or working in the Arctic or knew much about it. The Barrenlands appeared to be overrun with Americans. In Sivertz's view, it made perfect sense to ship Inuit up to the High Arctic since they were the only Canadians likely to be able to survive there. At the time he had every faith in the programme, and he defended it now. Well into the 1960s, when Resolute Bay was being ravaged by alcohol and children were dying at Grise Fiord for lack of medicines, Ben Sivertz was planning new colonies, as he called them, at Mould Bay, Isachsen, Eureka and Alert, and he regretted that those colonies had never come into being. He dismissed out of hand the notion that any Inuk had suffered any misfortune as a result of being moved. On the contrary, he said, the Inuit believed they were a superior race and that
qalunaat
were an “astonishingly ignorant people.” When Commissioner Mary Sillett
pressed him on the point, he insisted, “There was no hardship, madam, in 1953,1954,1955,1956,1957,1958. There was only great satisfaction by all Inuit people at Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord.” It was a comment Ben Sivertz would live to regret.

The following morning every newspaper carried the headline, “There was no hardship.” More than anything else said or done, this one remark swung public opinion resolutely to the side of the Inuit. It made the officials sound like a bunch of bitter old men clinging desperately to the past. Over the next few weeks, the unthinkable happened, and the bureaucrats, all men accustomed to the quiet regard of their peers, found themselves rising in the mornings to hate mail and death threats. In Ben Sivertz's outburst a generation of civil servants, most of them fiercely bright, committed and well-intentioned men, had been discredited. Few ever regained their pre-hearing reputations. Some, among them Ross Gibson, went to their deaths in disgrace. The hearings shook Canada's bureaucracy to its foundations. They put into question, perhaps for the first time in Canada's history, the idea that, when it came to government ordinary Canadians were prepared to believe that good intentions necessarily produced good effects. A powerful principle had been evoked. The hearings capitalised the idea that in the free world, people had an absolute right to determine their own futures. This was democracy. Anything else, however well meaning, was despotism.

If this seems obvious now, in 1993 it was quite fresh and timely. In 1993, negotiations on the establishment of the Inuit territory of Nunavut were just entering their final phase. The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, which was signed in May, a month after the Inuit hearings, gave the Inuit title to 137,355 square miles of territory, an area nearly as large as the state of California, along with a share of federal government royalties from oil and mineral development on federal lands and the right to harvest and manage wildlife in the territory. The Agreement put the future of the Inuit people in their own hands for the first time since the Vikings had arrived in the Arctic a thousand years ago. It also made Inuit the largest private
landowners in North America. One of the chief negotiators for the Inuit, and the man they now call the Father of Nunavut, was John Amagoalik, who had been taken as a child with his family from Inukjuak and brought to live in Resolute Bay.

The April hearings were nothing short of the rebirth of a people. At the time of the relocations, forty years before, the Inuit had been broken and demoralised. Inuit voices had been voices in the wilderness, they went unheard, often they went unsaid. Years of quiet and sometimes unintentional but nonetheless ruthless disregard had colonised their hearts, and had made them, on the surface at least, the smiling inscrutable happy-go-lucky Eskimos of Robert Flaherty's
Nanook oftheNorth.
After hundreds of years of patronage and domination, they had finally shrugged off that legacy. It had taken forty years, but the dignified, insistent voices of the Barrenlanders had won through. At last their truth had been accepted as a matter of public record, and no credible history book would ever dare deny it. Those thirty-five men and women who turned up at the Chateau Laurier, and the others who had, over their long exile, stood up and spoken out, had put the Arctic on the map in a way hundreds of years of European exploration had never been able to do. They had given the Arctic back its authentic voice, which was not the voice of the great white explorers or the drama of expeditions and heroism and derring-do, but the quiet, still voice of the men and women whose antecedents had meandered across the Arctic from Asia and who had loved it enough to make it their home. The history of the Arctic had been given back to the people it belonged to. In the most profound sense, the people of the Arctic had, finally, come home.

The Royal Commission helped change Lower Canada's perspective on its upper reaches. Many southern Canadians now embraced the idea that the Barrenlands were just that, lands, as diverse and various as those to the south. They came to understand that the world which lay beyond the 6oth parallel was not the great white wasteland of movies and explorers' tales, but rather a series of distinct and dynamic regions which were highly interdependent and
also vulnerable. It was an insight that served only to make the Arctic seem more extraordinary, more worth protecting.

For the Flahertys, the Royal Commission signalled the end to a long, exhausting exile. In one sense it was a banishment which had begun a century and a half before when Robert Flaherty's ancestors had left Ireland. It was a journey that had taken them to the northernmost reaches of the world. Who could have predicted that its final phase, that terrible voyage to Ellesmere Island, would, in its turn, have led to quite another, greater kind of journey.

Martha Flaherty saw her mother off on the flight back to Grise Fiord and returned to her own home outside Ottawa. Maggie Nujarluktuk and Robert Flaherty's granddaughter is there now, smiling her grandmother's smile.

EPILOGUE

I
N JULY
1994, over a year after the first Inuit depositions, The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples reported its findings.

The relocation was not aimed at relieving population pressure on limited game resources. There was no population growth in the Inukjuak area in the early 1950s and the game situation had not changed in thirty to forty years. The concern was with the ability of the fur trade to sustain the income levels to which Inukjuak Inuit had become accustomed … Greater reliance on hunting would substitute for the income that fur trading would, in the long term, be unable to provide.

Everywhere in the Arctic, hunting was cyclical in nature, even in areas of relative abundance. The relocation would not alter these cycles and would not alter the hardship experienced by people who lived by hunting during adverse game cycles or weather conditions. It was recognized in the Department that the cyclical nature of hunting could and did lead to periodic famine and starvation. This was considered to be the natural state for the Inuit. The goal of the relocation was to restore the Inuit to what was considered to be their proper state.

The Department proceeded with the High Arctic relocation without proper authority. The relocation was not voluntary. It proceeded without free and informed consent. There were
material representations, and material information was not disclosed. The true nature of the relocation …and the inherent risks were not disclosed. Nor can it be said, given the cultural factors affecting the giving of consent, that consent was given freely. Moreover, many Inuit were kept in the High Arctic for many years against their will when the government refused to respond to their requests to return.

The relocation was an ill-conceived solution that was inhuman in its design and its effects. The conception, planning, execution and continuing supervision of the relocation did not accord with Canada's then prevailing international human rights commitments.

Great wrongs have been done to the relocatees, and it is incumbent on the government to accept the fundamental merit of the relocatees' complaints. This acceptance is the only basis upon which reconciliation between the Inuit and the government is possible.

The Canadian government did accept the findings and in 1995 it set up a Heritage Fund of ten million Canadian dollars to provide housing, travel, pensions and compensation for the sixteen families who were relocated to the High Arctic in 1953 and 1955 and their descendants. In spite of many calls on the government from politicians, statesmen, human rights groups and from the Inuit themselves to apologise for the High Arctic relocations, the government of Canada has never done so.

On 1 April 1999, the territory of Nunavut came into being, with its own parliament and legislative process. Nunavut comprises one-fifth of Canada's land mass and is eight times the size of the UK. Its population of 27,000, 95 per cent of whom are Inuit, would fill barely half the seats in a modern baseball or soccer stadium. Nunavut remains the only self-governing state in the world to be established for the benefit of indigenous people.

Many Arctic watchers now believe that global warming will for
the first time open up the Northwest Passage to commercial shipping. The U.S.A. indicated that it regards the passage as existing in international, not Canadian, waters. Russia, Norway and Denmark all have competing claims to the natural resources that may lie beneath the High Arctic seabed. In August 2005, the Canadian government announced that it was sending its navy back to Churchill following a disagreement between Canada and Denmark over Hans Island in the eastern Arctic archipelago. It seems the issue of sovereignty remains unresolved.

The communities of Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord still exist. Resolute Bay is a tiny but bustling settlement, which makes some of its income from guiding and kitting out sport hunters, some from traditional hunting and trapping and an increasing amount from hosting polar expeditions, which most often begin from there. The devastation wrought by drink is by and large a memory, though the place still feels both fragile and somewhat anarchic. Grise Fiord remains cut off, though it is now serviced by a Twin Otter twice a week. The settlement escaped many of the privations found throughout the Arctic settlements caused by disillusionment, unemployment, social fragmentation and alcoholism and is now seen as one of the more successful hamlets in the Canadian Arctic. When I was there, it seemed a charming if eccentric place, at once part of the world and very much cut off from it. Television had arrived only three years before, and a generation was growing up with the usual fare of cop shows and soaps, but without ever themselves having seen a motorway or a skyscraper or a branch of McDonald's. In the school, posters showed pupils how to spell common words. One of these, I noticed, was “baleen.”

After the Royal Commission hearings, Rynee Flaherty returned to Grise Fiord while Martha Flaherty stayed in the Ottawa area. The remaining Inuit members of the Flaherty family divided themselves between Grise Fiord and Iqaluit, where Rynee eventually moved to be with her daughter Mary. Martha Flaherty continued her work as President of Pauktuutit, the Canadian National Inuit Women's
Association. She moved on from there to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. She has been a member of the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women and the Panel on Economic Development for Canadian Aboriginal Women. She is listed in the
Who's Who of Canadian Women
and is now a prominent lobbyist and broadcaster on Inuit issues.

The two sides of the Flaherty family, white and Inuit, are reconciled and on good terms. Robert Flaherty's papers are archived at Columbia University in New York and the Flaherty Foundation, which is also based in the city, is active in promoting and training promising documentary film-makers. In the UK, Robert Flaherty has lent his name to the British Academy of Film and Television's most prestigious annual documentary award. In polls from the U.S.A. to Russia,
Nanook of the North
is consistently voted the greatest documentary of all time.

“In the end,” Robert Flaherty said, “it is all just a question of human relationships.”