The Long Exile (14 page)

While Minik was trying to recover his father's bones, Uisakassak arrived back in northwestern Greenland, bringing with him stories and impressions of the places he had seen. He told his fellows that he had found it difficult to navigate “among the man-made mountains” of the city, and that it had been “too warm and there was a great lack of walrus meat and blubber.” He described the trains which hurtled “like a gust of wind across the sea,” and could hardly stop talking about the streetcars “big as houses with masses of glass windows as transparent as freshwater ice, racing on without dogs to haul them, without smoke and full of smiling people who had no fear of their fate.” His companions were not impressed by these tales. Sorqaq, the local shaman, told him to go and tell his lies to the women, who would be more likely to believe them, and Uisakassak was officially shunned.

The Arctic trade in goods began with an equal degree of cynicism. Canada was an early European frontier long before Christopher Columbus sailed to America. The first documented visit, by Vikings, was in 982 and by the Middle Ages, traders were regularly making the journey across the Atlantic to bring back polar bear skins, narwhal tusks and live gyrfalcons, which were then traded as far east as the Arabian peninsula. By the sixteenth century there was a thriving trade in furs between the Arctic regions and Europe, pioneered by, among others, Pierre Esprit Radisson, who remarked of his travels in the Arctic, “we are caesars, there being nobody to contradict us.” In 1821 Sir George Simpson, then head of the Hudson
Bay Company, wrote, “I am convinced [the Inuit] must be ruled with a rod of iron to bring and keep them in a proper state of subordination, and the most certain way to effect this is by letting them feel their dependence upon us.”

The rod of iron was rifle-shaped and it was widely used to kill and maim Inuit, and to support the rape of the women and the abduction of their children. In the Arctic there was no one but the Inuit to act as witnesses. The early fur traders were, as Radisson said, “caesars.”

Trade itself was often unfair. In 1923, a .30-30 Winchester rifle sold for twelve white fox pelts, though such a rifle could be purchased for a single pelt in the south. The era of bells and needles as trade goods had long since gone and seemed now to have an aura of innocence about it. For the previous half-century the rifle had been the bestseller. Inuit looked after their things and by the time Robert Flaherty arrived in Inukjuak to make
Nanook of the North
the market for rifles was reaching saturation point. The former whaling captain turned trader, Charles Klengenberg, solved this small dilemma by giving the Inuit hard steel ramrods and advising them to scrape out the insides of their rifle barrels, an action which soon ruined the rifling, as Klengenberg knew it would. The guns then failed to shoot straight and Inuit starved until they could scrape together sufficient funds in the form of fox pelts to buy another. And so the market for rifles was restored. Klengenberg wrote of a later exchange with Inuit: “They were so innocent a people … that I had not the heart to take advantage of them in trade, so all I took was most of their clothes and stone cooking pots and copper snowknives and ice picks for steel knives and frying pans and a supply of matches. They had no raw furs with them, but their garments would be useful for my family and some of my rascally crew.”

By the 1950s, the Inuit were rather wary of any “offer” emanating from
qalunaat
, especially where it involved a move from their familiar hunting grounds, but they were equally afraid of what refusal might bring. To Inuit, whalers, police and representatives of the
Hudson Bay Company were all cut from the same cloth. If you could not avoid them, you had better keep watch on them. They were not the kind of people who would be denied.

A day or so after the meeting with Hinds, Ploughman and Reynolds, Constable Ross Gibson orders Tommy Pallisser, the Hudson Bay Company translator, and Special Constable Kayak to prepare the detachment
komatik
and dog team for what might well be a long trip. They will head north towards Povungnituk. The first camp they visit will be that of Paddy Aqiatusuk.

Over the following two weeks, Gibson, Kayak and Pallisser sledge to every camp lying between Inukjuak and Sugluk, sixty miles to the north, looking for volunteers for the Ellesmere Island experiment. At each camp, the routine is the same. They unharness the dogs and set about looking for suitable snow for a snowhouse. If the men of the camp are out hunting, a local boy is dispatched to fetch those within range. While the three men of the patrol wait, Kayak and Pallisser fix up two small snowhouses, one for themselves and one for Gibson, who can never bring himself to sleep beside an Inuk, and someone boils a kettle of sweet tea. Once all of those who can be assembled are gathered round, Gibson pulls out Henry Larsen's telegram and a map and proceeds to tell the Inuit what he knows, which, in all honesty, is not very much.

Had Ross Gibson known more about Ellesmere Island it would have made it more difficult for him to sell it. The place was uninhabited and had been so since the Little Ice Age thickened its ice caps and grew its glaciers about 350 years ago. There was no evidence that the island would support human habitation. No wildlife surveys had ever been conducted there and it was not known how many fish, marine mammals, birds or land mammals populated the area. What
was
known was that the polar desert conditions did not support anything like the numbers of plant and animal life which flourished around Inukjuak. The cold and the dark were known from police detachment reports, though not to Ross Gibson. Temperatures in the High Arctic are on average 15°C lower than those in
Inukjuak. In the polar north, temperatures rarely rise much above freezing, even in summer, and in winter they regularly fall below −40°C. A modern domestic freezer is usually set at about -18°C. At −40°C a cup of boiling water turns to water vapour when thrown into the air, saliva freezes and steam rises from the fingers. In humans, hypothermia can set in within two minutes of the skin's exposure to air. The winds, too, are much fiercer, becoming katabatic as they spin along the frozen flats of the Arctic Ocean. The sea around Ellesmere is never wholly free of ice and the navigation season is often as short as four weeks, making the area more or less inaccessible to anything but ski-planes for ten or eleven months of the year. On account of its position high above the Arctic Circle, the winter dark period stretches from October to February. For four months of the year it is dark twenty-four hours a day.

What Ross Gibson
does
know is that the Inuit already live in snowhouses, they already spend their summers in canvas tents, they already hunt seal. Surely, life on Ellesmere Island cannot be all that different? He makes some effort to explain the dark period and the fact that it is a little colder on Ellesmere Island, but, since his job depends on Inuit agreeing to move, he ends his pitch on an upbeat note, emphasising the tremendous quantity of game to be hunted, the piles of soft, meringue-coloured pelts to be trapped, finishing always with the trump card: the promise that anyone who does not like it can return.

Despite these inducements, no one wants to go. Even those who are having a hard time of it with the fall in fox prices say they want to remain with their families. Trappers are predicting record fox catches for the next year and the price is bound to rise sooner or later. Until then, life will be hard but not unendurable. They will do what they have always done and sit it out. And so, in camp after camp, all along the eastern coast of Hudson Bay, with much smiling and shaking of hands, the Inuit turn Ross Gibson away. He returns to Inukjuak without a single volunteer.

Back at the detachment, he rethinks his strategy, and fixes finally
on the power of repetition. The only thing for it is to return to the camps and keep returning, pressing the advantages of the move until he senses the tide turning his way. Time is tight and getting tighter. Each time he goes out to the camps the ice is a little softer and the dogs are forced to strain a little more in their harnesses and Ross Gibson feels a little more frayed and desperate. On his third pass through the camps he is downright bad-tempered. Behind his back the Inuit still call him Big Red, but now they are afraid.

At the camps of the poorest hunters and trappers, or those with the largest families, people are beginning to waver. They are imagining that, if they do not go, Ross Gibson will stop their family allowance money, a dollar or two, but right now, the only dollar or two they see.

Ross Gibson decides to target Paddy Aqiatusuk. He would like the old grouch to disappear and he knows he will be likely to take a good few others with him. He is at the head of a big family. And so Gibson returns to Aqiatusuk's camp, talks up the great hunting and trapping, the proximity of police detachments in case of any emergency and the promise the family will all be returned if, after a year or two, they decide they do not like it.

Aqiatusuk sucks his teeth, shakes his head. He is contented enough where he is, on the land he knows, among his family. Gibson tries another tack, takes out a list, pretends to check it and notes, with Pallisser translating, that some of Aqiatusuk's family have already said they will go. He spots a certain tension in the sculptor's face, knows he has hit his mark. How will they hunt? Aqiatusuk asks. Where will they live? What will happen if there turns out to be no food? Gibson bluffs his way through, loses his temper a little, becomes aware that his voice is raised. He is met with a wary silence. The truth is that Aqiatusuk has no desire to leave his homeland. His back is sore and his liver gives him trouble, he is happy to live out his days making his carvings and being a help to his family. And yet, and yet. If what Gibson says is true, he can go north with Elijah and Samwillie and his family, they can trap for a while, earn enough to
buy a Peterhead boat and come back down to Inukjuak. There is something else, too, something he reads in the scowls on Ross Gibson's face. If he does not agree to go, he senses that the police will never leave him alone. The Big Red policeman will harass him from the settlement, he will refuse to pay him family allowance, he will stop him selling his carvings at the Hudson Bay Company. And he will make life unbearable for his stepson, Josephie Flaherty. No Inuit says no to a white man without repercussions. Aqiatusuk senses the menace, it is what his ancestors tell him. In his bones he feels it to be true.

The old sculptor marches into Inukjuak, sits himself down in losephie's hut, waits for his stepson to come home from work, amusing himself by playing with losephie and Rynee's little daughter, Martha. The door opens and losephie shakes his boots and goes to his stepfather to hug him. He already knows his family will leave, the settlement Inuit have talked of little else, and he knows, too, that he cannot go with them because he has a job and a daughter and another baby on the way. From losephie's hut Aqiatusuk walks to the police detachment and opens the door.

Ayunqnaq
, he says, it can't be helped. Reluctantly he agrees to move north to Ellesmere Island.

On the morning of 23 May 1953, Constable Ross Gibson telegraphs RCMP headquarters in Ottawa with the names of the seven “volunteer” families who will make the 1,500 mile journey to the High Arctic in July. Then he pulls on his boots and goes out into the blinding snow. Aqiatusuk is right. Some things cannot be helped.

On the morning of 25 July the C.
D. Howe
anchors offshore and sends her cargo barges out across the water to the little wooden pier at the mouth of the Innuksuak River, where Inuit are already gathered to help bring the cargo ashore. That evening there will be races and acrobatics and cat's cradle competitions. There will be a special supper of hardtacks and sardines and pieces of candy. In the morning the Inuit will be carried on board ship for their annual medical check-ups. Thirty-three of them will remain. Among them will be:

Paddy Aqiatusuk, his wife Mary, son Larry Audlaluk, stepsons Elijah and Samwillie and stepdaughters Minnie and Anna, Paddy's fifty-one-year-old brother Phillipoosie Novalinga and his family, Paddy's son Joadamie Aqiatusuk and his family, Thomasie Amagoalik, who has been living in Phillipoosie's camp, his wife Mary and sons Allie, Salluviniq and Charlie, Thomasie's brothers Simeonie and Jaybed-die Amagoalik and their families, plus Daniel Salluviniq and his family and Alex Patsauq, whose son Markoosie is coughing blood.

The arrangements for this monumental move are hasty and primitive. Margery Hinds is asked to inspect the families' clothes and equipment but nothing is done with her report stating that in most cases they are inadequate. Since the provisions and equipment supply list has been drawn up by James Cantley with no knowledge of the number of people moving, nor their ages, sex and sizes, there is nothing to be done in any case. Each migrant is supposed to be given a thorough medical examination on board before they leave, to ensure they are fit to travel, but the C.
D. Howe's
X-ray machine has broken down and there is no time to fix it. There are problems accommodating the Inuit's dogs and equipment, much of which is left on deck, covered by a tarpaulin. A rough storm might send dogs and equipment overboard. The Inuit quarters under the foredeck are already nearly full with sick people, in particular consumptives, on their way to sanatoria in the south, so there are insufficient beds and no division at all between the sick and healthy. Cantley has signed off on the purchase of some mattresses which will be put on the floor in the Inuit quarters to supplement the bunks, where they will pick up the damp and the cold. It will all just have to do. R. A. J. Phillips of the Department is on board at the time and later writes a report on his impressions. At Inukjuak he observes “too many white people around offering confusing and conflicting directions to the Eskimo” and adds that “there is far more racial discrimination than I had realised. There was a half-concealed air of patronage which is particularly nauseating.”