A Personal Response to Frank J. Tester and Peter Kulchyski, Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939-63, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 1994. Comment by Peter Jull.
(The Northern Review #12/13 (Summer/Winter 1994):197-202)
In the 1950s, the Canadian government moved some Inuit families from the Inukjuak area of Quebec on Hudson Bay to the High Arctic islands. The community known today as Grise Fjord on Ellesmere Island thus came into being, while other families formed a new village close to (but carefully separated from) the existing weather station and military outpost at Resolute on Cornwallis Island. A couple of families from the Pond Inlet area of North Baffin Island were moved to these same places to help the southern relocatees adjust to eco-systems and conditions very different from those they had known in Quebec. They were the first Inuit in modern times to settle in the islands of the Arctic Archipelago lying north of latitude 74°N. Inuit lived to the northernmost limit of these islands when climate permitted before the Little Ice Age.
Inuit involved report that they experienced difficulties and real hardship due to various oversights and blunders in implementation of this scheme, and that commitments made to them in advance were not honoured in whole or in part. Further, they now say that they were merely moved north as “human flagpoles,” a phrase probably coined by Mark R. Gordon, the late Quebec Inuit leader who waged a battle using the legal and other resources of the powerful Makivik Corporation to seek compensation and other redress for those affected. That is, Inuit believe, that they were moved by the government to strengthen Canadian sovereignty claims in the Arctic in the 1950s when certain American slights implied that the USA questioned that sovereignty.
The Canadian government has stuck to the position, advanced by its own reviews of the documentation and the recollections of its former officials concerned with the relocation, that the reason for the move was the desire to relieve population pressures in an area of acute food shortage and to remove population to areas where game was both abundant and unexploited. Ottawa has refused to apologize or to “admit” that it had been acting for purposes of sovereignty, although it has provided funding for return relocation to Quebec and housing there for some of those affected. Of the possible reasons for such refusal, three may be that (a) Ottawa does not believe that it acted other than in the Inuit's interest at the time, (b) a precedent might be set for others in Canada who had been moved sometime for whatever reason, and © admission of a sovereignty motive would imply that Canada's Arctic sovereignty was so insecure as to require such measures.
Most Canadians, ignorant of the original relocation “facts” that are now so hotly disputed, have probably tended to believe the Inuit. Inuit were the ones who experienced the whole business first hand, after all, and speak with obvious feeling about its impact on their lives. Some of the former officials and their supporters have seemed too ready to dismiss that personal experience. In doing so they have sometimes displayed assumptions that have unwittingly reinforced the Inuit view of their past insensitivity. Some attitudes that were common enough 40 years ago appear ethnocentric, psychologically naive, or simply arrogant today.
The controversy that has surrounded this episode in recent years has become bitter, although outsiders may well ask why. After all, the two positions—Inuit hardship and official good intentions—do not preclude each other. However, in the passion of debate some Inuit have insisted that they were simply pawns in a chess-game of sovereignty, while various non-Inuit connected with the project have insisted not only that Inuit had nothing to complain about butthat they were positively happy about the experience. In other words, the opposing groups have gone beyond statements of the facts as they experienced them, i.e., hardship suffered and intentions honourably conceived, to question and even claim to know each other's inner motives and feelings. This is not productive ground for reconciliation.
On the one side we have Inuit whose childhoods were entirely shaped and, in some cases, misshaped by the experience of the relocation and its consequences for their families and themselves. Early experiences are, as someone has recently said, the most original things about any of us: before we learn to condition our feelings or impose external perspectives on life, we experience what happens to us and what we see around us more directly. Hence the continuing popularity and freshness of the bildungsroman, whether in its elegant and ambitious form like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or tell-all tales about one's abusive movie-star mom. All human beings have such novels inside them. As we also know, siblings in the same family may even have quite different experiences and perceptions of what goes on in the family home, yet those varying perceptions are all valid. There is no one truth, nor objective measure, while many factors and forces envelop us as individuals. Therefore, when we hear a social scientist today claiming to know what people were thinking and feeling—and one or two such individuals have stepped forward in the debate over Resolute and Grise Fjord—we can only be grateful that the “science” is no longer quite so imperial or imperious.
On the other side we have various public servants who are dismayed at being branded cynical manipulators and risk-takers with human lives. These men, seeing the hardships yearly faced by the Inuit of the Inukjuak region (hardships that are statistically tabled by Tester and Kulchyski in Tammarniit), had the ingenious idea of moving people to pristine lands then un-hunted, un-fished, and un-trapped. It was breathtakingly, radically, simple. They felt themselves to be creative rescuers. Some would rally other arguments to the support of this proposal, and others down the line charged with implementation would speculate or assume additional or alternative motives, or impose their own motives,1 but what did such details matter when hungry Eskimos were at stake? These men were proud of their stature and their ability to make wise decisions for the great empty North. Having experienced the Depression in its fullness, they were proud that, in the brave new post-war world, the state could act decisively to alleviate suffering. Trust, pride, honesty, keeping one's word—these were the sorts of values most dear to them. To be attacked suddenly now in retirement after long years of difficult and honourable service, attacked by the then-infant children of the 1950s relocation for having acted in those children's best interests, perhaps even for their very survival, seems a terrible nightmare, a dreadful mistake from which they may hope to awake.
In other words, it is unlikely that either side will withdraw from their basic positions in which they have, quite rightly, a great deal of their most profound personal identity at stake.
* *
Several studies have now been carried out on the relocation to Resolute and Grise Fjord but each one has been supposedly flawed. In one it may be methodology, in another, comprehensiveness, or the apparent or suspected desire of authors to demonstrate one or other viewpoint. A stand-off has resulted and all have become angrier with each new revelation or pseudo-revelation. The depth of the work by Tester and Kulchyski in Tammarniit shows up the failures of some of the other works explicitly or implicitly. It should succeed in achieving two things: validating the importance of famine as a governmental motive in the case of Resolute and Grise Fjord, and providing material for deeper thinking about northern and indigenous policy.
In my own work and writing I have avoided the issue of the relocations to Grise Fjordand Resolute for some very personal reasons. Having worked long and closely with some of the officials named in the book (which begins with Resolute and Grise Fjord and moves on to other projects), I know—and knew long before public controversy had erupted—that they regarded the project as an astute and successful ploy to alleviate the threat of famine. Having worked for long with some of the adult Inuit who were moved as children and who have experienced personal distress as a result of the relocation, I know that their feelings and accounts of family distress are genuine. I have visited and participated in lengthy public meetings in both communities. Grise Fjord I only visited once for a couple of days in 1968; Resolute I visited repeatedly over 20 years for periods of days or weeks (and will visit again, no doubt, when travelling to Nunavut), normally lodged at the multi-purpose base and travelling to the Inuit village for meetings, social events, or various urgent purposes.
In June 1993, returning with my wife to Canada for a working visit, I was startled on opening The Globe and Mail, handed to me by the Canadian Airlines staff as we taxied for take-off in the middle of the night in Honolulu bound for Vancouver. A hearing of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples into the relocation was then in progress. For me, the whole debate has had an unreal quality. I believe that the basic reason for its persistence and widespread resonance with Inuit and with others not directly affected is the evident lack of control Inuit had over their own lives in the early post-war period. Rightly or wrongly, I have viewed the issue as political. Inuit powerlessness was the case and was the norm in those times: that much is incontestable. It was not simply a case of some people in government being insensitive. The mutual relations of equality, awareness of the nature of the deep cross-cultural differences, and process for real dialogue across cultural barriers did not exist at the time. That era's Inuit powerlessness and some of the policies of the White Man2 led directly to a political counter-movement of Inuit land/sea claims and demands for self-government, e.g., Nunavut. The situation has now been transformed by some of the very Inuit who were relocated, e.g., John Amagoalik and Martha Flaherty. Resolution at Resolute and Grise Fjord has been achieved—at least on the political level. The Nunavut Act and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act, both negotiated by Inuit with the federal government and both passed into law in 1993, and the various federal and provincial laws in Quebec implementing the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975, also negotiated by the Inuit, now provide that Inuit can and will determine most important aspects of their social and regional future. In capital cities and policy bureaux, the outlooks and northern policies of the 1950s now seem very remote. However, some of us have been wrong to underestimate the depth of personal feelings, as opposed to the political issues, on both sides.
It is worth noting that such political sensitivities are not limited to Inuit. The one strong editorial backlash in Canada's national media against the proposals for governance contained in Building Nunavut, 1983, the region including Resolute and Grise Fjord, was a section of demographic policy (which I, myself, had drafted). In it the Nunavut Constitutional Forum noted the need for some control over the location of and effects of groups of transient outsiders, notably resource industry or other temporary workforces who cause great dislocations in small societies. This is a problem experienced (and strongly regulated) by populations in comparable small jurisdictions such as Greenland, Alaska's North Slope, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Shetland, and Norway's North Sea oil coast. The Globe and Mail, in particular, was outraged by this proposal for Nunavut. Of course, there are many ways to make effective demographic policy without “frightening the horses,” as the Australians say.
Nevertheless, the persistence of Inuit anger over the Resolute and Grise Fjord relocations has surprised some non-Inuit Canadians and worried others. Is this the beginning of a new style of Inuit politics? Have the Inuit, who usually avoided the politics of historical grievance in thepast, decided to be more confrontational? I think it is easy to overstate what has happened. For one thing, Inuit have long had grievances but they have usually been able to negotiate outcomes or establish some process for doing so. In this matter they have not had such possibilities. Further, all Inuit today have bitter recollections of themselves or close family members moved around by school and medical authorities in the past, causing attenuation or loss of previously close-knit relationships and tremendous psychological hardships for those moved. Discussion with any adult Inuk quickly reveals the raw wounds that these events have left. Relocation is not an anomaly for Inuit, but has been their post-war way of life. No doubt the reason why Tester and Kulchyski have centred their work on it is precisely that is had been the major element of Canadian Inuit policy. Individuals were moved for reasons and with consequences rarely anticipated by those involved; whole communities were moved; people in scattered camps were moved into central locations, i.e., new settlements, often chosen not for their suitability to Inuit but for their convenience for white administration and resupply. Nobody was unaffected. Famine and fear of famine made government over-protective, and this book highlights that paradox underlying later Inuit policy: government wanted Inuit to exercise autonomy, but with a White ready-to-hand to help each Inuk do it! (A similar contradiction runs all through recent Australian policy for “self determination,” which is effectively run by the state for Aborigines and Islanders to prevent any slips 'twixt cup and lip.) It may, therefore, be most useful to view Inuit political reaction to relocation as an overdue and natural reaction to a paternalistic past as they take the reins themselves today.
Tester and Kulchyski devote less than half their book, i.e., Chapters 2-4 (pp 43-204), to the relocation to Resolute and Grise Fjord. They use relocation issues, which were the major ones at the time, to explore domestic northern policy as a whole for this period. Their introduction (pp 3-12) mentions their background assumptions and interests. Chapter 1 (pp 13-42) discusses Canadian jurisdiction vis-à-vis Inuit and the way in which famine and relief supplies focussed national policy and resulted in the 1939 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, Re Eskimos. Chapter 5 documents the relocation and 1957-58 starvation of the Ennadai Lake people, and Chapter 6 is “The Garry Lake Famine” in the same season. Chapter 7 describes the initially failed attempt to relocate victims of the Ennadai and Garry Lakes famines to the seacoast of Hudson Bay at Whale Cove. Chapter 8 continues the several strands of the book and discusses the Inuit policy story to the early 1960s.
This book is the most profound study of the first 20 years in Inuit and northern policy, i.e., the beginning of the period of total transformation of Inuit society. (The book deals with the era that immediately precedes the Arctic of villages and settlements described in Hugh Brody's The People's Land.) It is extremely important for many reasons, not all of which the authors may have cared about or intended. One hopes it will stimulate much more description, analysis, and discussion of northern social, administrative, and political history. It is a matter of concern that while there has been funding and activity in relation to the collection by Inuit of their legends and tales of the old life, the critical modern social history of their people may have been relatively neglected. Inuit will need that to ensure that the history of their region and their people is more than a litany of government good intentions or academic wails about White con struction of northern reality.
The book is strongest when it is documenting and narrating. Most of it is devoid of nit-picking and pedantry. The authors have some relevant experience and show more intelligence and subtlety in handling and interpreting documents than many others in this field.3 There are copious notes. The book is unquestionably a landmark and it is only unfortunate that most Canadians will view it—in the present, at least—merely as part of the debate over the Resoluteand Grise Fjord relocations.
Intelligence, knowledge, research, and policy debate have much to offer the North. Nothing can be taken for granted, however. Academics late on the scene may wish to render the Canadian Arctic a terra nullius awaiting their discovery and transformation, not unlike the settlers/invaders they affect to despise. The ethnocentricity of many scholars has severely hampered northern scholarship. Tester and Kulchyski do not suffer from that. However, one may ask why they lapse into gloating over the vivid phrase of an official on an Arctic beach about the “petticoat”–like wake of a ship turning away, leaving him stranded, as a symptom of his bad (i.e., now unfashionable) attitude. In a book about starvation one might expect such one-upmanship to be unnecessary, but then, self-righteousness in pouncing on the trivial while incapacitated in the face of the important is the Canadian disease. If academics are to contribute to northern society they may do so more usefully than by precious postmodern picking over of throwaway phrases on a blasted heath. Just as the Hudson's Bay Company used to bring to its northern posts the cheap toys it had failed to sell down South, academics building the new society of the North would do better to leave their junk behind.
Inuit claims and protests of recent times have had a stimulating effect on northern science. Governments had previously insisted that they control the North as territory, but they did not know how it worked as a living and changing environment. They could not and often would not communicate with the people who did know, the Inuit. In recent years Inuit have combined with researchers and writers to transform Canada's “vast” “empty” “frozen wastes” into a patchwork of rich ecoregions and human cultural adaptations. Traditional ecological knowledge has also begun to challenge the Western scientific approach in public policy.4
The relocations to Resolute and Grise Fjord, and the peoples of Ennadai and Garry Lakes, ran into trouble because governmental understanding was limited. I have seen no evidence that Canadians have learned much about the human relations content of the Tammarniit or Mistakes of the title;5 however, they have evened up the odds between Inuit and other Canadians through political reform.
* *
There is a heart of darkness in this book—the central chapter on the Ennadai Lake people. Ennadai is a large lake on the Kazan River some 200 miles west of Hudson Bay in the south-west of the Keewatin district. Here the moralistic viewpoints of various officials, the lack of white comprehension of Inuit culture and of local eco-systems, the frustration and confusion of the Inuit being moved around at the unwhimsical whim of White officialdom, the vagaries of the great caribou herds and the unknown effects on them of cumulative impacts induced directly or indirectly by White activity in the North led, perhaps inevitably, to disaster.
The authors are uneasy with the “facts” about the Ennadai starvation, recounting many of them warily, uncertain as to their real import. Of course, there is the general context of near-total incomprehension between European and indigenous peoples, as in all Inuit and other indigenous policies in all “first world” countries. This is much more obvious to us today than it was in 1957. Also there is the isolation factor that we may forget today. The Barren Lands of the Keewatin in winter are one of the most daunting environments on earth. Furthermore, and this is a problem for all northern history, men who could make judgements while operating alone on the edge of the world in a crisis, or who would wish to be there in the first place, are not necessarily reflective or gifted writers. (The complaint in later years would be that the North had too many timid officials who could not or would not make decisions.) However, it is possible to reconstruct what the Whites did, and why, even if some of their assumptions may seem to us asremote today as our barbarian ancestors invading the Roman Empire. More complex is how the Inuit were responding to the Whites, and why.
The story is of the collapse of an independent and self-sufficient hunting group. One senses that if more could be made of this case, it would be worthwhile. If anthropological specialists on the Keewatin, like Eugene Arima, and ethnic relations specialists, like Terje Bratenberg, could be brought together in a study seminar, with the proceedings produced, it might be useful. Whatever happened to the Ennadai people was critically important, but what was it? If we understood the various factors better, it could be a major advance for knowledge and policy.
Nearly forty years after Ennadai we know almost nothing about cross-cultural relations, and only something about ecosystem management. True, there are mechanisms today that ensure consultation, and there is a multi-partite Inuit-Dene-governmental caribou management administration that takes in the Ennadai and Garry Lakes regions and the herds that pass through them. That is progress sufficient for political purposes. But in terms of knowledge, are we any better placed than before? For ecosystem knowledge and management, the answer is unquestionably Yes. For cross-cultural relations we are more tolerant and less consciously ethnocentric but one would not wish to bet the lives of any hunter-gatherer people whose language we don't speak that we would deal with them much better today.
However, it is precisely the least known groups—those who seem most remote from our “mainstream” ways—for whom we are most likely to make decisions on the basis of advice from “experts” within our own cultures, whether in dealing with foreign aid to Africa or “the remote Aborigines” in Australia. The indigenous policy offices of hinterland governments in Australia today may be decorated by young university graduates who are progressive but the people who make decisions may be no more enlightened and, if anything, less aware and respectful of cultural factors, than the northern policy-makers, program managers, and field staff of the 1950s during whose term of office some twenty-five people died in the regions of Ennadai and Garry Lakes.
Endnotes