The Long Exile: A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. Melanie McGrath
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look after’ and all Josephie knew was that he wanted to care for Rynee, that he wanted to look after each delicate little part of her. Where had they met? All these years later Rynee finds it difficult to remember the exact moment, the one precise and telling detail. Perhaps it was at a drum dance, or on a camp visit or at the trading post in Inukjuak, their mutual attraction revealed in stolen glances and open, toothy smiles. Perhaps there was some slow simmer, a layering of casual meetings over days or weeks or months, culminating in an accretion of feeling, a bubble suddenly bursting at the surface. However it came about, this miniature woman was everything Josephie wanted in a wife, beautiful and healthy, with seaweedy hair and berry lips that spoke to Josephie of quick and happy Arctic summers. It was easy to imagine her frying him bannock bread and sewing him a pair of kamiks, the bread soft and as fat as summer bees, the kamiks tough and more waterproof than ducks' wings. Before long, family alliances were hinted at, gifts promised. Until they married, the couple would live apart, and see each other when Josephie sledged past Rynee's camp or, in the summer, when he borrowed his stepfather's kayak and paddled up the coast.
Out on the sea ice, one spring day, Josephie Flaherty and Paddy Aqiatusuk found themselves beside the Belchers, those islands whose bleeding cliffs Robert Flaherty had once explored and the largest of which now bears his name on maps, though the Inuit have long had their own name for the place. The hunters had been sledging out for the bearded seal which sometimes basked on the shore-fast ice and, finding none, decided to make for their usual landfall. Though there were fishing nets still littering the beach and other evidence of recent occupation the island seemed on this occasion emptied out, as though a great gust of wind had come down and swept away its heart. Usually someone would come down to greet them, but today no one appeared. The reason emerged later. A man called Charlie Oujerack, had been given a Bible in Inuktitut and taught how to read it by the mission at Inukjuak. After shutting himself away to study the book further he had formulated the view that he was Jesus Christ come to save the world, and that he would start with the Belchers. His first apostle was his sister, Minnie, who succeeded in making a few other converts among the tiny population and in silencing everyone else. The fantasy was harmless enough until Charlie Oujerack landed on the idea that true believers must prove their faith by walking out across the sea ice naked, as a result of which the lives of three adults and six children were lost and the remaining islanders plunged into despair.
Among the Inuit, the event was seen as the sign of a bad spirit abroad, some malcontented ancestor or river soul out to trip up the unwary. Christianity had never wholly won them over. To the missionary and the RCMP constable at Inukjuak, it was just one further piece of evidence that Inuit were best treated not as the adults they thought they were, but as the children that they had, by this small piece of lunacy and in a million other ways, proved themselves to be.
For a while, the incident became the chief topic of conversation enlivening the qalunaat 's otherwise humdrum weekly bridge and poker parties. In Robert Flaherty's time the sole white occupant of Inukjuak had been the Révillon Fréres trader but by the mid-1940s, and partly as a result of the war, more and more qalunaat had begun to arrive. In 1945, the qalunaat population consisted of the Hudson Bay post manager, a Mr Trafford and his wife, Trafford's rival at the Baffin Trading Company, James Cantley, his assistant, a Swede by the name of ‘Slim’ Carlson, the missionary, the Reverend Whitehead, and a Mr Doubleday who ran the radio station and his wife. They were joined in summer by the odd geologist, naturalist or geographer working for the Canadian Geodetic Service. Living on the opposite bank of the river were the detachment policemen, generally a corporal and a constable, and from 1943 onwards, the chief operator of the new Radiosonde station.
Before the war, most ordinary Canadians rarely thought about the great lands lying to the north. Robert Flaherty's film had left them with a strong sense of the dignity and courage of the Inuit way of life, but then it had allowed them as quickly to forget it. The Inuit were not much more than colourful characters in the press reports and in the movies, and, as Flaherty had said, ‘happy-go-lucky’. To all but a few, the 200,000 square miles of its northern territories were not in any real sense Canada.
The eastern Arctic archipelago and its inhabitants were particularly obscure. The islands had officially become part of Canada after they were transferred by Great Britain in 1870, but for the next 70 or 80 years the question remained as to whether or not Great Britain had the right to title in the first place. In 1904 the Canadian cabinet asked Dr William King, the Chief Astronomer of Canada, to report on Canada's Arctic possessions on the grounds that ‘Canada's title to some at least of the North Islands is imperfect’. On maps of the time, Ellesmere Island, the largest in the High Arctic Queen Elizabeth group, was represented as a US possession or as unclaimed. Three years later, on 20 February 1907, Canadian Senator Pascal Poirier tried to clarify the issue by presenting a motion to the Senate formally claiming all the territory between two lines drawn from the North Pole to Canada. The Russians refused to acknowledge this ‘sector principle’, as did the Americans. All through the twenties, as Josephie Flaherty was learning about ice, the Norwegians and the Danes were making tentative claims to those parts of the archipelago which had first been mapped by Norwegian and Danish explorers. These claims were gradually shrugged off and by the time Josephie reached eighteen and the Second World War began, Canada's legal right to the eastern Arctic archipelago was no longer hotly in dispute, though a question mark did still hang over whether the seas around the islands belonged to Canada or were international waters, an issue so complex that it remains a matter of contention today. The issue of sovereignty in the eastern Arctic archipelago did not entirely go away, though. The region was now shown as part of Canada on maps but as part of the war effort, the United States had constructed five airfields in Canada's Arctic zone and even though Canada officially bought these after the war for US$78.8m, they often remained staffed, at least in part, by American personnel and the American military and some of its various satellite departments often acted as though the territory was still open. In 1946 some US newspapers carried recruiting advertisements for young men to work at a series of new weather stations in the Canadian Arctic which Canada knew nothing about. After some frosty enquiries by the Canadian government, Senator Owen Brewster of Maine hastily introduced a bill into the US Senate to establish these proposed stations as joint US–Canadian operations. All through the forties the stations continued to be supplied and serviced by US planes and ships and it was only in 1954 that the Canadian Department of Transport was able to take over sea supply.
By then, the Arctic had been drawn into the Cold War, and the Americans were announcing plans to build airstrips capable of landing heavy jets and cargo planes at the remote northern Ellesmere Island weather stations of Alert and Eureka, points on the North American continent only 1,200 miles across the Arctic Ocean from the plains of Siberia. A Canadian Department of External Affairs memorandum of 1952 drew anxious attention to the US presence and predicted that the number of US citizens in the Arctic District of Franklin, encompassing the eastern Arctic islands, would soon outstrip the population of ‘white Canadians’ living there. In the same vein, a Privy Council memorandum predicted that the airstrips ‘would probably assume the character of small US bases and Canadian control might well be lost’. The memorandum continued, ‘Our experiences since 1943, have indicated the extreme care which we must exercise to preserve Canadian sovereignty where Canadians are outnumbered and outranked.’ In January 1953 Canadian Prime Minister Louis St Laurent went so far as to say that ‘US developments might be just about the only form of human activity in the vast wastelands of the Canadian Arctic’.
To counteract this new American occupation, and to provide more support for the Canadian Inuit, a string of Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachments was quickly opened across the Canadian Arctic. The joint US-Canadian Arctic weather stations were built and the Canadian government set up Radiosonde posts to collect meteorological data for the newly opened transpolar aviation route between North America and Europe. All of this, it was hoped, would provide jobs in Arctic settlements and put the Canadian Arctic once and for all in Canada's hands.
The RCMP arrived in Inukjuak in 1935, the Radiosonde post was built in 1943 and a joint US–Canadian weather station opened there in 1946. Qalunaat moved up to staff them.
One of the side effects of the war was that it gave thousands of American soldiers their first experience of Arctic conditions