Montreal Gazette

Inuit feel at home in Dorval

Co-operation has been a game changer, police say of Ullivik and its director

- CHRISTOPHE­R CURTIS ccurtis@postmedia.com twitter.com/titocurtis

Every day after breakfast, Maggie Putulik and her Aunt Lolly would walk to the telephone operating station across town.

Putulik was three. Lolly was blind.

In the Arctic village of Kangirsuk, guiding Lolly to work meant keeping her safe from passing trucks and stray dogs. Sometimes, Putulik would pull Lolly through the snow squalls that came howling off Ungava Bay.

“I was her eyes, I was her lookout,” Putulik says. “But she was such an incredible woman to be around and to learn from.”

There was never any doubt in Putulik’s mind: she was born to lead.

These days, Putulik is the director of Ullivik — an Inuit health centre with 91 rooms and 143 beds. Patients fly in from Quebec’s 14 remote Inuit communitie­s for everything from life-threatenin­g emergencie­s to routine surgery. The $15-million centre opened in Dorval last year and, thanks largely to Putulik’s leadership, has been a success story for both the city and Inuit.

Despite a history of resilience in one of the world’s harshest environmen­ts, Inuit in Quebec are in the midst of a public health crisis.

Underfunde­d housing and health services in the North means rates of tuberculos­is are more than 250 times the national average. Infant mortality rates, meanwhile, are at least double what they are in the south. Life expectancy is about 15 years below the Canadian average.

Putulik is on the front lines of a fight to deliver more effective, humane health care. Simply getting a centre devoted to Inuit has been its own long, painful struggle.

When the Nunavik Regional Health Board announced plans to renovate a hospital in Villeray eight years ago, a small but militant group of residents in the borough fought the plan.

Calling the prospect of an Inuit centre an imminent danger, they passed around petitions and created a panic about how an influx of Inuit in the area would increase crime.

“It was so nasty,” Putulik said. “There was a sense of feeling unwelcome as a people, of being segregated from the rest of the city. The discrimina­tion was real and raw.”

When they settled on a new potential location, in Dorval, what they found was a city willing to work with, rather than against, them.

“It was night and day,” said Putulik. “We came away with a real sense of being heard. We were humbled, we were touched by their openness.”

Dorval police commander MarcAndré Dorion says Putulik might be selling herself short.

“From the outset, we were impressed with how willing Maggie (Putulik) was to sit down with us and educate us,” Dorion said. “Right away, we had a working relationsh­ip. We were immediatel­y focused on making the project work in this community.”

The perception that Inuit are inherently prone to acts of criminalit­y is a harmful and ignorant, Dorion said.

Many of the people who come south for health care are survivors of abuse in Canada’s Residentia­l School system. Some remember the dog slaughters of the 1950s, when government officials killed hundreds of sled dogs to force Inuit into a sedentary lifestyle.

Putulik says the drastic changes forced upon Inuit has been devastatin­g.

“A lot of that colonial violence was turned inward,” she said. “It has led the social fabric in the North to weaken. Substance abuse, sexual abuse, conjugal violence: these are symptoms of that pain.”

During a series of meetings with the officers at Station 5, Putulik walked them through the historical baggage many Inuit carry. But she also took the time to highlight her people’s strength.

“About 90 per cent of our youth speak three languages: English, French and Inuktitut,” said Putulik. “More and more of them are coming south for university and college. And they’re succeeding.”

Some of the Inuit who come south struggle with addiction and some are at risk of harming themselves. But instead of targeting these people with arrest or tickets, officers in the area work with Ullivik.

“We ask our officers to think about that historical baggage,” said Dorion. “So if they see someone in a bad way or they see a young woman who looks lost, they ’ll give them a ride back to Ullivik and make sure they’re safe.”

Officers at Station 5 are also encouraged to do monthly activities at the health centre. Sometimes that means stopping by for a chat or to try Inuit food like goose, seal meat or Arctic char.

“There’s a historic mistrust of the police and we understand that,” Dorion said. “It’s my job and the job of our officers to build trust and to work toward a new partnershi­p.”

On a Tuesday in July, the centre was buzzing — families signed up for a day trip to the Kahnawake Pow Wow and children chased each other through a playground out front.

In the kitchen, a freezer had just been stocked with caribou meat, goose and other delicacies flown in from Nunavik.

“This is a home away from home,” said Putulik.

With the Ullivik project a resounding success, Putulik thinks back to her aunt. Being Lolly’s guide also taught Putulik something about the Inuit.

“I learned what it means to persevere.

“You know, she went on to earn a college degree and become a social worker. She’s an amazing woman, and to me, she is an example of the Inuit spirit of resilience.”

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 ?? PETER McCABE ?? “We came away with a real sense of being heard,” Ullivik director Maggie Putulik says of the Dorval community’s response to the Inuit health centre. “We were humbled, we were touched by their openness.”
PETER McCABE “We came away with a real sense of being heard,” Ullivik director Maggie Putulik says of the Dorval community’s response to the Inuit health centre. “We were humbled, we were touched by their openness.”
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