Inuit historian helped find lost Franklin ships
Erebus, Terror found through his work, stories
Louie Kamookak spent his childhood summers living in a hunting camp with his great- grandparents near his home of Gjoa Haven, a remote Inuit community on King William Island, Nunavut. At night, as the family sat by the fire, his greatgrandmother would tell him stories of their ancestors — and of a past that was already well on its way to disappearing by the time Louie was born in 1960.
One story, among the rest, would stick with the boy, as he grew older. His greatgrandmother spoke of riding on her father’s shoulders as a child, and coming upon a ridge and finding a scattering of strange artifacts.
“They were finding stuff that she later realized were muskets, or a rifle; spoons and forks, ropes and chains,” Kamookak recounted in an interview with the National Post in January 2015. “Then they noticed there was a mound the length of a human being, and there stood a stone with strange markings on it.
“She realized that was a grave. Going back to her time, the Inuit had never buried their dead under the ground — they just wrapped them in skins, and the animals would come and take the bodies away.
“That was the belief, that you died, and you go back into the world.”
Kamookak became an amateur historian, a teacher, a relentless collector of Inuit stories and a champion of a long overlooked Inuit oral tradition that, in time, became a key component in the most significant archeological find in contemporary Canadian history: the discovery of the Terror and Erebus — the lost ships of Captain Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic.
“Louie played a critical role in the successes we have seen in the last five years with the discovery of both of Franklin’s lost vessels,” says John Geiger, a friend of Kamookak’s, and chief executive officer of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
“I refer to Louie as the last great Franklin searcher — he was devoted to this search for decades.”
Kamookak was diagnosed with cancer in January, and passed away in hospital in Yellowknife on March 22, with Josephine, his wife of 33 years, by his side. He was 58 years old. The couple had two daughters and three sons. Sheila, Kamookak’s second- oldest, remembers her father as a caring, funny, soft-spoken man with a huge capacity for learning — and for listening to the stories the elders would tell — and then telling and retelling those stories to Inuit youth.
“He was hugely important to our northern community,” she says. “My father got youth interested in our history.”
After Franklin was lost, the Europeans came looking, launching dozens of expeditions to find the captain and his crew: search parties that, in the early years, would i nterview the Inuit they came upon.
For whatever reason — cultural chauvinism, prejudice, ignorance — the Inuit oral histories drifted out of favour or were overlooked entirely by Franklin searchers for much of the 20th century. The prevailing (white) attitude was: the searchers, not the Arctic residents, knew best. And so they stopped asking questions, and listening, which was one thing Louie Kamookak never did.
For three decades, he worked tirelessly, recording the stories of elders, and then cross-referencing them with accounts from the early expeditions that had come in search of Franklin. In doing so, Kamookak developed a mental map — a best, most educated- guess, of where Franklin’s lost ships might be in the waters off King William Island (or Qikiqtaq).
“There was a very long period where the Inuit accounts related to the expedition were ignored entirely,” Geiger says. “Louie was working methodically, and very much alone, for 30 years — trying to compare the historical search accounts with contemporary stories from elders, to create a picture of what really happened.
“But it wasn’t until the latter part of his life that the Inuit tradition had begun to be taken as seriously as it always should have been.”
Kamookak was vindicated — although he would never be one to use those words — when, with his help, Parks Canada found the wreck of the Erebus in 2014. Two years later, the Terror was found.
Kamookak, in recent years, was the go- to historian for any serious writer, or anyone, really, smitten by the story of what had become of the English captain and his men. He spoke to academics. He spoke to school groups. He spoke to journalists and bureaucrats, bridging the great divide between north and south, and bringing a 170- year old mystery into focus, through the stories his ancestors would tell.
“I find it unbelievable that Louie is gone,” Geiger says. “I saw him in January, when he was diagnosed, and Louie — he was very optimistic — and that was his outlook. And even when he got the diagnosis, he still had great plans, and as recently as last Nov- ember he was planning to go back into the field and pursue some leads in the search for Franklin’s remains.
“He never lost his interest. He never lost his great love — as a teacher — and as someone who had all the attributes of an elder.”