National Post (National Edition)
Inuit to get $5M for relocations
Ahiarmiut had no access to tools, shelter
EDMONTON• In 1950, the Canadian government airlifted a small group of Inuit known as the Ahiarmiut from Ennadai Lake in what’s now called Nunavut and dropped them on an island 100 kilometres away.
The Ahiarmiut — fewer than 50 of them — had no food. Some didn’t have mittens. There were only trees for shelter.
“We had nothing, not even a cup or a knife, nothing. No axe, nothing at all,” elder Job Muqyunnik told researchers in 2003. “We spent eight months walking around that island. Then we went back to Ennadai Lake on foot.”
Today, the government, too, is walking back on a policy that saw the Ahiarmiut relocated five times.
It has reached a $5-million settlement with an organization representing survivors and descendants who filed a lawsuit in 2008. While the final details will be sorted out, the money will be distributed to survivors, their descendants and go toward commemorative projects.
They’re also hoping for an apology from the government.
“It’s a good feeling, although many times I felt very, very alone,” said David Serkoak, who founded the Ahiarmiut Relocation Society (initially the Ennadai Lake Society) which represented the Ahiarmiut in court.
He lived through some of the relocations as a child and began gathering the case for compensation in 1998.
Steven Cooper, the Ahiarmiut’s Edmonton-area lawyer, argued that the Ahiarmiut were manipulated, by the governments of the time, for commercial reasons — moved to work at a commercial fishery, for example — and political reasons — placed in locations the government felt were important for Canadian sovereignty.
“We have serious moral flaws, the nature of which have come out in our history,” Cooper told the Post. “This is a good example of that.”
It’s an episode in Canadian history that has been chronicled by Farley Mowat in two accounts of the Ahiarmiut, People of the Deer and The Desperate People. “That may be the very first time that Canada realized there was a group of Inuit, or (a) small band of Eskimos, living in Ennadai Lake,” Serkoak said.
It’s a story that elder Muqyunnik described as “the saddest time of my life.”
As trading posts began to close in the region, through the 1930s and ’40s, the government assumed that there wouldn’t be enough economic activity to support the Ahiarmiut. In 1949, the federal government built a radio tower at Ennadai Lake, and the Ahiarmiut traded with station employees. It was, according to oral testimony given to researchers, a profitable time for the Ahiarmiut. “According to our elders, that is also the beginning of changes in the hands of foreigners, in this case, by white people,” said Serkoak.
The federal government worried trade between employees and the Ahiarmiut was leading to dependence and that the Ahiarmiut would lose the ability to live as they had traditionally.
And so, once the bulldozers took down their tents, the plane flew them away to the island on Nueltin Lake, somewhere, in theory, they could live and hunt. But it wasn’t so simple, surviving on unfamiliar territory, absent equipment and possessions.
Within months, the survivors had straggled back to their home at Ennadai Lake, walking across the ice once it froze. Yet, by the mid-1950s, the government was discussing moving them again, with Frank Cunningham, then-director of Northern Affairs and National Resources, musing they were “beginning to rely more and more on outside assistance.”
“We intend, therefore to investigate this situation more fully later in the year, with a view to deciding whether it is worthwhile to continue to maintain this small community at Ennadai Lake or whether we should not make an attempt to have these people moved to an area where they could be more closely supervised and where they would be nearer to a trading post,” wrote Cunningham in a memo.
In May 1957, the Ahiarmiut were flown to Henik Lake.
Henik Lake was as inhospitable as the island in Nueltin Lake. They began starving and by February 1958, they’d been moved again, to Arviat. By now the government had become convinced the project had failed.
But the Ahiarmiut weren’t to stay in Arviat. They were relocated, first to Whale Cove and then Rankin Inlet. Today, most have returned to Arviat, that’s where, last Monday, the community discussed the settlement.