LOUIE KAMOOKAK
1959-2018 | Gjoa Haven, Nunavut
WHEN LOUIE KAMOOKAK was about seven, his father took him to see his first human skeleton, half-hidden in a makeshift coffin set on the wild mosses of King William Island, Nunavut, near the edge of the Northwest Passage. It was the remains of one of the early fur traders, a fellow known as Russian Mike.
The story was that Mike had made a lot of moonshine, done a lot of fighting, fallen into terrible trouble and finally shot his dogs and himself.
But the seven-year-old, though terrified, took a good look at the bullet’s entry wound in the bleached skull and concluded that it had gone in from the top, not the bottom. So this was more likely a murder than a suicide.
It was the start of a five-decade career in self-taught forensic archeology — although, Kamookak once told me, most Inuit dislike being around dead bodies. At the time, he was showing me and a group of teens what was left of Russian Mike, whose bones had been scattered by the foxes.
Kamookak, one of Canada’s finest Inuit oral historians, lived in the right place for someone who loved solving forensic mysteries. King William Island was where the lost sailors of Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition, having abandoned HMS Erebus and Terror, walked to their deaths, ill, starving and eventually cannibalistic.
For decades, Kamookak scoured his home island and the surrounding areas, carefully tracking evidence about where the Franklin sailors had been. He catalogued the placement of artifacts such as china and spoons, then graves and even skeletons. I always thought he coaxed Franklin’s secrets out of the barrens themselves.
He coaxed them out of his relatives, too. Patiently, year after year, he would listen to the oral history the Elders told of the Franklin horrors, passed down over the generations.
Kamookak was convinced that these stories needed to be taken into account if Franklin’s ships were ever to be found, if the record were ever to be put to rights. He painstakingly matched the ancient Inuit geographical names of his region with the ones the non-inuit had replaced them with, the better to figure out what the old stories said. He helped Parks Canada decide where to search for Franklin’s ships in 2014, and his advice proved instrumental in finding Erebus that year.
I remember walking with him across the southern edge of his island during that multi-day expedition with the Inuit teens, following, as he said, in the footsteps of Franklin’s men. It was as if he could still feel their spirits, restless on the land and maybe malevolent.
He was fiercely, shyly proud of the fact that the students wanted to spend time with him on the land. He would recount the tales in a nearly incantatory tone, word for word, the same every time, offering up his wisdom as a gift to the next generation, but never forcing it on people. A born teacher.
Reprinted from the May/june 2018 issue, written after Kamookak’s death in March.