Inuit wounds run deeper than many realized

I watched the prime minister apologize to Inuit last week in Iqaluit for the Government of Canada’s conduct across the Arctic during the TB crisis from the 1940s to the 1960s and considered myself fortunate that I could recognize many of the faces in the hall and just as fortunate to remember two remarkable old friends who lived that experience.

One thankfully survived long enough to savour the moments. The other, the late Jonah Kelly, was an exceptional Inuk journalist and we became friends almost the moment I stepped off the plane in 1967 as very young CBC broadcaster from the South.

Observing Jonah’s broadcasts were my early lessons on how deeply Inuit were impacted by the horrible illness itself and more ravaged by the unbearable, loneliness and isolation so many endured.

Consider, across the vast arctic, most communities, except for large centres like Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit, only received mail a few times a year and there was no phone service at all.

And so it fell on Jonah, barely 20 years old, to be the lifeline for thousands of people suffering in institutions across southern Canada, separated from fami- lies thousands of miles away.

With his weekly program on the always static and cracking shortwave radio, Tittiqaat Innunuut or letters from the people, Jonah linked the sick and suffering in the South with their heartsick families at home thousands of miles away.

I remember we got mail in Frobisher Bay three times a week at that time. After every plane arrived, Jonah opened a handful of letters from the southern sanitariums. Often he would also get letters hand carried from the villages and outposts delivered by good-hearted transients passing through the settlements.

All were hand printed, usually on scribbler paper and written in Inuktutit, either in syllabics or the roman alphabet. Every so often, a small home-produced tape recording also arrived.

He treated every letter or Tittiqaat and every tape with reverence.

Many times I sat on the opposite side of studio glass watching and tending the recording levels on the tape that would be shipped to Montreal for broadcast on CBC shortwave. To be honest, I didn’t understand the words but the power of that emotion gave me my first understanding of that terrible injustice.

Fifty-two years later watching so many tears pouring from aging eyes, I knew the long reconciliation journey had moved forward. So many had waited so long for a prime minister to simply state; “I am here to say sorry”

I soon found the one face I was looking for, and one familiar to nearly all Inuit as simply John A. — the father of Nunavut. John Amagoalik personifies the two terrible injustices today’s prime minister condemned — the isolation in hospitals so far from home, and the forced relocations by Canada in the 1950s to assert Arctic Sovereignty. John’s family and a half dozen others were transplanted from their home in Inukjauk in Northern Quebec to Resolute Bay High in the high Arctic. A stroke has robbed him of his mobility, but I watched him with Evie his lifelong partner sitting in the seat of his walker, listening — acknowledging this long overdue justice finally unfolding.

Over the years, John generously shared with me how that double trauma shaped him. The terrible living conditions soon caused tuberculous among many of those relocated and so at 13 John Amagoalik was a patient in Edmonton’s Charles Camsell TB sanitarium.

He seized the sanitarium’s education opportunities and learned English. I remember him saying, “I don’t think it was the government’s intention to create a radical who would change Canada.”

But that’s the reality. John A. made up his mind early on that never again would Inuit be subjected to such injustices. He spent his life fighting for “an Inuit Homeland in Canada.” Almost 20 years ago to the day his dream was realized. Its called Nunavut.

Yes, there were a lot of tears in that room washing away decades of pain, but there was also resilience — so much resilience that will remain.

Whit Fraser wrote True North Rising, a memoir that chronicles many of the remarkable people and events that changed the Canada’s Arctic and the country.