Abstract
In his opening statement to the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs on March 19, 1990, John Amagoalik, then President of Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC) identified the High Arctic exiles in the language of redress: We note that the Japanese Canadians have been apologized to and they have been given $280 million in compensation. We note that the Chinese Canadians are about to be compensated, and there is now talk of Italians being compensated . . . we are not arguing against that. We agree that Canadians have suffered injustices and that these things need to be put right . . . but we also say we deserve that too, perhaps more so . . . I see no difference in our situation (Canada, 1990).
Two years prior in 1988, the federal government of Canada made a historic apology and financial settlement with Japanese Canadians who had been seeking redress for their Second World War dislocation, internment, and the liquidation of their private properties held in trust. Similar grievances from minority communities including Italian Canadians and Ukrainian Canadians who had also been interned during war time hysteria as well as Chinese Canadians who had paid an increasingly hefty head tax before a 24 year immigration ban were simultaneously seeking redress for past state-led injustices.
A lesser known grievance came from a small group of Inuit who had been relocated to the High Arctic from Northern Quebec in the 1950s. Amagoalik was less than eight years old when he and his extended family were relocated from Inukjuak (formerly known as Port Harrison) in Northern Quebec to Resolute Bay, a hamlet at the tip of Cornwallis Island with a Royal Canadian Mountain Police (RCMP) outpost and a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) base. Resolute Bay is some 2000 kilometers north-east of Inukjuak, which is approximately the same longitudinal distance from Ottawa, Ontario to Atlanta, Georgia. The harsh living conditions and subsequent suffering of approximately 92 Inuit relocated in the 1950s were largely denied by government officials until the 1990s. The reasoning for the relocation has also been disputed among researchers as whether the move was a coordinated assertion of state sovereignty using Inuit as “human flagpoles” (Tester and Kulchyski, 1994), but this study approaches the state’s justification for relocation, and its decades long refusal to recognize the relocatees’ grievances, as inextricable from colonial paternalism and socio-economic inequalities. Despite the belated apologies in 2010 by Minister of Indian Affairs, John Duncan, to the remaining survivors and their families in Inukjuak, Grise Fjord, and Resolute Bay that were meant to foreclose this chapter of Canadian history, this article traces the state’s circuitous processes and refusals to deny and subvert the High Arctic relocatees’ redress for recognition as ongoing colonization in determining whose memories, and therefore whose grievances, are legible to the settler state in meriting redress.
Legal scholar Roy L. Brooks has argued the majority of the United States’ response to Indigenous claims are “settlements rather than reparations, and rehabilitative rather than compensatory” (Brooks, 1999: 10). Since the late twentieth century, the Canadian government has taken a similarly aggressive tactic in pursuing legal settlements over atonement with Indigenous communities rather than negotiate in good faith with Indigenous grievances, specifically over the definition of Aboriginal rights. For example, under successive Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau then Brian Mulroney in the 1980s, the state failed to negotiate an amenable definition of Aboriginal rights through a series of disastrous First Minister meetings between the prime minister, provincial premiers, and Indigenous leaders (which excluded Indigenous women’s groups). 1 By 1990, the Oka crisis was perhaps the single most defining example of the state’s refusal to negotiate with Indigenous People on every political level, opting to deploy armed forces instead. As a direct result from the 78 day stand-off, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) was undertaken to investigate the failures of Canada’s policy direction toward Indigenous Peoples.
The decades-long redress campaign of the High Arctic relocatees seized the timing of RCAP by requesting their own separate investigation. The 1994 RCAP report would offer a breakthrough after years of state dismissal. While the High Arctic relocatees themselves drew comparisons between their campaigns for justice and Japanese Canadian redress, the federal government did not, refusing to even acknowledge any wrongs had been committed and any negative perceptions as skewered memories. I argue the state’s devaluation of relocatee memories are due to a number of intertwined factors that begin in colonialism’s overt dehumanization process, which then persist through ongoing socio-economic inequalities and a lack of political power. I trace the redress of the High Arctic relocation from the historical context of state-led efforts to “rehabiliate” Inuit off of welfare as the dominant narrative to the efforts by Inuit themselves and the validation of their communities’ memory-making.
Therefore, the scope of this research explores how official memories, including state apologies, are not delivered equitably, especially in the case of High Arctic relocatees who did not stop pursuing justice for relocatees after negotiated settlements. By centering the efforts of aggrieved communities, this research challenges the dominant narrative where gestures of material and symbolic benevolence by the liberal state often become the end of the story. In such instances, the root causes of systemic discrimination and colonial attitudes are transformed into ahistorical anomalies within a unified, inclusive narrative promoting the strengths of the nation. To challenge the moral benevolence of the apologetic state, this research aims to illuminate the sequence of historical events long before the deliverance of an official apology by valuing the role of aggrieved community memories and the process of making them legible within a settler colonial context.
Background of redress
John Amagoalik defined the injustice of his family’s relocation and the decades long separation of families in the language of redress in order to be officially recognized by the Canadian federal government. The relocatees understood themselves as Inuit and as Canadians, and making claims for redress was to affirm their rights with fellow aggrieved citizens. Following the precedent of Japanese Canadian redress that included the formal apology by Prime Minister Mulroney in the House of Commons alongside a compensation package worth $300 million divided into individual payments to survivors, a community fund, and matching funds for a race relations foundation, the relocatees’ call for redress was a timely argument. However, the federal government did not see it that way.
The Canadian state has historically treated racialized groups differently than Indigenous Peoples, where the former were excluded from civil society until a points-based immigration system and official multiculturalism advanced limited rights to certain communities through a rights recognition framework (Coulthard, 2014; Elrick, 2021). The Canadian government has also treated various Indigenous Peoples differently. Inuit and Metis were never included into The Indian Act (1876), a polemical piece of federal legislation that continues to recognize treaty rights while simultaneously bureaucratizing Indigeneity into status rights (i.e. First Nations) and non-status.
2
The struggle for rights for Indigenous Peoples accelerated after the Second World War, or what Dene scholar Glen Coulthard (2014: 2) described as the politics of recognition within an international framework where “the struggle for recognition” was a central catalyst for Indigenous rights alongside other marginalized minorities. Specifically, Coulthard defined the making of rights and recognition through official multiculturalism, which: Refer to the now expansive range of recognition-based models of liberal pluralism that seek to “reconcile” Indigenous assertions of nationhood with settler state sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity claims in some form of renewed legal and political relationship with the Canadian state. Although these models tend to vary in both theory and practice, most call for the delegation of land, capital, and political power from the state to Indigenous communities through a combination of land claim settlements, economic development initiatives, and self-government agreements (2014: 3).
Coulthard adapted Frantz Fanon’s critique of political recognition to re-assert Indigenous self-determination, and not liberal rights, as the goal of Indigenous groups seeking recognition between the 1960s and early 2010s (Coulthard, 2014; Fanon, 2008). While scholars of multiculturalism have argued that the end goals of recognition by minorities have bolstered notions of liberal nationalism, liberal rights are inherently antithetical to Indigenous rights when they do not “meaningfully address the colonial fiscal relationship” embedded within nationalism (Yellowhead Institute, 2021). While certain rights including education and healthcare were requested by the relocatees (and ignored) by the federal government, liberal rights based fundamentally on individualism have been argued as antithetical to Indigenous governance structures that emphasize interdependence including the recognition that individual and group rights are “mutually interactive rather than in competition” (Holder and Corntassel, 2002: 129). In the specific case of discerning liberal rights within settler-Indigenous relations, the latter exist simultaneously as legal wards of the settler state (most visibly in terms of the enduring colonialism of the Indian Act) and as sovereign nations attempting to assert their jurisdiction under settler occupation. However, as the majority of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit have been pushed into economically precarious circumstances worsened by national and international exploitation and other forms of structural violence, the goal of liberal rights and recognition are legible primarily as fiscal forms of colonial domination.
The decades long struggle for High Arctic redress became a debate of official history and the limits of colonial records versus colonized communities and their marginalized memories. In this article, memories from High Arctic relocatees are defined neither as homogeneous nor all encompassing, but rather as active participants involved in organizing toward a shared cause of justice. In focusing on communities in tandem with the state, this research offers an intimate study of holding both history and memory together, where archives of state records meet mercurial memories informed by time and trauma. I also follow the lead of historians from Michael Rothberg (2009) to Richard White (1998), specifically the latter who approached memory and history akin to enemies, where the two stalk each other across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain . . . but there are only regions of the past that only memory knows. If historians wish to go into this dense and tangled terrain, they must accept memory as a guide. (White, 1998, p. 4)
This article has followed this path, where neither memory nor history alone was sufficient to reconstruct the past into a united chronology.
State documents and written records stood as official histories that oral testimonies from relocatees contradicted. Canada’s self-boosterism as the “Great White North” and active appropriation of Inuit culture from the inukshuk to naming sovereignty exercises in the Arctic, “Operation Nanook,” after the fictional titular character from Robert Flaherty’s
By centering the efforts of aggrieved communities, this research challenges the dominant narrative where gestures of material and symbolic benevolence such as the delivery of apologies or negotiated compensation packages often become the end of the story. In such instances, the root causes of systemic discrimination and colonial attitudes are transformed into ahistorical anomalies within an inclusive narrative promoting the strengths of the nation. To challenge the moral benevolence of the settler state, this research aims to illuminate the sequence of events prior to political recognition by exploring the socio-historical context of the aggrieved events and how recognition for some grievances was withheld before it was given.
The legal status of Inuit and the colonial framework of recognition
Colonial attitudes of settler supremacy and the process of dehumanizing Inuit were already established by the early 20th century when relocations began in Dundas Harbor as early as 1934. Inuit economy had become absorbed into the precarious cycle of the Canadian fur trade, especially in Northern Quebec, and fallen reliant on the unpredictable commodity pricing of furs that favored traders over trappers. Systemic poverty among Inuit trappers in Northern Quebec were severe enough that in 1929, federal bureaucrats and the Quebec government agreed to an arrangement to provide initial relief for Inuit on the condition that Quebec repaid the federal government (Diubaldo, 1992: 37). After 3 years of this arrangement where Quebec reimbursed Ottawa $54, 660.16 or $9 per person per year, which was more than 12 times higher than the average 73 cents for destitute whites under the same relief program, Quebec’s Justice Minister wrote: Will you [Ottawa] please let us know on what the Federal Government bases its contention that the Province is responsible in the matter [of relief to destitute Eskimos]. Are not Eskimos included in “Indians” in number twenty-four of section ninety-one of the British North America Act? (Diubaldo, 1992: 114)
Ottawa initially responded that Inuit were not included under the BNA Act, but this squabble between Quebec and Ottawa would lead to a pertinent Supreme Court case and ruling that confirmed the legal status of Inuit were neither governed by the Indian Act nor “on equal footing” with the rest of Canadian society. This ruling affirmed for Quebec and Ottawa that Inuit “were Indians for purposes of the division of constitutional authority between the federal and provincial governments” and therefore fell under the federal government’s responsibility and subsequent paternalism (RCAP, 1994: 44). The burden of delivering high-cost relief to reach remote Northern regions under federal fiduciary responsibilities to Inuit would become the impetus for a series of “Eskimo Affairs Conferences” led by the Department of Resources and Development (DRD), Arctic Division that shaped the High Arctic relocations in the 1950s.
At the end of 1951, the deputy minister of the DRD, H.A. Young, organized a convening the following year to address the Inuit question, as “relief and family allowances . . . is tending to reduce the initiative of the Eskimo in obtaining a living for themselves” (RCAP, 1994: 42). The “Eskimo Affairs Conference” would lead directly to the establishment of an interdepartmental committee chaired by the Deputy Minister of Resources and Development (Arctic Division) and attended by federal representatives from the RCMP and the Northwest Territories Council, Department of National Health and Welfare, Department of Transport Department of Citizenship and Immigration, the Defense Research Board, the Department of National Defense, the Department of Fisheries, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Roman Catholic Mission, the Anglican Mission, the United States Embassy, and the National Film Board’s Doug Wilkinson (RCAP, 1994: 60). The theme of the conference was taken up as a series of twice a year committee meeting headed by Bent Gestur Sivertz, Head of the Arctic Division, who monitored the business of the relocation through its financial expenditures and returns from fur trapping. Reflecting their precarious legal status as neither wards nor equal to citizens, Inuit were seen, on one hand, as possessing ideal characteristics when leading a traditional life but, on the other hand, as needing to have objective decisions made for them without regard to their own desires because they lacked the ability to resist the ‘temptation’ of welfare. (RCAP, 1994: 54)
As a result of these conferences in Ottawa where no Inuit were invited, the RCMP in collaboration with the Arctic Division relocated nearly 17 Inuit families into the barren High Arctic as an experiment to encourage Inuit off state relief and back into a life of self-reliance (RCAP, 1994: 42).
According to historian Tina Loo (2019: 30–31) and Sarah Bonesteel (2006), a range of people had offered critiques of Inuit poverty and starvation throughout the 1940s and 1950s, ranging from American military personnel stationed in the North to public histories by author Farley Mowat’s (1952) “People of the Deer” and photographer Richard Harrington’s (1952) photobook,
The federal government approached Inuit relocation into permanent settlements as a welfare measure, where Inuit were displaced from their homelands to “areas where game was believed to be more plentiful and where they could not rely on morally corrupting ‘handouts’ from traders, missionaries, or military personnel” (Loo, 2019: 32–37). Exhausted by the high cost of relief to address Inuit welfare, state officials then turned to a mix of amateur and applied anthropological anecdotes of Inuit having settled in the High Arctic centuries prior. With no formal assessments or reports of wildlife populations, Sivertz relied only on the speculations of Arctic Division staff members James Cantley, Alex Stevenson, and Henry Larsen, to proceed on the plan of relocation with RCMP Commissioner Leonard Nicholson. It would become their records that shaped the official memories of the relocations as a success.
When questioned decades later by Commissioner Mary Sillet of the RCAP on how these specific Inuit from Inukjuak were chosen for relocation, Sivertz insisted that they chose themselves, but confirmed that “the demand for relief supplies [there] were larger than any other place in Canada” (Sivertz, 1993: 431). Commissioner Rene Dussault also asked Sivertz to confirm, though he never did, whether “the fact that demands for government relief were increasing and this was getting more costly to government were part of the picture” for their relocation, and that “the assessment of their [Inuit] situation was essentially made by people who were not Inuit, looking at the record of increased government relief and so on” (Dussault, 1993: 434–444). Sivertz, along with other retired bureaucrats testifying before the Commission, routinely denied any wrongdoing as their own records showed only positive feedback.
Sivertz (1993: 69) proudly testified to the success of the relocations as an “experiment” to allegedly encourage Inuit off state welfare while attempting to “Canadianize the North.” Sivertz repeatedly referred to the relocatees as a homogeneous group where if one Inuk was happy with these circumstances, then they were all happy. In his testimony in 1993, Sivertz would adamantly deny any hardships or risks of hardships were present. Despite many family members mourning the death of relocated family members, including children, Sivertz (1993: 445) testified that if the experiment had truly been a failure, it would have been evident “through the deaths of the people.”
While individual deaths did occur, perhaps Sivertz was referring to how no Inuit died through starvation because of the relocation. Food security was a major issue in the north and it peaked with the deaths of 33 Inuit who starved to death in Keewatin in the late 1950s. This tragedy led Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to proclaim that the mandate of Northern Affairs is to act so that “no more Canadians will starve!” (Loo, 2019: 33). In Canada, the federal government’s post-Second World War welfare programs and “aspirations to universality” were immediately challenged by the high rates of systemic poverty experienced by Inuit, which led to experimental relocations to curb the cost of relief payments (Loo, 2019: 32–37). Economic liberalization schemes were introduced in the post-Second World War recovery and the Cold War thaw, and as scholars have noted, neoliberal reforms tend to strengthen the power of well-positioned domestic and international economic elites while providing only tangential if any benefits to the poor. At the same time, these reforms tend to subject historically disadvantaged groups to even greater economic vulnerability. (Lind, 2008: 6)
The relocation was promoted as an alleged rehabilitation program to encourage Inuit to be more self-sufficient rather than relying on government support, but it also gave reason for the transference of sea supply away from American control to the Department of Transport starting in 1954 (Diubaldo, 1992: 122). The growing presence of American military personnel after the Second World War in the Arctic greatly outnumbered the lone Canadian air force base and a string of scattered RCMP detachments, which galled Ottawa officials (Sivertz, 1993: 648). Minutes from a 1953 Eskimo Affairs meeting proposed transferring additional Inuit families from Inukjuak to Resolute Bay “to meet a developing demand for casual labor in that area in unloading supplies during airlifts and during the summer resupply” (Library and Archives Canada, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development fonds, n.d.). In other words, beyond the notion of self-sufficiency, government officials also considered relocatees as exploitable labor to fulfill temporary needs by the Geological and Meteorological branches stationed in the north in the Cold War era.
In contrast to the state’s ideas of success, the relocatees testified to completing hard, unpaid work as guides and manual laborers unloading ships and planes. Unbeknownst to them, their labor for federal branches was being calculated by RCMP officers working in tandem with the Arctic Division to pay off the expenses of their relocation and subsequent expenditures of supplies (Sivertz, 1993: 451). Payments for trapped furs existed only as ledger lines and store tokens. As the federal government benefited from the relocatees’ labor and settlement in the most northern posts of the country, the relocatees experienced a completely different reality.
Their home in Inukjuak shares a similar latitude with Scotland. It sits below the tree line and includes a wide biodiversity of nutrients. In 1953, residents of Inukjuak had access to a healthcare facility and schoolhouse. Relocatees were promised if they moved to the High Arctic, which had neither adequate shelter, healthcare, or education opportunities, there would be allegedly better hunting, fishing, and economic opportunities (Marcus, 1991; Hammond, 1984). The settler state’s desire for Inuit to remain fur trappers engaged in a commodity-driven economy was the driving logic underpinning the state’s concept of improved economic opportunities for Inuit, which itself was an overreach of colonial authority. This logic of favoring economic rights separate from access to education or healthcare promotes economic rights as “the most fundamental civil right” (Melamed, 2006: 17).
In Amagaolik’s words, “[The mounties] were very persistent. It seemed they would not take no for an answer. My parents refused again. They left but soon returned. My parents finally agreed—under certain conditions,” none of which were obliged as soon as the families boarded the
While it would be the poor planning, lack of infrastructure, and failure to keep promises of return the settler state would belatedly apologize for, the decades of state refusal to recognize the High Arctic relocatees as hardship because they were no longer in need of state welfare reveal the embedded colonial logics in determining which grievances are legible as injustices.
History vs memory on the High Arctic relocation
Officially, the federal government failed to acknowledge any wrongdoing on their part through the publication of the Hickling Report (Hickling Corporation, 1990) to shut down any further critiques of the relocation using only government records. As a result, the hardships faced by Inuit relocatees were then thoroughly documented, commissioned, or created by or in collaboration with Inuit relocatees. Notable accounts include the reports submitted to the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs (Canada, 1990), research papers by Alan R. Marcus (1991), the Canadian Human Rights report by academic Daniel Soberman, and the 1994 Royal Commission on Aboriginal People’s report on the High Arctic relocation. Each report has tracked the state’s dehumanizing approach toward Inuit including the perversion of their fiduciary powers to deploy RCMP officers on the behest of the DRD, who were then responsible for Inuit affairs. In 1955, rather than return relocatees home, the state encouraged six additional families to join those already removed as the only remedy for homesickness.
RCMP officer Ross Gibson, who had been stationed at Inukjuak and became responsible for selecting the families and accompanying the move to Resolute Bay, would vehemently deny any wrongdoing in his testimony to RCAP decades later from his hospital bed in British Columbia, especially as his name had been associated with allegations of sexual abuse. In his account of the past, Gibson referred to Inuit as a homogeneous group as well as to himself as a benevolent force, stating, Eskimos appeared to accept the welfare as a way of life and slowed up on their own Native ways and became dependent on the white man. This was quite obvious to me . . . I feel that this whole project has been a complete success . . . I expect no compensation for anything that I have contributed to the better way of the Eskimo and I feel that the Eskimo should not be compensated for what happened. (Gibson, 1993: 24–25)
Gibson had also been the main interlocutor between relocatees and Ottawa, despite a language and culture barrier, and while it is plausible he had done what he could for the relocatees, the premise of the relocation was inhumane from the beginning.
At the time of his RCAP testimony in June 1993, Gibson had also taken issue with the relocatees framing their relocation to other redress campaigns, questioning how they could even be comparable. He included snippets from an article from his local newspaper, Do we classify this Eskimo project in the same category? Are they out for compensation some 50 years later? . . . These are things that I wonder about and the things that I am concerned about because I was the one person who was with these people and understood the situation. I cannot agree that they should be compensated. They were never abandoned. (1993, 21)
In reality, the poorest families in Inukjuak were selected for relocation were coerced to board the
The uneven power dynamics between relocatees and the RCMP would only be amplified by the pressures coming from Ottawa to make the relocation a success. In his presentation to RCAP decades letter, Sivertz referred only to reports made by RCMP officers or translated by these same individuals about the healthy and happy communities of the relocatees as evidence of a successful experiment. Based on these official reports, Sivertz “snapped” at RCAP Commissioners for questioning the lack of education and medical facilities, stating, “There was no hardship . . . there was only great satisfaction by all Inuit people at Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord” (Aubrey, 1993; Sivertz, 1993: 453).
The relocated families included relatives by blood and adoption and consisted of multi-household members with surnames Amagoalik, Patsauq, Salluviniq, Nungak, Echalook who moved from Inukjuak to Resolute Bay; Aqiatusuk, Noavalinga, Amagoalik, Nutarak, and Flaherty from Inukjuak to Grise Fiord; Akpaliapik, Anukudluk from Pond Inlet to Grise Fiord; and Amagoalik from Pond Inlet to Resolute Bay. Surnames were not widely adopted until the 1960s as the federal government identified Inuit with numbered disk tags beginning with the letter “E” for “Eskimo.” However, due to the inconsistency of spelling between English and French translations of Inuit first names, surnames were eventually enforced to align Inuit identification with settler standards. Extended families who were accustomed to living together were divided, against their wishes, only once they were at sea. Vulnerable individuals like Sarah Amagoalik, who gave birth on board the
Campaign for High Arctic redress
The public memory making of the relocation began as early as the 1970s and was intertwined with political consciousness raising when relocatees and their descendants from Inukjuak were insisting that the relocation was imposed, poorly mismanaged, and unable to meet “the most basic needs of the Inuit as human beings” (RCAP, 1994: 8). Even if the state had yet to develop their own domestic human rights laws, the relocation of young and old from Inukjuak, which had a schoolhouse and a nursing station, to Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord that had neither went against international conventions for human rights, notably the 1948 UN Declaration for Human Rights. Throughout the 1950s, verbal promises to relocatees that they could return home were refused by RCMP officers and/or denied by government officials. Interdepartmental memorandums and correspondence revealed how Ottawa-based planners like Sivertz “knew of the Inuit’s desire to return, and privately acknowledged the department’s two-year promise of return, but ignored the Inuit requests” (Marcus, 1991: 287). With only state records to memorialize the relocation as a national success, relocatees began to organize among themselves to share their version of history.
The earliest reports of organized return to Inukjuak were in 1973 when families in Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay wrote to Bob Pilot, a former RCMP officer in the High Arctic who became Deputy Commissioner of the Northwest Territories. There was some united consideration, but disagreements between the federal government, Quebec government, and NWT government ensued over who should pay for the cost of relocation stalled the idea indefinitely (Pilot, 1993: 265). Pilot testified that he believed the pressure to return in 1973 was partly due to Inukjuak relocatees wanting to be part of the historic James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA), then the largest land claim settlement in Canadian history that encompassed Inukjuak within the boundaries of Section 23 (Inuit and Naskapi territory).
The timing of the High Arctic campaign with JBNQA was also interpreted by Graham Rowley, a retired public servant who consulted on Northern Affairs, as further reason to undermine redress efforts as seeking benefits from the agreement was the reason for return, and “not from dissatisfaction with the north” (Rowley, 1993: 557). He noted the divisions among relocatees and how pressure for redress had been largely from Port Harrison (Inukjuak) and not Pond Inlet relocatees. Despite the presence of surviving adults who were relocated in their late teens to twenties, Rowley (1993: 561) testified how “During the past few years the Inuit who testified have been told, time and again, a distorted story of their childhood, which they now probably believe.” Rowley, similar to Sivertz, believed the relocatees were being “subverted” by Inuit politicians and only making a complaint now because they now have “10 million dollars dangled before them as a prize they might obtain if they take on the role of ‘victim’” (Day, 1993).
The claim for $10 million had been put forward by Makivik Corp in 1993 for outstanding issues including the loss of livelihood coupled with family separation and undue hardships. Makivik Corp as well as Inuit Tapiriit of Canada (since renamed Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami) were formed in the 1970s in large part to deal with the bureaucracy of land claims agreements and resource management, but ITC especially also operates to advocate for the rights of Inuit. Former Makivik VP Zebedee Nungak observed, The consciousness of the High Arctic exiles began to rise at the same time as the political consciousness of Inuit across the Canadian Arctic began to rise. As more and more of the younger relocatees began to receive formal education, Inuit raised more and more questions about the belief of the relocatees that they were treated unjustly and were coerced into relocating. (RCAP, 1994: 34)
As an example of intergenerational trauma and reckoning on the part of relocatees and their families, the pressure for answers and justice increased as their elders began to pass away.
ITC and Makivik formally joined forces as early as 1978 to begin their campaign for compensation from the Canadian government for relocation of Inuit families from Inukjuak to Grise Ford and Resolute Bay (Prouty, 2020). Families from Pond Inlet chose to not participate or testify before the Standing Committee or RCAP for reasons unconfirmed. As noted by the literature on reparations, the success of redress must have “unified internal support,” to assert meaningful political pressure, but the lack of participation by Pond Inlet relocatees was held as a wedge by state officials to undermine Inukjuak relocatees as the only ones seeking redress (Brooks, 1999: 6–7).
In 1982, the Deputy Minister working under Department of Indian and Northern Development (DIAND) Minister John Munro dismissed the idea of any promises being made to relocatees, stating, “We have nothing on file to indicate that such a promise was ever made. Even if it had been, I suspect that it was for a limited number of years following their location” (RCAP, 1994: 178).
In his testimony to RCAP decades later, Sivertz (1993: 445) would suggest that the promise of return was only for the entire group of relocatees as the department would not engage with individual requests. However, in the same testimony, Sivertz would repeatedly refer to an unidentified group leader or spokesperson among the relocatees, who was unlikely representative of the various interests due to the differences among families who came from two different regions and spoke different dialects. 3 The inconsistency in which government officials dealt with relocatees, whether individually or by group, as Sivertz suggested, contributed to increased suffering under inhumane conditions.
In the 1950s, travel to and from the high arctic would have been nearly impossible both logistically and financially to undertake on one’s own. Relocatees at Resolute Bay including Jackoosie Iqualuk and Jaybeddie Amagoalik earned a wage income at a fraction of their settler counterparts working as janitors and porters on the army base. They were the first relocatees to pay for their own flight back home (McGrath, 2006: 268). The only other options were by dog sled through the winter, which was perilous at best, or by sea during the summer months. Furthermore, the
By January 20, 1987, Makivik and Inuit Tapirisat submitted an extensive position paper to the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs outlining the expenses and logistics of resettlement back to Inukjuak and the need for 13 new housing units. By then, Bill McKnight was in his brief tenure as DIAND Minister and agreed to the construction of 10, not 13, new housing units and the payment for transportation. In the strongest case of recognition yet, McKnight agreed that the families’ relocation to Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay should be recognized as “an event of national significance” (Canada, 1990: 106).
By the fall of 1987, progress appeared to take shape for relocatees as DIAND agreed to pay $250,000 for those who wished to move back to Inukjuak and $700,000 to the Government of Quebec to construct 10 new houses, which led to the return of 22 exiles in the summer of 1988 (Hickling Corporation, 1990: 56). However, the housing units were managed as rental units for the exiles, many of whom were unable to work after returning from the High Arctic due to chronic illnesses and disabilities (Canada, 1990: 22–28). This meant it was difficult for them to pay for their needed shelter.
Other outstanding issues remained in compensation and remedial measures for hardships endured. Not all families were able to move back to their home territories due to elderly parents who could not sustain another month-long voyage on the choppy arctic seas or due to children and grandchildren who did not wish to leave their birthplace. Families remained permanently divided as some stayed while others dispersed home to Inukjuak or down to Iqaluit.
After the historic redress agreement with Japanese Canadians in the fall of 1988, Makivik wrote to newly appointed DIAND Minister, Pierre Cadieux, to request a meeting to follow-up on outstanding issues of redress for High Arctic relocatees. By the spring of 1989, Cadieux replied that his predecessor had fulfilled all obligations and that another meeting on the matter was not necessary. In addition, Cadieux recommended any further requests to improve the social and economic infrastructures of residents of Inukjuak should be forwarded to the Quebec Government, who under the JBNQA was the one responsible to serve localities (Canada, 1990: 297–299). Cadieux’s dismissal of federal responsibilities to provincial hands was a complete reversal of momentum from his predecessors and an example of the “interjurisdictional neglect” that has persistently plagued federal fiduciary responsibilities toward Indigenous Peoples. Specifically, “interjurisdictional neglect represents a breach of relationship and responsibility” to protect the right to life due to federal and provincial conflicts over access to basic necessities including adequate healthcare and education (National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 2019: 567). Letters to and from Ottawa were no longer sufficient. The following spring, ITC and Makivik organized a delegation to Ottawa to testify before the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs on 19 March 1990.
The High Arctic comes to Ottawa
In his address to the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs, John Amagoalik emphasized the history of the federal government’s experimental relocation of 22 Inuit in the 1950s was not just a memory from the past, but a matter of national interest: We [Inuit] need a longer time to tell our story, because we are just touching its surface. This story needs to be told. It is a Canadian story; it needs to be explained in Canadian history. (Canada, 1990: 16)
Prior to the testimonies given in 1990 by Amagoalik, Zebedee Nungak, Sam Silverstone (Vice-President and Legal Counsel of Makivik, respectively); Inukjuak representatives Markoosie Patsaqu, Andrew Iqaluk, Samwillie Eliasialuk; and Resolute Bay representatives Allie Salluviniq, Martha Flaherty, and Sara Amagoalik, all relocatees who shared their lived experiences and memories on official record for the first time, the public memory of Inuit life for most Canadians had been largely shaped by settler myths privileging the state’s policy direction to unite Northern and Southern Canada.
Few Canadians knew of the lived realities of Northerners as many consumed harmful stereotypes or reductive caricatures about Inuit. The famed father of documentary-filmmaking, Robert Flaherty (1922), had released
Josephie’s oldest daughter, Martha Flaherty, was 5 years old when her parents and two younger siblings were relocated to be closer to Paddy Aqiatusuk, the father figure who had raised Josephie and who had himself been relocated in 1953. RCMP would not allow Paddy to return home, but encouraged him to write to relatives to be relocated instead. However, Paddy died sometime between his written request (via the RCMP) to Josephie asking him to come and before Josephie and his family’s arrival to Resolute Bay. Paddy’s death was reported as an accident, but his children described his death as the result of a broken heart from being so far from home (McGrath, 2006: 186). In contrast to her famed and estranged grandfather’s famed record of Inuit life, Martha’s testimony to the Standing Committee in 1990 was not globally circulated, or even believed by the majority of the House of Commons. She spoke of her responsibilities as the oldest child after the relocation and the stresses her family endured with no food or medical aid through years of near starvation. She also testified, without naming anyone specifically, that “women were abused sexually . . . these people did not have food. They would only be given food after being used for sexual purposes. I will also say later about garbage, how we lived off the garbage of the police” (Canada, 1990: 12). The allegations of misconduct against the RCMP would be routinely denied citing lack of evidence, including counterclaims by the police that public accusations have caused “considerable stress” for service members who contributed to Northern communities (RCMP Community and Aboriginal Policing Directorate, 1993). Unfortunately, it is worth noting allegations of sexual abuse against RCMP officers are not isolated events, but rather routine examples of gender-based violences against Indigenous women and girls (Palmater, n.d.).
Relocatee Samwillie Eliasialuk, who was 17 years old at the time of relocation, summarized how the RCMP’s promises of abundant hunting were complete lies as wildlife conservation restricted families to killing only a very limited number of caribou a year. Caribou was necessary for food, but also for their hides, which were superior in warmth. They were also warned against hunting musk ox as RCMP continued to enforce arrest or fines up to $5000 despite the alleged move toward self-subsistence. Eliasialuk also spoke about doing hard labor “unloading drums and coal for the police,” helping the police travel between Grise Fiord and Resolute, even saving their lives when they got lost, all of which he was never paid for. Concluding his testimony, he stated: Our lives have been ruined and disrupted. We have acquired illnesses and disabilities. We rightly deserve to be paid compensation . . . We have to have the means to live . . . We definitely deserve to be paid for the labour we did for the police . . . We defined a large stretch of real estate for Canada. It gained in the discovery of vast natural resources, while we got absolutely nothing. We have experienced nothing but poverty. (Canada, 1990: 8)
No one from DIAND testified before the Standing Committee. As the first official records of Inuit speaking on their own behalf, their testimonies existed in a silo. Instead of participating in the process, Harry Swain, Deputy Minister of DIAND, responded in a 10-page letter, dated 15 May 1990, dismissing the relocatees’ oral testimonies because, records indicate, quite simply, that there was no malice or wrongdoing by departmental officers in the relocation project . . . With the passage of time, the facts surrounding the project have become altered in the memories of the people concerned. It is important to examine the beliefs of the present, which are undoubtedly sincere . . . feelings are not facts, no matter how fervently held. They should not be allowed to obscure the historical record. (RCAP, 1994: 180)
DIAND’s dismissal of oral histories as feelings and not facts has been a consistent approach by the settler state to delegitimize Indigenous knowledge, but the cross-party Standing Committee nevertheless made five recommendations for DIAND: (1) acknowledge the role played by the Inuit relocated to the High Arctic in the protection of Canadian sovereignty in the North; (2) make an apology for the wrongdoing that the government inflicted on the people of Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay; (3) carry out such an apology with due solemnity; (4) accompany the apology with some form of recognition of the contribution to Canadian sovereignty made by the Inuit people of Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay; and (5) consider compensation to the people of Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay for their service to Canada and the wrongdoing inflicted upon them (Hickling Report, 1990: 2).
DIAND declined the Standing Committee’s recommendations. Instead, the department commissioned an independent study, known as the Hickling Report, which countered the Committee’s recommendations by privileging the state’s records in assessing the allegations. Released before the House of Commons debate on November 20, 1990, the Hickling Report not only rejected all five recommendations, but arrived at the conclusion that “to apologize for a wrongdoing it did not commit would constitute deception on the part of the Government and would imply that the project was a failure, when, in fact, it was a reasonably successful endeavor” (Hickling Report, 1990: 57). The House rejected the motion to apologize and consider compensation to the relocatees. Tim Siddon, the newest DIAND Minister, stated afterwards, “Since our investigations do not indicate government wrongdoings, an apology is not required” (Aubrey, 1990).
The historic redress agreement for Japanese Canadians signed 2 years earlier ushered in hopes, rumors, and anger among other communities for other long-standing injustices ignored. The “competitive memories” of recognition would transpire more than once as High Arctic testimonies repeatedly claimed that their grievances were equally as deserving as other Canadians, if not more so (Rothberg, 2009: 8). Markoosie Patsauq, who was relocated at the age of 12 from Inukjuak to Resolute Bay in 1953, stated to the Standing Committee, “If Mr. Mulroney is going to come to an agreement with any of those people, like Chinese and Italians, they also should look at our problem, because in those days, in the 1940s, the government had a legal right under the War Measures Act to take these precautions against the security of Canada . . . but us — in 1953 the sick people, old people, crippled people, were sent to the High Arctic to live on the white man’s dump. There is a very big difference in those things” (Canada, 1990: 20).
The palpable resentment in Patsauq’s testimony against other minority groups potentially reaching an agreement before Inuit relocatees reflected the skewed politics of recognition under the logic of neoliberal multiculturalism. While reparation mechanisms such as apologies held the potential to strengthen national identity, Canada’s first formal apology to a historically wronged community reframed the nation as a land of opportunity based on shared principles of private property rights. The state adamantly insisted the relocation of Inuit was for their betterment and was undertaken to improve their lives based on increased self-sufficiency through hunting and trapping opportunities rather than state relief, reasons which are rooted in liberal values based on economic rights. The state’s coercion of Inuit off of state relief was deemed a success by officials, but the relocation from conception to planning to execution had never once directly consulted with Inuit.
A.J. Park has noted that given the foundation of settler colonialism and its logic of elimination, “Indigenous life is derealised as not quite human and Indigenous populations are exposed to precarity, which are structural conditions that bring about their destruction” (Park, 2015: 274). For High Arctic relocatees, it was their induced poverty from the colonial fur trade that led to the state’s solution of relocation. This forced relocation was bound up with settler state security and territorial ambition in the north, which inevitably exposed the relocatees to greater levels of precarity and hardships despite its perceived success by the state.
The lack of individual consent and choice on how relocatees lived included “the ‘encouragement’ to hunt, the firm hand on relief supplies, the absence of credit at the store, the rationing of supplies, the forced savings, control over the complex and confusing accounts, the imposition of conservation restrictions, keeping the Inuit camp and the settlement separated” would all take place under the paternal guise of the state doing what was best for Inuit interests (RCAP, 1994: 91). RCAF officer Armand Brosseau would testify in 1993 that, While the people in the south were enjoying cheques and doing what they wanted with [Family Allowance payments], the Eskimos were more or less told what they had to buy . . . they had to take it and accept it . . . People in that time were treated like people from the third world. (Brosseau, 1993: 85)
The system of tokens in the North and the wardship enforced by RCMP meant Inuit who received family allowances like other Canadians were on paper treated like equals, but in practice were subjected to perpetual coercion. The paternalistic approach of the state toward relocatees operated on the premise of dehumanization that limited Inuit into wards of the state without their own cultures, agencies, and epistemologies. This colonial approach extended to how the relocation would be recorded and remembered by federal officials, but with the creation of the self-governing territory of Nunavut in 1999, an Inuit-led approach to official memory making would begin to take shape.
“To gain an apology” through the High Arctic exiles monuments
In the three decades since the High Arctic relocatees began self-organizing toward official recognition, discrepancies between the official history of events proffered by Canadian officials and the oral histories from the relocatees themselves were only amplified through each successive encounter. By 2009, after a decade of self-government, Nunavut Tunngavik Inc (NTI), the administrative arm of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, re-approached the issue of an apology for High Arctic relocatees by commissioning a series of official monuments to commemorate Nunavut history. In this way, community memory and official memory making at last merged for relocatees.
The objectives of the High Arctic Exile Monuments initiative were clearly stated through official press releases confirming that the purpose of the project was to promote community building, commemorate Nunavut history, affirm Canadian sovereignty and “to gain an apology from the federal government” (NTI, 2019). John Amagoalik, who besides his political advocacy also served on the High Arctic Exile Monument selection committee, said at the time, ‘We’re fascinated by the English language and all the terms of regret, of sorrow or other things . . . We would like to hear a sincere apology’ (Watson, 2009). As originally outlined by the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs in 1990, there remained a strong desire by relocatees to receive a formal apology for the injustice of the relocation, and that such an apology would be carried out ‘with due solemnity’ (Hickling Corporation, 1990: 3).
In the 30 years that passed, multiple statements had been made, cash compensation had been negotiated, but still no verbal apology had been made that would have aided in the restoration of relocatees’ dignity and their desire to be seen as equals to other Canadians. The monument project was therefore to tell the story of the relocation from the perspective of the relocatees with the aim of receiving a formal apology from the Canadian state.
The monument project was originally conceived by an NTI-appointed committee as a commission of four thematically interconnected monuments located at the places of origin (Inukjuak and Pond Inlet) as well as the destinations where some of the younger generations have stayed on (Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay). However, budget constraints resulted in only two larger than life limestone and granite sculptures (Wakeham, 2014: 137). A lone Inuk man carved by the late Simeonie Amagoalik (second cousin to John Amagoalik) stands in Resolute Bay. The second sculpture, separated by 400 km of Arctic Ocean, is by Looty Pijamini and depicts an Inuk woman and child in Grise Fiord. The plan was to unveil the monuments in the fall of 2009 with hopes the Prime Minister would be in attendance, but with neither the sculptures finished, or an apology confirmed by late summer, the unveiling ceremony was postponed until the fall of 2010 (Watson, 2009).
The unveiling of the High Arctic monument occurred in late August and early September of 2010. Prime Minister Harper did not attend, despite his presence in the area for his annual northern tour. In his place was the newly appointed Minister of DIAND, John Duncan, who delivered the apology three times on his first trip up North on 18 August 2010, alongside Inuk leader Mary Simon in Inukjuak. Harper’s presence would have indicated this was a national issue and not just a programming matter for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. The concession of an apology after decades of refusal by the federal government was gained in no small part by Inuit-led efforts, but the official recognition of loss was also synchronized with a reinvigorated assertion of High Arctic sovereignty.
While Duncan’s apology was delivered “on behalf of the Prime Minister, the Government of Canada and all Canadians . . . for the relocation of families and the extreme hardship and suffering caused by the relocation,” many of the original relocatees have noted that it should have been done by the prime minister (Flaherty, 2014). The full apology, which has since been placed onto the High Arctic Exile Monuments project website, acknowledged the pain of the separation from their home territories, from their families, and the inadequate provisions of shelter and supplies, the lack of information on “how far and how different” their new homes would be and the lack of transparency in dividing up families once they left Inukjuak (Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, 2010).
Due to a legal settlement signed in 1996 that absolved the federal government of any legal or moral wrongdoing, no further compensation would be issued alongside Duncan’s apology. Importantly, Duncan apologized for the government’s failure to keep its promises of return for those who did not wish to stay in the High Arctic, which was a sore point that previous DIAND Ministers and bureaucrats from the Arctic Division had repeatedly denied or undermined. Yet the apology, in its own words, aspired to keep Canada as the “True North Strong and Free,” and at its conclusion received polite applause from the attendees. After more than an hour of listening to political speeches inside of a small gymnasium, the attendees “began to sob when Phoebe Atagootaaluk Aculiak, a direct descendent of a relocatee, stood up and recited the names of those who had died in the relocation” (Curry, 2010). Inuit themselves were compelled to name their loss when the state did not. The power in naming the dead, especially when their deaths were the end result of state-led dehumanization, signaled a collective and dynamic remembrance of the loss and trauma endured by High Arctic relocatees whose hardships were consistently denied and ignored by state officials.
After decades of pursuing this moment, John Amagoalik said that “it would have been better if Prime Minister Stephen Harper had delivered the apology directly to the Inuit in either of the two communities,” but he welcomed the apology all the same (Amagoalik, 2014). Similarly, Martha Flaherty has stated the apology “was not good enough” even though it was good that they apologized (Flaherty, 2014). She remained critical that the “prime minister should have been apologizing not delegating [it to] his colleague.” Relocatees continued to hope their grievances were treated equally to other redress campaigns that received a Prime Minister’s apology, but after decades of denial, refusals, and a compensation agreement, the federal government was not willing to offer more.
Duncan’s apology tour continued a few weeks later in Resolute on September 8 and 2 days later in Grise Fiord to officially unveil the High Arctic monuments commissioned by NTI. The ceremonies were described by press as having “equal parts dignitaries to exiles” which may also explain why Harper chose to delegate in lieu of attending himself (Zarate, 2010). While meaningful for communities who had waited a long time to hear those words from a Canadian official, the apologies at each monument were overshadowed by the release of Canada’s new Arctic Foreign Policy on August 20 which was immediately followed by Harper’s annual tour of the North that was largely spent in promotion of Operation Nanook. Harper’s absence from the Inuit-led ceremonies and unveilings to commemorate the High Arctic relocation were a failure and a disappointment on the state’s part to finally acknowledge the decades-long struggle of relocatees as a national issue. While official memory-making was at last made possible by the self-government of Nunavut, the relocation was ultimately a federal error and should be recognized and remembered as such.
Conclusion
This article on the High Arctic apology ends with the critical observation that since John Duncan’s apology in 2010, multiple additional state apologies have been addressed to Inuit, three alone in 2019. In January at a gathering in Arviat, Nunavut, Minister Carolyn Bennett of the Department of Indigenous-Crown Affairs and Northern Affairs (the successor to AAND, which replaced DIAND in 2011, along with Indigenous Services) apologized for the (1950 - 1960) Aharmiut relocations. In March in Iqaluit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for the state’s gross mismanagement of the tuberculous epidemic impacting a third of Inuit between the 1940s and 1960s, which marked the first apology uttered by a prime minister to Inuit. By August, a third more general apology for findings of the 2013 Qikiqtani Truth Commission (QTC) was delivered by Bennett in Iqaluit.
While apologies had long been sought for devastating long-term impacts of family separations and dehumanization that occurred through the TB epidemic and the Aharmiut relocation, including a lawsuit against the federal government eventually settled out of court, it is notable that the QTC did not seek or recommend an apology for these events.
The QTC was the first Inuit-sponsored and Inuit-led initiative convened by Qikiqtani Inuit Association (QIA) and mandated to examine issues related to social policy, language, dog slaughter, and relocations between 1950 and 1975. The Commission was established in 2007 and made use of community-generated sources that developed their own methodologies in tandem with non-Inuit archivists and historians to improve understandings of Inuit life.
5
QTC’s findings confirmed that bringing living standards of the South to the North were “destructive of Inuit culture and they rarely achieved the more laudable goals of improving material and health conditions” (Goldring, 2015: 522). Peter Goldring, who served as the senior historian on QTC’s research team, stated, Inuit have always understood that while government programs introduced in that era [1950 – 1975] were meant to confer material benefits, they also functioned as instruments of social control, undermined traditional ties to the land, and disrupted the intergenerational transfer of knowledge. (2015: 501)
The Final Report by QTC’s Commissioner Jim Igloliorte neither recommended compensation nor sought an apology, though it left the door open to say Inuit would be receptive to one “as long as that apology signals a willingness to work with Inuit in a respectful partnership that seeks to redress past and continuing wrongs” (Qikiqtani Inuit Association, 2013: 56). Embedded in this statement that reiterates an apology will only be received if it is accompanied by action is the lingering doubt that the federal government will do as it says. Instead of recommending an apology, Igloliorte instead recommended “the need for the Government of Canada to formally acknowledge its
In exploring the redress campaign of the High Arctic relocatees, which adamantly sought a solemn state apology similar to the one delivered to Japanese Canadians in 1988, this research has found the state’s approach has taken a circuitous path in first denying, refusing, and settling through financial compensation before offering the desired formal apology via proxy. In centering the aggrieved first and foremost, this work has centered the memory-making of the High Arctic relocatees whose state-led socio-economic disadvantages made their grievances illegible for political recognition by the settler state.
In the end, it is the monuments commissioned and organized by the nascent Nunavut government and carved by High Arctic Inuit themselves that live on to memorialize their community’s history. While the monument’s primary objective was to gain an apology from the federal government, other objectives that bear repeating included the development of community celebrations alongside exposing national and international audiences to Nunavut’s history. The community activism paired with Nunavut’s unique self-government allowed Inuit to circumvent the route of federal grants and permission to erect their own official memorializations of the High Arctic relocations that becomes both public memory and official record. As an act of self-determination, the stone carved memorials in Grise Fjord and Resolute Bay serve to memorialize the strengths of the relocatees as an enduring presence across the High Arctic.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
ORCID iD
