Authors: Melanie McGrath
By then, the Arctic had been drawn into the Cold War, and the Americans were announcing plans to build airstrips capable of landing heavy jets and cargo planes at the remote northern Ellesmere Island weather stations of Alert and Eureka, points on the North American continent only 1,200 miles across the Arctic Ocean from the plains of Siberia. A Canadian Department of External Affairs memorandum of 1952 drew anxious attention to the U.S. presence and predicted that the number of U.S. citizens in the Arctic District of Franklin, encompassing the eastern Arctic islands, would soon outstrip the population of “white Canadians” living there. In the same vein, a Privy Council memorandum predicted that the airstrips “would probably assume the character of small U.S. bases and Canadian control might well be lost.” The memorandum continued, “Our experiences since 1943, have indicated the extreme care which we must exercise to preserve Canadian sovereignty where Canadians are outnumbered and outranked.” In lanuary 1953 Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent went so far as to say that “US developments might be just about the only form of human activity in the vast wastelands of the Canadian Arctic.”
To counteract this new American occupation, and to provide more support for the Canadian Inuit, a string of Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachments was quickly opened across the Canadian Arctic. The joint U.S.-Canadian Arctic weather stations were built and the Canadian government set up Radiosonde posts to collect meteorological data for the newly opened transpolar aviation
route between North America and Europe. All of this, it was hoped, would provide jobs in Arctic settlements and put the Canadian Arctic once and for all in Canada's hands.
The RCMP arrived in Inukjuak in 1935, the Radiosonde post was built in 1943 and a joint U.S.-Canadian weather station opened there in 1946.
Qalunaat
moved up to staff them.
One of the side effects of the war was that it gave thousands of American soldiers their first experience of Arctic conditions and their first real sense of Inuit lives. While the war was on, attention was focused elsewhere, but once it ended, stories began leaking out from the American service personnel of the terrible conditions they had witnessed during their Arctic tours of duty. Many Inuit living around the American airfields, among them Fort Chimo on Ungava, appeared to be poorly clothed and thin and under constant siege from white men's diseases. They noted the Inuit's cruel and arbitrary dependence on fox fur prices which meant that any surplus a family was able to accumulate during a good season was immediately wiped out the moment fox prices fell. They saw how, if an Inuk man got ill, then his family often went hungry because the extended family, though anxious to help out, had nothing to give. If the illness was protracted, the entire family would wind up dependent on the goodwill of the local Hudson Bay factor, or they would starve. The RCMP detachments were too widely spaced to be of much use. In extreme cases, whole families died together. These were tough men and women, living in the most extreme conditions, hard-working and uncomplaining, Canadian citizens whom Canada seemed to have forgotten. The stories coming from the Arctic were a far cry from the cheery, upbeat world of
Nanook
, and the American press jumped on them. The
Boston Globe
was among the first to run scandalised reports. Other newspapers followed.
As southern Canadians and Americans were beginning to learn the truth about life for many Inuit, losephie Flaherty's fortunes were changing for the better.
Out of the blue, the Radiosonde manager offered Robert Flaherty's
son the job of station
piliriji
or choreboy. Why he picked Josephie out is not clear, but it may have had something to do with the fact that Josephie was a half-breed and as such was considered, somehow, more suited to the job. It may simply have been that Josephie was strong-looking with competent hands and a diligent manner and that he smiled a good deal.
Accepting the job meant, for Josephie, having to leave Aqia-tusuk's camp and going to live in the choreboy's hut beside the station. This Josephie was at first reluctant to do, feeling pushed and pulled by the competing claims of his stepfather and the Radiosonde manager, but he soon saw that by this one small sacrifice, his family could be relieved of some of their insecurity. With the meagre allowance from the choreboy's job he could at least look after himself and help them out and in some way help pay back the family for the years of care they had given him, even though he was only partly theirs. Accepting the job also meant being able to marry the woman he wanted. Finally, and this is not a trivial point, saying yes meant that Josephie would not have to say no to a white man. And so for the first time in his life the young Josephie moved far from his family camp into a hut on the south shore of the Innuk-suak River in the settlement of Inukjuak and became a wage earner.
The job, as he discovered early on, was exhausting rather than challenging. He kept the floors well swept and the station cleaned, burned the rubbish, checked the station's weather balloons and parachutes for holes and tears. In the summer he maintained the station's Peterhead boat and caulked the station building with rope and tar. When the snow arrived in September, he boarded up the windows, shovelled snow against the exterior walls, fixed the insulation around the pipes and valves and made sure the chimney remained open, primed the stoves with coal and topped off the lamps with coal oil. When there were errands to be run, dog pemmi-can to be made, messages to be taken to the RCMP and so forth, it was Josephie's job to do them and not to question why.
In return, he received a small weekly wage. The new choreboy's
remuneration was barely sufficient for a few bags of flour and sugar, a little lard and tobacco. His idea of being able to keep his family turned out to have been misplaced. When it was parcelled out around camp, there was hardly enough to make much of a difference to anyone.
The hut was a bonus, though. It had an enclosed snowporch peppered with hooks and, on the bare board floor, a boot rack and a large, flat stone to serve as a makeshift meat store. Beyond the porch and through another door lay a single room, about twelve feet square, marked off with a piece of caribou skin into two areas, respectively for sleeping and living. On one side, farthest from the door, were a couple of shelves, below which there would be room for a Coleman stove, should Josephie ever be able to afford one. The walls were lined with newspapers scavenged from the Radiosonde station, which served as insulation, as well as to lend the hut a cheerful air. True, the place was small, so small that four adults could fit in the living area only by sitting shoulder to shoulder, true also that the rough board floor was so musty and damp in the summer and the ceiling so foggy with smuts and animal fat, that Josephie preferred to live in a tent beside it, and true that in winter, icicles hung from the rafters, but there was something about this hut which nonetheless brought with it a promise of safety, even advancement. It was more
qalunaat
to live in this hut than it was to live in a snowhouse.
It also provided Josephie and Rynee with their first home. She moved in and set herself to sewing a pair of new summer
kamiks
and a winter outfit of caribou skin for her man.
Whenever Paddy Aqiatusuk came into Inukjuak to trade he dropped by the young couple's hut for a mug-up and a place to stay. Josephie's life, now suddenly abstracted by his humdrum job with its unnatural
qalunaat
timetable, was rooted by these visits; by the man himself, his presence, his strong, true sense of being Inuk. During the short weeks of summer, the two men would sit outside on the banks of the river, stirring a driftwood fire beside which Rynee dried sealskins and loops of seal gut, and talk about the land, Aqia
tusuk's hunting trips, where his trap lines lay. In the winter they chatted inside the hut, on caribou skins. When they had drunk tea and eaten, Aqiatusuk would light a cigarette and set himself to his carvings, while the night passed and the two men relived past hunting trips, the dogs they had had, the winters that had come and gone. Sooner or later, always too soon for Josephie, someone from the detachment would come round to remind Aqiatusuk to leave the settlement once his business there was done and, griping like a wounded walrus, the sculptor would pack his gear and head back out to camp, leaving something of the old days hanging in the air.
The seasons turned, and at the Radiosonde station the manager was replaced by another then another still and over the months and years the Flahertys began to accustom themselves to the life that seemed to have come their way. Needless to say, Josephie and Rynee Flaherty had no idea of the incidental part they were playing in the “Canadianisation” of the Arctic. Nor did they know that a much bigger part lay waiting around the corner. To Josephie, the
qalunaat
were the strangers on their doorstep. He understood less about them than he did about the ptarmigan living in the willow. This half-breed son of Robert Flaherty carried the burden of his odd, alien, blood lightly. He had no means of connecting that part of his own heart in which the spirit of his father lay. The Hudson Bay Company, the government administrators, the RCMP, the missionaries, his own father, were all of a piece to him, a mysterious club whose rules he would never fully comprehend and to which he would never be invited to belong.
There was another half-breed living in the settlement. Tommy Pallisser worked at the Hudson Bay store and doubled as an interpreter whenever a southern scientist arrived in the settlement. Originally from Labrador, he had almost become a white person, in part because he spoke English and in part because, being from elsewhere, he was as much an outsider as the
qalunaat.
The
qalunaat
invited him to their dinner parties and to their endless games of bridge and poker and they talked to him almost, but not quite, as if
he were an equal. But Tommy Pallisser knew he was not and he kept his Inuit wife from learning English lest she got ideas. The Inuit in the settlement avoided him for the most part. For all his special knowledge and privileges, he was a man caught between two worlds, belonging nowhere, with no particular affinities, a man not entirely to be trusted.
Josephie Flaherty had no desire to be white. What Josephie wanted was simple. He wanted his children to grow up strong, and to go out on the land and to catch seals and caribou and walrus as his stepfather and his grandfather and his grandfather's grandfather before him had done. He wanted his family to have enough to eat and to be able to support his stepfather when he got too old to hunt. And if all that had been straightforwardly, simply possible, then Josephie Flaherty would have been a happy man.
He rarely went out on the land now. For the most part his life was restricted to that small strip on the north bank of the Innuksuak River where the Radiosonde station stood. Without wishing to be, or even fully intending it, he and Rynee had become settlement Inuit, that small group of Inuit residents about whom the police and other
qalunaatwere
forever complaining and describing in reports as “scroungers” or “slum-dwellers.” Not that Josephie Flaherty had any time for scrounging. The Radiosonde station kept him fully occupied. Nor did he ever ask for anything more of his bosses than what little he was given, except, every now and then, a day or two to go out with Paddy Aqiatusuk hunting for seal, when the two men could feel the wind against their skin and the smell of the dogs in their nostrils and things were something like the old days. And it would have been quite unfair to describe his and Rynee's hut as a slum. True, it was stained with smuts and seal grease, true it smelled of uncured sealskin and fat, but every day Rynee took a goosewing and swept the place until it shined.
Very occasionally, Josephie was asked to act as guide on some Radiosonde expedition. One bright summer day finds him heading out to the quay with the radio operator, Freddy Woodrow, Tom
Manning from the Geodetic Service and two fellow Inuit, an oddity by the name of Noah, who wears an old top hat and has a reputation as a wifebeater, and Soralee, in whose Peterhead the group will travel. There are women washing sealskins down at the quay on that particular day, leaving pools of soap and milky water in the rock-pools beside the shore. The men pass them by, stopping to remark on the weather, the state of the char run, then clambering aboard Soralee's Peterhead, they stow the tents, the Coleman stove, the primus and the
qalunaat
paraphernalia on board and settle in for the journey. The going is good and by early afternoon they are tying up at the Hopewells, where Manning has some surveying to do. Having the remains of the day to themselves, the Inuit men take the Peterhead out char fishing, catch thirteen and get three seal into the bargain. Pitching camp at a respectful distance from the
qalunaat
, beside a tidal lake filled with foul-smelling seaweed on a rocky platform covered in saxifrage, they put out the fish to dry and dine on barbecued seal.
The following morning they head north, past patches of ice blink and water sky, where the drifts of pack ice still remain out in the channel. A sun dog throws a halo of yellow light across the clouds and a tribe of Ungava Canada geese fly by, honking. Soon the low coast of southern Ungava has risen into the grey cliffs of the northern peninsula, a landscape Josephie recalls from his youth but now seldom visits. They stop in the middle of the day on a lonely outcrop of rock, so that Manning can find eider eggs, and by early afternoon they are at sea once again, pressing north towards Cape Smith. There they are slowed by low-hanging cloud and cobwebs of rain-filled mist and decide to put in at the Cape Smith Hudson Bay Company detachment, a neat, white clapboard building in the shadow of a wall of barren pillow lava, where Noah proceeds to mug-up while Josephie and Soralee see to the boat and unpack the
qalunaat's
things. They stay up late that night, sitting on packing boxes, chewing over the old times, long gone and only sometimes missed, but missed sorely when they are. During the return journey
on the following day, the coastal cloud momentarily lifts and Jose-phie finds himself sailing past land which was once, not very long ago, so familiar he would have been hard-pressed to consider it as anything other than an element of himself, the rock skeleton on which his life's body is hung. But he is slipping up now, remembering inlets where there are none, imagining around the next headland some strong feature of his childhood which no longer exists, the landscape requiring a conscious calling to mind where there was once a simple sense of knowing.