The Long Exile (34 page)

If she was to have any chance in the world, Martha Flaherty quickly saw that she would have to get out. She was twelve years old, beautiful, bright as a button and as tough and as fragile as an egg. She was also determined to change her destiny. The moment she reached high school age, she applied to a residential school in Churchill and was accepted. Taking up her place meant leaving her
mother, her siblings and everything she now looked upon as home. But it also meant surviving. Martha packed her bag.

In Martha's absence, Rynee took the brunt of her husband's fearsome temper, his outlandish rages, his sullen depressions and bullying tantrums. For sweet, tiny, tough Rynee, separated from her family in Inukjuak, still penniless, living at the top of the world, and with six children to keep, there was no getting out. She was stuck with it. Her friends were sympathetic. No one in Grise Fiord had failed to notice the change in Josephie Flaherty but no one really understood it either. Those who believed in such things claimed that the old Greenlandic woman, Padloo, had raised a bad spirit by telling the story of Qimmingajak. Others said Josephie had been possessed by
nuliarsait
, the spirit wives who sew chaos inside people's heads. There was talk of
pibloktoq
, the Polar Madness, which was well known to afflict northern Greenlanders and dwellers at high latitudes. Certainly, Josephie exhibited many of the signs: mood swings, violent depressions and irrational thoughts. Some made a connection between
pibloktoq
and feelings of impotence, others put it down to the biorhythmic disturbances caused by the long dark period. Most people who knew Josephie had a more straightforward explanation. They said it was hardly surprising that a man whose father had abandoned him to such a fate as Josephie's would go crazy sooner or later. He was a dry stalk, they said, ripped from its root, unable to recall the time, long since past, when it had borne leaves and sprung back from the wind.

The son Robert Flaherty “never had” never got to see Inukjuak. In 1968, he had a mental breakdown, from which he never fully recovered and, in 1984, he died of lung cancer in Grise Fiord, caused, so his family said, by the burning his lungs had received during all those hunting expeditions on the sea ice. He was buried under a little cross in what is now a growing graveyard beside the airstrip, at the foot of Ellesmere's mountains.

T
HE DEATH
of Josephie Flaherty was, in part, a liberation for his daughter. For a long time, Martha Flaherty's overwhelming feeling was one of relief. In those last years of his life, he had caused too much unhappiness to be immediately missed. Much later when she understood more about his life then she would mourn him. But at the time a part of her was glad he was gone.

For all its benign intention, residential school had been a difficult experience. In many residential schools Inuit children were forbidden to speak their own language and had no means of contacting their parents or relatives. They were put beside Indian children, with whom, historically, they did not get along. The most common currency of discipline was beating. Fights, bullying and an atmosphere of threat and mutual hostility were the norm. Though most staff were doubtless well meaning, the schools attracted more than the usual helping of perverts and child predators. The children, whose own traditions were considered primitive, were taught southern history and southern customs. They fell prey to southern diseases. Many were returned to the north in flimsy clothes and shoes completely unsuited to the conditions, unable to speak the same language as their parents. Damaged by their experiences at the schools and often entirely ignorant of the Inuit way of life, the children found it hard to fit in, let alone to settle in the Arctic, but impossible to go back to the south. They became rootless and drifting, cut off by language
and by habit both from their families and from the traditions into which they had been returned. Residential school, for many, was residential hell.

Martha's experience had been as miserable as most, but it had taught her a great deal about the
qalunaat.
She had come to realise that, despite centuries of expeditions, the Arctic remained a fearful and enticing mystery to most of those who lived below the tree line. Even the more curious and better informed often based their notions of the north and its people on her grandfather, Robert Flaherty's, vision of the place. It seemed ironic that the global popularity of
Nanook
had served to freeze the Arctic and the people who lived in it, including Robert's own son and granddaughter, in a version of a past that never was, in a land that could never be. For Martha and her people, the north was a region of complex, dynamic conversations between ice, land and living things in which human beings were incidentals, at the centre only of their own lives. There were no heroes among the Inuit. There were only human beings getting by.

In their own environment, southerners suddenly seemed less powerful to Martha than they once had. For all their forests of buildings and human rookeries, the young Martha discerned that these southern men and women were often leading lives of almost unbearable sadness and isolation, living away from their families and from everything they knew, more deeply exiled, even, than the inhabitants of Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay, who at least recognised their banishment. To an Inuit mind, southern city life was not any kind of life to aspire to. Grise Fiord might well be frozen, but people's hearts somehow seemed warmer up there.

By the late sixties, Martha Flaherty had been through enough to sense that what her family had suffered was not in the usual run of things. Her brother Peter, half starved as a baby, was still afflicted, spending much of his time staring out to sea. Her sister Mary had not forgotten being taken from her parents. Then there was Martha
herself, a trembling child-hunter, bumping along on the sea ice doing her best to avoid the polar bears. How she felt for her mother, Rynee, whose smile did not come as fast now as it once did, bringing up so many children with so little and none of her family to help and with Josephie slowly going mad with anguish and frustration, it is difficult to say. Even now, she finds it hard to talk about it. For many years she could barely bring herself to think about Josephie.

For the Flahertys there was still no hope of going home though. From the late sixties on, a few families in Resolute Bay managed to get enough work at the air base to raise the cost of their airline tickets and, abandoning their homes and belongings, flew back to Inukjuak and settled there. Jackoosie Iqaluk and his family, who had looked after Mary Flaherty in Resolute Bay, returned in 1977. Jaybeddie Amagoalik left in 1979 and Paddy Aqiatusuk's stepson, Samwillie Elijasialuk, who had been given permission to move from Grise Fiord to Resolute Bay in the early sixties to look for a wife, arrived back in Inukjuak in the same year. Even by Canadian standards, the High Arctic to Inukjuak is quite a distance, the equivalent of moving, say, from New York City to Cuba, and Arctic travel is extremely expensive. The majority of the exiles, as they had begun to call themselves, still longed to return home but remained trapped in their isolated, icy prisons with no means to make the journey and with Department officials refusing to accept that they had any duty to help them.

For Martha Flaherty, returning to Grise Fiord felt too much like revisiting old wounds. She moved to Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories to study nursing, and wound up acting as a translator between Inuit patients and southern doctors, moving, as she had learned to do, between two worlds. Before long she joined the Northwest Territories Interpreters Corps and moved to Yellowknife. It was there, in the capital of the Northwest Territories, that Martha began to organise.

In 1973, a group of men and women representing Grise Fiord
and Resolute Bay wrote to Bob Pilot, who was then working in Yel-lowknife as an adviser to the Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, asking for help to get back to Inukujak. Pilot was one of the few
qalunaat
in the northern administration to have lived among the Inuit in the High Arctic and, unlike Ross Gibson, he had always seen himself as a social worker first and a lawman second. It was as a welfare-minded rookie policeman that he had witnessed at first hand what isolation, homesickness and hunger had done to the people of Grise Fiord. He was clear in his own mind that the Inuit had been promised a return to Inukjuak and sensed that, if it ever came to court, the federal government would have a case to answer. The arrival of the letter came as no surprise to him. His own view was that it would save time and trouble in the long run if the funds were found to help those people who wanted to return. Holding out would haunt the Department further down the line. With that in mind, he recommended that the government of the Northwest Territories organise a charter flight from Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay to Inukjuak so that the exiles could take a look at the homeland they had last seen twenty years before and decide whether or not they really did want to return. If they did, Pilot felt that the federal government should stump up the considerable expense attaching to such a move because it had been the federal government's idea to send the exiles north and the federal government which had promised, all those years ago, to help the Inuit get back home. In any case, it was the federal government which had most benefited from the settlements at Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay because they had helped to establish Canadian sovereignty in the region. Those families had planted the flag for Canada and Canada had a duty to return the favour.

Bob Pilot's plane never left the runway. Between them, the governments of the Northwest Territories and Quebec and the federal government in Ottawa could not agree on who should pay for the flight. They knew that whoever took the initial responsibility would be lumbered with the entire move and it would be difficult and
expensive. In any case, none of the governmental agencies were particularly troubled by the Inuit claim. Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay seemed a long way off. The exiles were easy to ignore.

It would take another twenty years, and numerous reports and appeals to the Department, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs, and the Canadian Rights Commission before the High Arctic exiles would get a just hearing.

All through those years, Martha Flaherty helped keep up the pressure, speaking at meetings, drafting letters, translating for those among the exiles who could not speak English, continuing to insist on the merit of the Inuit case, and refusing, despite the intransigence of the authorities, to be discouraged or turned away. Even when at times it would have been easier to capitulate, to label herself and her family hopeless victims and be done with it she refused to give up. Her experience among
qalunaat
had taught her that ignorance was no excuse for injustice, and she was now in no doubt that what had happened to her family had been unjust.

The federal government continued to insist otherwise. Its arguments rested on intent. A government report stated that “records indicate, quite simply, that there was no malice or wrongdoing by departmental officers in the relocation project… it is 37 years since the first people moved from Inukjuak to Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord. With the passage of time, the facts surrounding the project have become altered in the memories of the people concerned.” In spite of the overwhelming evidence against it, the federal government's official line was that it had no reason to apologise to the Inuit because its intentions had been benign. Even as it accepted that the move had been ill-prepared and those who had been moved had suffered emotional and physical stress it claimed that the Inuit were exaggerating or that their memories were playing tricks. In 1990, it finally agreed to help those who wanted to return to Inukjuak, but refused under any circumstances to pay the exiles compensation.

It was particularly ironic to accuse the Inuit of forgetting. A hundred and forty years before, a British rescue party looking for
the Franklin expedition, which had got lost in the Arctic the previous year, had begun talking to a group of Inuit on Baffin Island about Martin Frobisher's Arctic voyage of 1576. At that time the Inuit had no written language and had never recorded anything about the voyage on paper. Nonetheless, they seemed to know a great deal about it. Intrigued, the rescue party took notes and when they returned to England they checked the Inuit version of the story against the documentation and found that the former was not only a perfect rendition of the established facts, but also that it added credible detail to various of the official accounts which lacked it. Amazingly, the tale of the Frobisher expedition had been handed down by mouth from generation to generation of Inuit for nearly three hundred years without any loss of detail or accuracy. The Inuit are rememberers. They hold history fast to them. For anyone to suggest they have forgotten details of events within living memory was nothing short of fantastic.

What was being lost in this game of accusation and counter accusation was what had always been lost or trampled on or just plain neglected, which is to say, the opinions of ordinary Inuit. Over twenty years, reports had been commissioned, documents sifted through, legal opinions sought, but the Inuit had never been given a chance to bear witness in a formal setting, in circumstances where they would likely be heard. On 15 lanuary 1993, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in Ottawa attempted to set that right. It was all very well relying on documentary evidence, but, the Commission said, the documentary evidence was almost all from one side. The Commission undertook to hold a definitive series of hearings which would adjudicate on the matter for good. It would take testimony from the Inuit and from the various Departmental officials who had been involved at the time, as well as from police, experts and anyone else with a view to give. For the first time in its dealings with Inuit people, the government of Canada would find itself, in effect, on trial.