Nunavik

Like an iceberg, 1992, “Shots in the dark”

/ Jane George / Leave a comment

Like an iceberg, 1992: “Shots in the dark”

Months later, I went back in Puvirnituq, on my third visit. Since my first visit, I’d become obsessed with learning about the eastern Arctic and returning to Puvirnituq. To cover my expenses, nearly $2,000, then a huge amount,  and to help pay for my time, I cobbled together a mass of contract work for the French and English CBC radio networks and several newspapers.

Street view, Puvirnituq, 1992 It was late afternoon and the kids where I was staying during that 1992 visit were having an after-school snack in the kitchen. They were also listening to the radio, singing and dancing along with the music. There, as in almost every household in Puvirnituq, the community radio station remained on constantly.

In those days before Facebook, everyone used that radio network’s airwaves to discuss what was on their minds, in Inuktitut, and also to play music from Inuit bands and singers. CKPV, the local station, played songs whose Inuktitut words everyone — but me — appeared to know by heart. And these songs were sung by Inuit singers everyone knew.

If there had been a top-10 ranking of hits here in 1992, a song called “My boyfriend” would have been number one. Everyone hummed its haunting melody and lyrics.

The song, which, in 1992, tells a simple story:

When we first met

Not too long ago

We laughed.

But one day you came and said you

Wanted to get rid of me

I dreamed about having fun with you

And I woke up thinking it was true

But it was only a dream.

But during that stay in Puvirnituq, in the middle of the night, when the radio had gone off the air, everyone was dreaming, and the snow was falling, I also learned that bad things could happen that no one would learn about until the next morning.

Children play in front of the Inuulitsivik Health Centre, 1992. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Children play in front of the Inuulitsivik Health Centre, 1992. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

One night, someone fired a bullet into the Inuulitsivik Health Centre. The hospital, a silvery-metal spaceship built in 1987, ended up with a hole through one of its thick windows.

That’s why Amélie has came to work late. Amélie was a nurse. She’d been up all night because her Inuk sister-in-law, Nora, called her during the early hours of the morning. She said a drunken man with a gun was holding her, another woman and a baby hostage.

“She called, she said ‘Come, help, come here now!’ So, I said, ‘who’s speaking?’ She said, ‘Come here now!’ And I was hearing in the back, yelling,” Amélie said later.

Her sister-in-law told Amélie where they were.

“I pushed my boyfriend. I said, ‘We have to go! There’s two women and a baby in that house! We got to do something.’”

They left on their all-terrain vehicle, passed the house, and the gunman shot at them.

“The four-wheeler was doing zig-zags so that he wouldn’t shoot us,” Amélie said.

By then, it was 4 a.m. They tried calling the police, but there was no answer. So, Amélie and her boyfriend went to the hotel, knocking on doors until they found a visiting provincial police officer from the Sûreté du Québec.

“So, we get to the police station, the truck is broken, there’s no truck, [and] by that time it’s five o’clock,” she said. “It looks like we have no protection. It takes so long to have the police coming.”

By the time the police arrived, the women, with the baby, had fled. The house was trashed, and the gunman had passed out in a chair.

M., the policeman, later told me he was too scared to do anything. That’s why he didn’t answer the phone. In the tiny trailer that served as Puvirnituq’s police station, M. pointed out bullet holes in the curtain.

He said he was already traumatized from having to answer calls alone and he’d decided he’d no longer do it. For an entire year, he worked by himself in Puvirnituq, the sole full-time police officer.

“I was alone at the time, and most of that time, I was scared. I had nobody to call to, especially in the morning. Nobody to call to. I was alone. That was why I was afraid,” he said, stuttering.

Back at the hospital, work went on the next day despite the bullet hole in the window.

At the entrance, people shook snow off their parkas and boots and left them there. A reception area stood midway along a circular hallway running around the hospital, which broke off into corridors, like spokes on a wheel. Huge soapstone carvings were on display in cases and appliquéd wall hangings with images of Arctic animals decorated the walls.

The chief hospital administrator, Aani Tulugak, sat in her office, looking out the window, down a street lined with houses, all built within the past 15 years, leading to where the village ended and the land took over.

She said Puvirnituq’s problems began in the 1960s and 1970s when people first moved near the community and began to enjoy a life with little responsibility. Inuit, who had lived difficult lives on the land, suddenly were freed from the daily struggle to survive when government moved in to improve conditions.

“They played. They danced. They watched movies. They went to bingo games. They played cards … all night. They visited all night and the kids were left. They had to go to school in the morning. They were left by themselves at home or outside, because there was no danger in those days in the community. There were only a few houses. The parents didn’t worry about violence or drinking in the community. There was none of that. It was so innocent.”

But those children, who wandered around unattended around the village, are today’s angry adults, she said. Government policies didn’t help.

“When they came into the community, the government said, ‘we’ll settle you in the communities. We’ll take care of you. We’ll give you housing. We’ll give you your family allowance cheques, your welfare cheques. You can send your kids to school all day. You won’t have much to do and you can expect good things from your children because we will educate them and they will have good jobs after that. They will be able to take care of you when you’re in your old age.’

“I mean, they were taking all responsibility from the parents,” Aani said.

A community meeting in the school gymnasium was called that evening to discuss the community’s latest violent incident.

Puvirnituq's school in 1991, which was replaced by the Iguarsivik School. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Puvirnituq’s school in 1991, which was replaced by the Iguarsivik School. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

More than 100 people of every age turned up, women in amautiit parkas and elders wearing sealskin boots who walked with difficulty. The gym was full.

One by one, men and women took the microphone in front and talked about the violence. Municipal councillors sat and took notes. All the comments were in Inuktitut, which a bilingual woman helped me understand.

Nora, one of the two women who held hostage by the gun-toting man, later told me that she was angry at the police for arriving too late to help.

“With their uniforms, they disgust me! Why are they in their uniforms? Who are they? They’re just renting their uniform or they’re getting paid to use the uniform? Do your job. I hate to say it, but this is my community,” she said.

“You tell me people, they don’t even know what justice is about. When we call for help in the night, an hour later maybe they come. I needed help. I wanted help. They don’t come.”

Nora said she wasn’t impressed by what people said at the public meeting, either. She said that’s what always happens: People talk about an incident after it happens, then their determination to change things just disappears. She said people pointed fingers at everyone but themselves.

“Too much denial. In anything, you have to hit bottom to be able to get back up and say that this is enough. It’s sad to say it, but if we’d hit bottom, there would have been things happening. Things would have changed,” she said.

The problem, Nora thinks, is that most people don’t take enough responsibility for themselves. Inuit have to repair the damage in their communities themselves, she said.

“They have to help themselves before we can be helped. We have to realize, we cannot receive, receive and receive and have people put bandages on us. We have to know how to heal it. We have to know how not to cut ourselves.”

The next installment of “Like an iceberg” goes live April 7.

You can find the first installment  from April 2 here.

Other previous instalments are here:

Like an iceberg, 1991…cont.

Like an iceberg, 1991…more

A giant iceberg off the coast of northern Baffin Island. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

A giant iceberg off the coast of northern Baffin Island. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

 

Like an iceberg, 1991…more

/ Jane George / 3 Comments
The Migration by Puvirnituq carver and printmaker Joe Talirunili. Talirunili's carving depicts an event when the boat on which he was travelling was nearly trapped by crushing ice in Hudson Bay. (PHOTO/ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO)

The Migration by Puvirnituq carver and printmaker Joe Talirunili. Talirunili’s carving depicts an event when the boat on which he was travelling was nearly trapped by crushing ice in Hudson Bay. (PHOTO/ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO)

1991: cont. from April 3

The night I met Peter Murdoch it was frigid and windy. I looked out of the window at J.’s apartment in Puvirnituq, and I could barely see the lights from the nearby houses. I’d arranged to meet Murdoch at the hotel, but I didn’t know where it was, so J. called the hospital van, which picked me up.

A view down a street in Puvirnituq with the Inuulitsivik Health Centre to the right. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

A view down a street in Puvirnituq, with the Inuulitsivik Health Centre to the right. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

I pushed the heavy metal doors, and headed tentatively down the narrow, carpeted hallway to what seemed to be the hotel’s communal kitchen.

“I’m looking for Peter Murdoch?” I said.

“You’ve found him,” said an older non-Inuit man, who resumed speaking Inuktitut to a younger Inuk.

“You speak Inuktitut!” I said.

“Even five-year-olds here speak it. So what’s so unusual about me?” Murdoch said.

We went into his small hotel room to talk, just a narrow bed, chest of drawers, a lamp, snow layered against the single window on the outside wall. Murdoch  — a tall man, maybe in his 60s, balding hair and a nervous habit of clearing his throat that I ended up editing out of every taped interview. I knew nothing about Murdoch, so he told me about himself.

In 1991, he was the general manager of the Fédération des Co-opératives du Nouveau-Québec, then an association of 12 co-operatives in northern Quebec.

But he had started off as a Hudson’s Bay Co. employee back in the 1940s. Then, as a young man from Newfoundland, he was sent to Baffin Island to run trading posts. And, he learned Inuktitut and the Inuit way of life.

“I enjoyed hunting a lot, going out with people, seeing the way they lived,” Murdoch said. “Visiting in tents, learning the language. I never tried to learn it. If someone told me something, I just remembered it.”

Often he was the only white man in a settlement. In Pond Inlet, on the northern coast of Baffin Island, he’d spend the long days of spring and summer out on the land, sometimes walking for days. He found a people with values he admired.

“When I first came to the North I was lucky. I came early enough to see people living the old type of life,” Murdoch said. “Their ability to accept people as they were, their ability to share, to be completely non-judgmental, let everyone be what they wanted, their ability to live with time — if there was nothing to do, they did it gracefully, did it well and enjoyed it. When things were tough, no one complained. You accepted your life as it came and I felt then that we could have learned a lot from the Inuit and the ways they relate to each other.”

As he spoke, I was brought back to a North that seemed almost a perfect society.

“The only thing that made a person an outcast,” Murdoch said, “was if he was a danger to the rest of the people. Then, they would react to get rid of that person. You didn’t see problems until after people moved into communities in the ‘50s.”

Murdoch first came to Puvirnituq with the Hudson Bay Co. in the early 1950s, when people were still living on the land in camps, not far from the trading post. In Pond Inlet, thousands of seals could be found on the ice year-round, but in Puvirnituq, he found a much poorer environment.

The fledgling community then consisted of a trading post, a dwelling, a small shack and a couple of snow houses. That’s all there was. Two small camps were located within walking distance, one with eight or 10 snow houses, the other with four or five. People were hungry. There was a lot of sickness. At that time people would sell a small carving for tea, the next day for flour or lard to make bannock.

“Sort of a dead-end sort of life,” he told me.

Murdoch walked around the camps, bringing medicine, getting to know the people.

“Here you had a group of Inuit living for the next meal. Just what you can get for the next meal. Yet, in talking, they were articulate, intelligent. So, we tried to find a better way.”

That better way was to try and pool resources to invest in purchases that would improve the standard of living for everyone, like buying a new boat or more ammunition.

Part of all sales from carvings would be used collectively — and the camps would decide what do. An election was held, and the camps voted a leader. It was all self-motivated, Murdoch said. It was the beginning of the co-operative movement in northern Quebec.

“It was never,” he said with emphasis, “a community development project” — the kind of government-sponsored projects that are imposed from the South by people from the South.

The market for soapstone carvings was just beginning in the South when Murdoch visited those camps. And sales of carvings would be the base of the co-operatives that grew up at the same time that Inuit were moving off the land, into communities. Inuit in Puvirnituq were good carvers, he said.

“They idealized hunting because there was so little game. It came out in the art and Puvirnituq became quite quickly known for its realism, with a dream-like quality.”

Peter Murdoch in 1992, then the general manager of the Fédération des co-operatives du Nouveau-Québec, stands by a shelf full of carvings from the Nunavik community of Kangirsuk on display at the showroom of the FCNQ headquarters in Baie d'Urfé, Quebec. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Peter Murdoch in 1992, then the general manager of the Fédération des Co-opératives du Nouveau-Québec, stands by a shelf full of carvings from the Nunavik community of Kangirsuk on display at the showroom of the FCNQ headquarters in Baie d’Urfé, Quebec. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

I knew little about Inuit art the night I spoke with Murdoch, but I was wondering why the print shop closed. I had climbed through snowdrifts to reach this small building, now locked and boarded over.

Murdoch told me that it was because welfare pays more than art today. The recession in the South had cut art sales. Printing was an expensive operation, so it was the first casualty. Now, the co-operatives couldn’t afford to buy all the carvings that are produced, so people were giving up carving, too. There had been 60 carvers in Puvirnituq a few years earlier. When I met Murdoch, only about 10 men seriously carved.

“If this was happening to wheat farmers, there would be something done,” Murdoch said. “But there is nothing done for the Inuit, nothing. Here, we see a whole way of life, a whole group of people turning from being self-supporting to a welfare society. There is no economy except what they can do with their hands or tourism. Everything is tied to the southern economy, and it’s magnified in the North.”

The co-ops were suffering too in 1991, because, to keep consumer prices reasonable, they needed to have some other source of revenue as a subsidy, Murdoch said.

But the co-operative way of doing things, he said, was no longer being encouraged by government, as it was in the 1960’s, and Inuit themselves were becoming drawn to the new development corporations that feed on land-claim settlement money.

That night Murdoch brought me from an idyllic past where Inuit life was tough, but pure, almost a reflection of the stereotypical soapstone imagery, back to today’s difficult, modern reality. He was telling me that there was a battle being fought between big forces, different ways of thinking, of living, of doing business. Inuit may be the casualties, and no one’s doing or saying anything, he said. Inuit strengths are disappearing. Murdoch’s disillusionment struck through me, like a bolt.

“We can destroy them very easily as a people,” he said. “Or we could help them. We could see their value. We could develop that, help them. I don’t think that we are that concerned about their survival. If we don’t change that, there is no future for the Inuit, as a race, as a culture. They are finished.”

After two hours of listening to Murdoch, I ended the interview. I didn’t know much then about Inuit and the co-operative movement he worked for, but I was moved by his vision. On my way back from the hotel to J.’s, I almost got lost, stumbling through the snow, following the pale lights from the windows of houses and the howling dogs as guides.

I did my first short radio documentary for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s national radio network on Peter Murdoch and the plight of Inuit carvers in the North.

But a producer in Toronto said “why should we care about this? A few Inuit that don’t have enough money for new snowmobiles?” and killed the piece.

The late Puvirnituq sculptor Eli Sallualu Qinuajua explored surrealism in many of his carvings, which include this carving called “Fantastic Figure." (IMAGE/ AGO)

The late Puvirnituq sculptor Eli Sallualu Qinuajua explored surrealism in many of his carvings, which include this carving called “Fantastic Figure.” (IMAGE/ AGO)

Like an iceberg continues April 5 with 1992, “Shots in the dark.”

You can read the first entry here.