arctic

Like an iceberg, 1994: “Seals and more”

/ Jane George / Leave a comment

Like an iceberg, 1994: “Seals and more”

I decided to return to Pangnirtung in the middle of February 1994. The sun had just begun to come back into this Baffin Island community. For months, the sun had lingered below the horizon. Now it was rising higher every day.

Pangnirtung fiord in February 1994. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Pangnirtung fiord in February 1994. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

In mid-afternoon, a bit of sun peeked over the ridge of the mountains, casting long shadows in town. Most of the day, the snow-covered mountains still hovered in a perennial dawn. They were pinkish, with constantly changing flashes of yellow. I never tired of this vista. One day, we took a walk out on the frozen fiord, among the blocks of ice that created a cold, white forest.

Margaret Karpik, the director of the Visitors Centre, took me to visit her mother, Ida Karpik, a well-known artist: I was doing a report for CBC radio on the revival of sealskin trade.

Ida and a few other local women were gathered in the qammaq, a traditional tent-like structure, to work sealskins and sew. On its ceiling and walls, old newspapers and catalogues had been glued, helter-skelter, for wallpaper. In the corner, in the stone qulliq lamp a low fire burns. Moss was used as the wick, seal oil as the fuel.

Margaret Karpik (left), with her mother Ida Karpik (right), in the women's qammaq in February 1994. Karpik, a renowned artist, died in 2002 at 63. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Margaret Karpik (left), with her mother Ida Karpik (right), in the women’s qammaq in February 1994. Karpik, a renowned artist, died in 2002 at 63. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

With Margaret helping to translate, Ida explained why sealskin was ideal for clothes, especially for jackets or boots that are warm in the cold and waterproof in the damp weather.

The hard work it takes to make sealskin into clothes is worth it, she said. I also spent a peaceful afternoon scraping a skin, watching her and the other women work and listening to their conversation.

In Pangnirtung, two local men were also trying to revive trade in sealskins. Only 15 years earlier, the market for sealskins had been strong, but that was before environmental lobby groups protested against the annual seal hunt and the United States slapped a ban on the import of sealskins. From Baffin Island alone, Inuit used to sell 15,000 sealskins. By the mid-1990s, not even a tenth of that amount were sold.

But Jaypeetee Akpalialuk and Michael Murphy told me they were planning to send skins over to Hokkaido, in Japan, where the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan, would use them in their clothing and handicrafts. Akpalialuk  was then the mayor of Pangnirtung. Without seal meat, he told me, Inuit would never have been able to live in the North. It would be too cold without sealskin clothes to wear, and seal to eat, he said.

“When you’re out on the land and the temperature is -40, you don’t have time to eat, but your body needs energy. It needs energy and you have to be warm. So, when we eat raw seal meat when it’s very cold, your body starts to get warm. Seal meat is very rich, and seal meat is the best thing in the North,” he said. “And sealskin is one of the best clothing you can have. You can wear it in summer, in winter. You can wear it just about anywhere. It’s waterproof, it lasts a long time, it’s one of the best materials you can have for clothing.”

Akpalialuk said critics of the seal hunt have it all wrong: Their seal harvest doesn’t even make a dent in the population.

“As Inuit, too, we’ve never been over-killing any species up here. Outsiders have been harvesting our species. Europeans came over to Baffin Island in the 1800’s and over-killed the bowhead. We never overkill. We always managed the resources according to our knowledge,” he said.

And Inuit aren’t inhumane, either, he said. They don’t kill seals like Newfoundlanders: They nearly always just shoot them quickly with a gun.

Although the elder Etooangat had told me Inuit also used to hunt seals with hooks, one thing was certain: The seal ban had been a disaster for his community.

“Most Inuit were depending on hunting sealskins for a living, it was the major income for Inuit. Once the market was killed, people suffered. There’s not too many jobs up here, they couldn’t buy food, purchase equipment, so some of them had to depend on welfare. The way I see it, the government of Canada didn’t do too much about it. I guess they didn’t care,” Akpalialuk said.

Akpalialuk and Murphy took me to the sealift container where they were storing sealskins. Murphy, then a singer and local cable television company owner, said he thought that Canadians are ready for sealskin.

“This whole veil of anger at the sealing trade is beginning to lift,” Murphy said. “And I believe that Canadians are distinguishing between the major company and the small guy who is taking the meat for his family, and now, you can have his skins. Isn’t it fair and just that a man should be able to use that product without throwing it in the dump? It’s a sustainable, renewable resource when harvested properly.”

But their project to renew the sealskin trade never took off. Two years later, Akpalialuk was dead. He drowned in a drainage ditch in Kuujjuaq, while intoxicated — his death one of a string of alcohol-related deaths that year which led this Nunavik community to clamp down on liquor sales. Murphy ended up in Ottawa, where, at one time, he faced charges of arson connection with the burning of a small privately-owned fish plant in Pangnirtung.

The timeless triangle of the mountains at the end of Pangnirtung’s fiord remains the same, and Inuit continue to face obstacles to marketing sealskins abroad.

And everyone still takes seal hunting seriously.

“The seals are on the ice” was one of the first phrases I ever learned in Inuktitut.

“But never say that unless you mean it,” a friend warned me. “Because everyone in the room will jump up and run out!”

The next instalment of “Like an iceberg” goes live April 15.

You can read the first blog entry of “Like an iceberg” from April 2 here.

You can read previous instalments here:

Like an iceberg: on being a journalist in the Arctic

Like an iceberg, 1991…cont.

Like an iceberg, 1991…more

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

Like an iceberg, 1992, “Sad stories”

Like an iceberg, 1993, “Learning the language of the snows”

Like an iceberg, 1993 cont., “Spring”

Like an iceberg, 1993 cont., “Chesterfield Inlet”

Like an iceberg, 1993 cont., more “Chesterfield Inlet”

 

 

Like an iceberg, 1993 cont., more “Chesterfield Inlet”

/ Jane George / 1 Comment

1993, “Chesterfield Inlet,” continued:

“Right now, I can’t forgive,”  a former student told me during an interview at the reunion of former students of Sir Joseph Bernier School, held July 1993 in Chesterfield Inlet.

The reunion took place in the community’s recreation centre, erected on the site of Turquetil Hall, the student residence that had been torn down 10 years previously. During the day it was hot — with temperatures in the mid-20s. Mosquitoes, dull with the heat, flew around.

“Being six years old and sexually molested here, I know the feeling of being trapped. I hate what he did to me,” the man said.

This sign commemorates Turquetil Hall in Chesterfield Inlet. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

This sign commemorates Turquetil Hall in Chesterfield Inlet. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Outside the centre, I was sitting and talking with this tall, good-looking man. As we spoke, it was as if he was reliving the bad memories of his school days here, when he arrived as an innocent six-year-old.

Soon after he arrived at the school he was sexually abused, he said in a quiet, slow voice.

“Dead, dead inside, that’s what I felt. Pain. Hurt. I don’t know if I had anger because I couldn’t distinguish between anger, hurt and pain at that time.

“When they did something to you that was so filthy, there’s no feeling, just hurt. Never mind the physical pain.”

I tried to focus on what he said and the buzzing of the mosquitoes as he spoke.

“We had no protection …I’m not going to go to heaven if I tell the secret … pray like hell. That’s what we were taught and God’s going to forgive the wrong things you did. Over 30 years later, the pain’s still here. Was it my sin? I don’t think so.”

During the reunion some of that pain surfaced. In the gymnasium, a terrible keening arose when they mourn the loss of a former student killed by her spouse, also a former student.

But there were other lighter moments. One night during the reunion there was a talent show. Residents of Chesterfield Inlet also turned out. A large flat drum was placed in the centre of the gym. Men and women took turns picking up the drum  and singing traditional Inuit a-ya-ya songs. Some former students never learned how to dance well when they were at residential school. As they reclaimed those lost years, they got up, took the drum and sang.

The morning always came too early. At 3 a.m., the sun made our tents glow. Returning students didn’t seem to sleep at all. An early morning walk brought us in front of the place where they used to line up every day to sing “O Canada.”

The Catholic Mission Hospital of St. Therese in Chesterfield Inlet, which contained 30 beds, was once the largest building in the Eastern Arctic. (PHOTO FROM WIKIPEDIA COMMONS)

The Catholic Mission Hospital of St. Therese in Chesterfield Inlet, which contained 30 beds, was once the largest building in the eastern Arctic. (PHOTO FROM WIKIPEDIA COMMONS)

Nearby was the former hospital, built 60 years ago, a three-story building with a flat roof. Old wagon wheels, painted white and red, beside the entrance, like reminders of a time, not so long ago, when this was the missionaries’ frontier. Above the door, a statue of the Virgin Mary. The former St. Therese Hospital was, for many years, the largest building in the eastern Arctic. I asked for a tour.

“It was built on a rock,” to last forever, said Sister Naja Isabelle, one of the Grey Nuns who then still took care of severely handicapped children in the former hospital. “And with only the annual sealift to bring in supplies, the hospital had to be entirely self-sufficient.”

Enormous reservoirs for fuel and water filled the basement. A generator supplied power. For years, the nuns kept the only chicken coop in the Arctic. And, even now, there was a greenhouse, with lush-looking lettuce and other vegetables.

“Last year, we had three meals from potatoes here,” Sister Isabelle said.

We toured the entire building, visiting the handicapped children. Their rooms were bright and cheerful, with posters depicting each child’s family, likes and dislikes posted above their beds. Paulusi, deaf and blind, was Sister Isabelle’s favourite. She picked him up and he giggled.

Sister Isabelle gave me a copy of a book on the life of their order’s founder, Ste. Marguérite d’Youville: I felt ready to take my vows.

I ate lunch at the mission with Bishop Reynald Rouleau. His diocese, the largest in Canada, covers two million square kilometres, 24 eastern Arctic communities. Bishop Rouleau, who chain-smoked as we talked, said he was depressed after revelations made during the reunion and the demands from residential school survivors for financial compensation from the church.

“The [Roman Catholic] Church seems like a powerful big thing,” Rouleau said. “I suppose the Church was that kind of institution. But I don’t have much power. I survive. Things have changed.”

Later that week, he did issue an apology, but it fell short of satisfying former students.

“During the last 35 years there have been many changes in the world and very rapid ones in the Canadian North. The school was only one agent of change and its role in all the changes that have taken place will be determined by history,” he said.

“I hope that this reunion has been a step in the right direction to help us all progress forward in order to respond to the social and spiritual challenges facing the people of Nunavut.”

Sister Vicky was also staying at the mission. She once taught at the federal school. I asked her how she felt during the reunion. She said she had been in a state of shock.

“All week, I knew everyone that went to speak. I knew them when they were eight, 10 or 15. I said how can it be? And I understand that if someone’s abused, that everything before or after it, it doesn’t count,” she said.

But Sister  Vicky said she didn’t think it was right to hate the Catholic church for what was done.

“If your brother hits you, are you going to hit your mother and dad and brothers and sisters and uncle? You’ll hate them for the rest of your life? The church is not a building — it’s just people.”

Sister Vicky said she was furious at Brother Parent. He was well loved, she said, a storyteller who fooled them all. In going through mementos from her years at Chesterfield Inlet, she found his photo and tore it into pieces.

“I throw it in the garbage. I say, ‘good for you.’ That’s hate. ‘What you did is terrible.’ He never hurt me, but he hurt people I love, small children, so this is how I feel.”

Not far from the village, small groupings of stones went unnoticed during the reunion. These were remains of the ancient Thule people, who once lived here. Beside the foundations of their vanished homes, there were rectangular depressions where sod was cut for walls.

Former students searched for the outlines of Turquetil Hall, still visible around the edge of the recreational complex. The old foundation was almost as hard to see as those at the Thule site, but for them, the marks were clear.

Missed the first part of “Chesterfield Inlet”? Read it here.

“Like an iceberg” returns April 14.

You can read the first blog entry of “Like an Iceberg” from April 2 here.

Other previous instalments are here:

Like an iceberg: on being a journalist in the Arctic

Like an iceberg, 1991…cont.

Like an iceberg, 1991…more

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

Like an iceberg, 1992, “Sad stories”

Like an iceberg, 1993, “Learning the language of the snows”

Like an iceberg, 1993 cont., “Spring”

Like an iceberg, 1993 cont., “Chesterfield Inlet”

Here's a detail from the stained glass window commemorating the legacy of Indian Residential Schools. This stained glass window, designed by Métis artist Christi Belcourt, is permanently installed in Centre Block on Parliament Hill. “In 2008, on behalf all Canadians, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a formal Apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools, their families and communities that acknowledged the impacts of those schools,” AANDC's former minister John Duncan said in November 2012. “Today we continue on the path of reconciliation as we dedicate this new stained glass window. The window is a visible reminder of the legacy of Indian Residential Schools; it is also a window to a future founded on reconciliation and respect.” (PHOTO COURTESY OF AAND)

Here’s a detail from the stained glass window commemorating the legacy of Indian Residential Schools. This stained glass window, designed by Métis artist Christi Belcourt, is permanently installed in Centre Block on Parliament Hill. “In 2008, on behalf all Canadians, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a formal Apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools, their families and communities that acknowledged the impacts of those schools,” AANDC’s former minister John Duncan said in November 2012. “Today we continue on the path of reconciliation as we dedicate this new stained glass window. The window is a visible reminder of the legacy of Indian Residential Schools; it is also a window to a future founded on reconciliation and respect.” (PHOTO COURTESY OF AANDC)