Eskimos' Harsh Life In Great Dark North -- Many Inuit Say Relocation Broke Promises

RESOLUTE BAY, Northwest Territories - The minute Simeoni Amarualik stepped off the icebreaker d'Iberville onto this desolate high arctic beach in September 1953, he knew something was very, very wrong.

The housing the Eskimo families had been promised by the government was nowhere in evidence. Neither was the hunting equipment, traps and supplies. And, above all, it was dark.

"They said it was pretty good hunting up here," said Amarualik, whose family had been uprooted from Inukjuak, 1,200 miles to the south in Quebec. "They didn't say anything about the darkness."

Ross Gibson, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable who accompanied the four families to this frigid bay on Cornwallis Island, vividly remembers the scene as the icebreaker pulled away.

"There were howling dogs and crying babies," says Gibson, now 70 and retired in British Columbia. "As I watched that ship pull out, I said, `My God, what have I got myself into.' "

Another 270 miles to the northeast, at Craig Harbour on the south coast of Ellesmere Island, Sam Arnakallak and five other families were put ashore to fend for themselves in a harsher climate than most had ever experienced.

"It just wasn't well-planned," Arnakallak says. "There was nobody to turn to. Basically what we wanted was some wood so we could build something. That's the least they could have done."

The surviving hunters and their descendants now claim they were part of a government social experiment and plan to bolster Canadian sovereignty in its arctic islands. They are demanding an official apology, acknowledgment of the role they played in the north and $10 million in compensation for hardships suffered.

The government has rejected claims by the Eskimos, who prefer to be called Inuit, saying Ottawa's motives were humanitarian and that the families were rescued from a crowded region of northern Quebec where game was scarce and conditions deteriorating.

"To suggest that these people were cast ashore in rags is just bull promulgated by somebody who wants to sensationalize the story for I don't know what purpose," huffs Richard Van Loon, senior assistant deputy minister for Indian and northern affairs.

REPORT: BROKEN PROMISES

In January, a report for the federal Human Rights Commission concluded the government had failed to provide adequate housing and other facilities and broken its promise to the Inuit families that they could return after two years if they wanted to.

The report recommended Ottawa pay for the return of families who so desired, officially acknowledge and thank the Inuit for their contribution to sovereignty, and apologize for the hardships. But it stopped short of endorsing compensation claims.

"I want the media to know that we are not angry with the government," Amarualik says in the kitchen of his modest home here. "We have nothing against the government, but we want to sit down with the government and get what is owed to us."

In 1953, officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police selected seven families from Inukjuak, a village on the east coast of Hudson Bay. All were volunteers.

Also chosen were three families from Pond Inlet, a high arctic community on the northern end of Baffin Island.

The 10 families, 51 people, were relocated to Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord. In 1955, a second group of seven families, 40 people, were relocated to the same two villages.

PLAN FOR INSTRUCTION

The plan was that the hunters from Pond Inlet would instruct their southern Inuit brethren on how to hunt and survive in a far northern land that is dark four months of the year.

Simon Akpaliapik, who was 32 in 1953, was one of the best hunters in the Pond Inlet region and was not averse to a little adventure.

"That's precisely why we decided to go," says Akpaliapik, a diminutive man, his face now weathered and cracked from many years of arctic winds and sun glare off the snow and ice. "It sounded like it was going to be a lot of fun.

Things didn't work out that way. It was 1983 before Akpaliapik made it back home to Pond Inlet, a beautiful village nestled on the south shore of Baffin Island's eclipse sound.

Recalling his arrival almost 40 years ago, Akpaliapik says, "We were just dumped on the beach. There was absolutely nothing. There was none of the material we were supposed to get. No fuel for the Colemans. Just some dried musk ox meat and some skins."

The groups in Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord had to hunt every day to keep enough meat coming in to feed the people and dogs. Because they had to hunt every day for survival, they were unable to spend much time trapping. Thus they were not able to acquire trade goods.

The people from Quebec were not terribly good hunters in the beginning, and were not familiar with the kind of wildlife available here.

"They didn't know how to hunt walrus, whales, and they really didn't know how to hunt seals in the winter," Akpaliapik recalls. "That first winter, we just had the bare essentials. We lived in tents covered with musk ox hides."

Amarualik acknowledged that nobody starved during that first winter at Resolute Bay, "but they were very hungry."

Despite the hardships of the first year or two, most of the people who relocated concede that life eventually improved. They learned new ways and people in both communities prospered. Many of the descendants of the original families are now quite happy.

The treatment of the settlers emerged as a political issue in 1982. That was when John Amagoalik, leader of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, an Inuit lobby group, sought government help in returning families to Inukjuak.

Since then, a number of individuals, groups and academics have claimed the government had secret motives in relocating the Inuit.

"The government of Canada lied to us. They broke their promises, our human rights were violated up in the high arctic, and for those reasons they must pay compensation," says Amagoalik. "It certainly didn't improve our lives. We moved from a location where we knew the land, knew the animals. It was like landing on the moon."

A WRONG TO BE RIGHTED

Rosemarie Kuptana, president of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, says the relocation "is a wrong and now we want to have it righted."

Van Loon, the deputy minister, conceded that "the first winter they were there was undoubtedly a very difficult winter, and I think there were some real planning and implementation problems.

"I'm sorry to be a little hard about this, but there are other instances in Canadian history and American history where hardships have been faced."

Numerous documents reveal Canadian concerns about sovereignty in the arctic. Those include a Norwegian challenge in the 1930s, incursions by Greenlanders into Ellesmere Island, and not the least, the fact that at the time there were more American military personnel in the Canadian arctic than Canadians.

Shelagh Grant, a professor of history at Trent University who has done a study of the relocation, says "documents confirm that concern for sovereignty was the primary motive for the government's choice of the Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay locations in the 1953 resettlement project."

Other documents refer to the project as "a pioneer experiment to determine if Eskimos can be induced to live on the northern islands which, relics indicate, once supported a native population."

Allie Salluviniq, who was resettled in Resolute Bay as a child, says the intent of the government could have been genuine concern over the poor conditions in northern Quebec, but that sovereignty clearly played a role.

"They could have located us in a warmer climate where there was more daylight, maybe in south Baffin," Salluviniq says. "It didn't have to be the high arctic.

"Why doesn't the government want to admit that something was not right? They apologized and compensated the Japanese interned during World War II, but the aboriginals of Canada are not satisfied."