by James Raffan
It had taken the ingenuity and imagination of Angulalik—Angut for short—Pedersen, a young man from Kugluktuk, to inspire this unlikely connection between North and South. Back in 2004, a teacher from his school in Kugluktuk had crossed paths with a staff member from Upper Canada College in Toronto on a beach in Mexico one holiday season. Surprising as it may sound, they found a possible match between a new Aboriginal scholarship and a promising middle school Inuk from Kugluktuk. The next thing Angut knew, he was flying to Toronto to do his high school education at UCC on a full scholarship. From the moment he arrived in Toronto, he dreamt of one day taking some of his southern classmates to his northern home.
We were sixteen in total in eight canoes. My participation with these youth came about after Angut’s geography teacher at UCC, Craig Parkinson, suggested he contact me about helping to find some sponsors for the journey. I’d written a letter of support, saying what a fine idea I thought this cross-cultural expedition to be. Angut got the funding. I had offered, but in jest, to come along, so I was surprised but delighted to receive an invitation to join the trip.
In the group were three guides from a company of outfitters; Craig with four students and a parent from the South; Kenny, with five students from the North, including Angut; and me. The problem of challenging the rapids with a crew that had a potentially disastrous range of canoeing expertise (from extensive to none) was adeptly handled by the guides; they paired novices with experienced paddlers in six canoes and then, in an ingenious bit of problem solving, plopped the most fearful expeditioners in an almost unsinkable catamaran—lovingly called the party barge—made of two 5.5-metre blue canoes lashed together, with the senior guide at the helm.
One of the first issues to be worked out was trail hygiene. Colin Smith, the chief guide, gathered everyone around and tackled the delicate topic of elimination. “These,” he said, holding up two blue waterproof sacks, “are the poo bags. Each one contains a trowel and toilet paper, some paper bags and one plastic bag. The trowel you use to make a small hole in the active layer of the tundra. If you use paper, and we might recommend that you don’t, but if you do, we’d request that you place your used toilet paper into one of these paper bags. Then put the paper bag into the plastic bag. And, at the end of the day, after the dinner is cooked, one of the chores we’ll all have to attend to is to empty the plastic bag and burn all the paper bags.” No one said anything, although by the look on Kenny’s face—he had spent a good portion of his thirty-four years on the land doing what bears do in the woods without the benefit of bags of any kind—I could see that he was trying hard to comprehend why all of this might be necessary.
Colin continued. “Now, about washing. You can use sand in the river to wash your hands, which works quite well. But if you’re doing any washing with soap, we ask you to do that well away from the river. We have a bladder that can be hung with the poo bags that contains water that can be used to wash your hands after going to the bathroom. And, if you’re wanting to wash more than your hands, I’m going to ask that you get one of the collapsible basins—you can use hot water if you want from the fire—and go back well away from the river to have a sponge bath.”
After Colin was finished, Kenny put up his hand, as if in school. “Why would you want to do that?” he asked. Colin looked at him and, without missing a beat, said, “Because we’re trying to have as little impact as possible on your river.”
It was clear from the outset that this trip was not really about canoeing or learning to camp, although that was surely a necessary part of the agenda. It was about connecting students from North and South. In fact, Kenny suggested that we call ourselves the Atanigi Expedition, from the Inuinnaqtun word that means “coming together.”
It was that. One of the southern students was surprised that the iPods and cellphones belonging to the Inuit youth (the organizers had decreed that iPods were off limits and we were well out of cellphone range, but it seemed everyone had one or the other in their pack somewhere) were the same as his, or in some cases fancier. “I was expecting that there would be an old guy in a parka on this trip who could sniff the wind and tell the weather, stuff like that.”
From the moment we’d landed and put our canoes into the Coppermine River just over the Nunavut-N.W.T. border, my canoeing partner, fifteen-year-old Billy McWilliam, had been fishing, in his dreams and in every waking moment on the river and off. Others tried their luck but no one except Billy had been catching anything much. Billy had been hauling them in—lake trout, grayling, and char, some for fun, some for the pot. This young northern man, who in everything but name looked and sounded Inuit, and even spoke a little Inuinnaqtun, appeared to be able to sniff the water and divine where the fish were. I took to calling him Billy McWilly, Fish Whisperer, and it made him smile, crinkling his almond eyes and revealing the dimples in his tanned and handsome face.
Billy was new to canoeing but, based on his exquisite balance as he fiddled with his rod and turned this way and that to cast, he was more comfortable in a boat than anybody I knew. We paddled and chatted. His father was born in southern Ontario and grew up on the French River. That taste for Canada’s hinterland on the Voyageur Highway had led him to apply for a job in one of the Northern Stores scattered in out-of-the-way places across Canada. (This is the chain of stores created by the venerable Hudson’s Bay Company and sold in 1987, in a transaction awash in irony, to a group of investors and employees who took the name of the HBC’s corporate nemesis, the Northwest Company.) Billy’s father started in Black Lake, Saskatchewan. A move to the store in Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island gave him a taste of the Arctic and introduced him to a Kugluktuk girl who was working there. Together, they moved on to other postings across the North, eventually ending up living in Kugluktuk with three beautiful girls and a handsome boy.
Billy’s mom worked for a cultural group in Kugluktuk called CLEY, standing for Culture, Language, Elders and Youth. As part of her work in the community, she had been piecing together the way that today’s Inuit in Kugluktuk connected to their history, finding ways to get elders and their wisdom into the school curriculum. Along the way, she had told Billy about a murder.
One day, Billy asked me if I knew the story of Uluksuk and Sinnisiak, two Inuit from the Kugluktuk area who were charged a long time back with the murder of two priests. At first the names were not familiar. But then, with astonishment, I realized that although I had never heard the two names spoken, a book that I had brought along with me on the trip, about two murders on the Coppermine River back in 1913, was about the same story. Just before I’d left home, a friend had brought the book around, thinking I might like to read it while on the expedition.
In Bloody Falls of the Coppermine, a New York Times feature writer, McKay Jenkins, had related how in 1911 or 1912, word filtered up the Mackenzie River valley from the Arctic that there was a group of Eskimos living at the mouth of the Coppermine River who were yet to be saved. This news made its way to Bishop Gabriel Breynat, who, at a scant thirty-two years of age, was in charge of all operations of the Catholic Church in Canada’s Northwest and was eager to beat the Anglicans to these souls. He dispatched two young Oblates, Jean-Baptiste Rouvière and Guillaume LeRoux. The two met up at Great Bear Lake and travelled north together by canoe. They arrived in October 1913, dressed in their cassocks, rosaries around their necks, Bibles in hand, communion kits in their backpacks. But they had no store of food and no winter shelter.
The half dozen families who were indeed living at the mouth of the Coppermine took one look at the strangers and realized that the last thing they needed was two more mouths to feed and two more bodies to keep warm, when survival for their own numbers was not assured through the dark months to come. They might have tried to accommodate the intrusion if one of the visitors hadn’t had an altercation over a rifle with one of the senior men in the encampment. This fight prompted another man to insist that, for their safety, the priests should pack up and head back south. They were giv
en a sled and a couple of dogs to assist with an expeditious departure.
Though what happened next is far from clear in anyone’s mind, two men from the settlement, Uluksuk and Sinnisiak, caught up with the priests on the banks of the river. Somehow the priests convinced the two men to help them move more quickly and, before they knew it, the two Inuit were in harness with the dogs, helping to pull the sled. But at some point very soon after that, hardly surprisingly, the whole situation spiralled totally out of control.
The Inuit rebelled. The priests tried to bring them back into line. A gun was taken from the sled and brought into the mix. And then, according to Uluksuk (from trial transcripts in the book): “Sinnisiak dropped the rifle and took an axe and a knife. I had a knife and we ran after him. When we got up to Kuleavik [Father LeRoux], Sinnisiak told me to stab him again, I did not want to stab him first, then Sinnisiak told me to stab him and I stabbed him again in the side and the blood came out and he was not yet dead. I did not stab him again and Sinnisiak took the axe and chopped his neck and killed him.”
When all was said and done, both priests were dead on the snow. Then, as they had learned to do with other large mammals in the hunt, Uluksuk and Sinnisiak removed a portion of the priests’ livers and ate them to prevent the ghosts of the departed from following those who had taken their lives. It was a grisly scene, to be sure, at least according to Jenkins.
I told Billy I was familiar with the story, and I asked him how he’d learned it.
“Uluksuk is my mom’s great-uncle.” Little did I know the coincidences wouldn’t stop there.
Several days after this conversation, we pitched into a back eddy to bail our canoes after a particularly harrowing close call on a series of sandstone ledges in the river. Somehow we’d ended up on the outside of a turn instead of the inside, and all eight canoes, including the party barge, took on water, even over and through the spray decks that were supposed to keep us dry. By then, Billy was very much into the canoeing thing. When the whitewater got intense, it appeared that he even stopped thinking about fish momentarily as we pulled, pried, backpaddled, and manoeuvred our way to safety.
He turned to me as we powered into the eddy after bumping down the ledges and crashing through the waves below, his smooth brown face absolutely radiant and covered with sparkling drops of icy river water. “That was totally fun,” he said breathlessly. “But James, we should have scouted that one.”
“How right you are, my friend. You’re getting the hang of this.”
From the eddy, as we waited for everyone to get bailed out and prepared for more whitewater action, someone noticed a small wooden cross high on a bluff on the opposite bank of the river. Although the guides and, by now, all of us were eager to continue the roller coaster ride down the river, the group decided that it might help get the blood flowing again in our legs if we ferried across and hiked up to check out the cross. So across and up we went, in our multi-hued helmets, life vests, and squeaky rubber wetsuits.
The cross was made of wooden two-by-fours that had long since lost their paint and sharp edges over years of incessant tundra winds and driving snow. Two carriage bolts, their heads still painted white, affixed the spars. Dual triangular cuts in the three finials of the cross gave a cared-for, almost Celtic look to what might have been, in other hands, two rough boards and a prayer. By the look of it, the memorial had been here, stuck in its cairn of stones, for some time. The only fresh blond wood we could see was a splinter from a shot from a small-bore rifle from somewhere to the west. A .22, Billy thought; somebody hunting ptarmigan.
The mosquitoes were horrendous, and everybody was fussing and fidgeting to wipe greasy bugs from their hair and faces. But the silent mystery of the site became more and more captivating. It was likely not a grave, given the conical form of the cairn. We poked a bit through the rocks at the base of the cross and came up with what appeared to be the threaded top of a broken Mason jar. Energized by the idea that it might contain a note placed by the cross maker, we dug a little deeper and the bug flailing ceased. To everyone’s astonishment, out came the proverbial treasure map.
We pulled out a piece of paper that had been folded four or five times. The paper, now a bit crispy with time, was stained with water and other organics that gave it an almost golden tone at the folds. At this point, I was imagining the rising swell of a movie score.
Gingerly, we opened it. In faded pencil were printed the following words:
THIS CROSS ERECTED
AT THE SPOT WHERE
FATHERS ROUVIERE AND
LEROUX WERE MURDERED
IN SEPTEMBER 1913.
[unclear] OF COPPERMINE
JULY 30, 1990
Until now, I had said nothing to anyone except Billy about the strange connection between this story, Billy, and the book that was in my pack. However, as I was absorbing this next bit of serendipity, I noticed Billy backing away from the cross and starting to slouch down the hill. It dawned on me that instead of feeling a geographical connection to an interesting historical event, he might be feeling diminished by being related, however tangentially, to a murderer. Hard enough being a fifteen-year-old in a strange new social and cultural situation, doing your best to fit in, without being connected to the nasty turn of events that had transpired at the exact spot where we had all just been standing.
After dinner, still a little dumbfounded by the sequence of coincidences through which the story of Uluksuk, Sinnisiak, Rouvière, LeRoux, and Billy had found its way into the Atanigi Expedition, I invited everyone who wanted to hear McKay Jenkins’s account of what had happened at the cross we had just visited to gather round the campfire.
Jenkins related how the weather that fall, as the priests headed south with the two hunters pulling their sleds, had turned from bad to worse. Uluksuk and Sinnisiak knew the white men were desperate, but they too were anxious to return home. They were leading the priests back to the river so that they might follow it south, the way they had come, when they came across a cache of goods beside the river (perhaps made with some of the same stones used to erect the cross at this place), including a rifle and ammunition, apparently left by the priests on their way north.
At some point Father LeRoux picked up the gun as if to coerce the two Inuit to get back to the task at hand. Simultaneously, Father Rouvière, the more peaceable of the two, started throwing cartridges into the river. This confused everyone, especially the hunters, who knew that the only thing between these priests and certain death from starvation on the way home was shells for their rifle. As far as they knew, the priests were going insane. They began to fear for their lives. The two priests, as we all knew by now, came to a bloody end in the snow, and the two hunters headed back north to tell the head man in the encampment what had happened.
There was silence around the fire as everyone realized that what they had heard was not just a story but something that had actually happened, high on the bank of the river where we had stopped earlier in the day. Before anyone said anything more, I gently put the book down beside me on the riverbank and said, “Right. That’s one account of this story, researched and written by a southern reporter. Because of who we are, the members of the Atanigi Expedition, I’m going to ask if there are other versions of the story to be told. I suspect there are a few people at this campfire who know this story and who have never read this book.”
Kenny spoke up and told us that, like Billy, he was related to one of the characters in the story: one Patsy Klengenberg, a man of Danish-Inuit origin who accompanied the two hunters as a translator when they were shipped south to Edmonton for trial by the Mounties, after being apprehended a year or so after the killing. Kenny’s account did not depart too dramatically in the details of the story, except to emphasize how presumptuous it was for southerners to turn up in October with no real resources of their own, expecting to be looked after by the people whose souls they were sent to save. Where Kenny’s account did differ was in what happened at the trial in Edmonton
.
The story he had learned around the kitchen table was that Uluksuk and Sinnisiak were sentenced to death for killing the priests and hanged. That brought nods from other Kugluktukmiut around the fire. They had heard the same thing.
By that point, I had not read on in the book far enough to know the eventual fate of the two hunters. So I flipped through to see if Jenkins’s account jibed with Kenny’s. It became apparent that the two men had first been acquitted (on an argument that they had not been tried by a jury of their peers, that a group of Edmonton businessmen did not constitute “peers” for Inuit hunters from the Arctic coast). But on appeal the same judge who had presided over the first trial found them guilty and indeed sentenced them to death by hanging.
However, because of the circumstances surrounding the self-defence claim of the defendants and the nature of the evidence as presented, that mandatory death sentence for murder had been commuted to two years in a jail at Fort Resolution, on the south shore of Great Slave Lake. According to Jenkins, Uluksuk eventually returned home; never the same, he was later murdered by one of his own following a dispute over a dog. Sinnisiak was released as well and died in 1930 of tuberculosis contracted while in prison.
All eyes at the fire turned to Kenny, who was shifting his position on the ground. “Not much different than hanging,” he said, after a moment of reflection. “A rope or a disease—he’s still dead as a result of his trip to Edmonton to stand trial.”