Father Joseph Buliard’s cabin on Upper Garry Lake. CREDIT: JENNIFER KINGSLEY
On his next posting, to Baker Lake, he encountered another force that would deeply affect him: the Protestants. Most of the Inuit in the area who considered themselves Christians were Anglicans, and their priest was Reverend William John Rundle James, or simply Mister James. The Protestant hold over the Baker Lake region troubled Buliard and motivated him to travel deeper and deeper into the tundra in search of souls to save.
Buliard wanted to establish his own mission, and according to his biographer, he considered the “Back River as his own special battlefield, its only purpose being to convert pagan souls or those caught in heresy, no matter the obstacles: cold, hunger, weariness, mockery.”2 In the summer of 1949, he erected Our Lady of the Rosary Mission on a small island. He had visited the area before by dogsled and knew that the north shores of those lakes were home to about fifteen families of nomadic caribou-hunting Inuit.3 The island was their summer gathering place. From there, he would bring them the word of the Lord.
Buliard spent summers working around the mission and gathering food for winter. When winter arrived, the priest — guided by local Inuit without whom he couldn’t have survived — repeatedly traveled hundreds of kilometers by dogsled to visit the four hundred people living in small groups throughout the region. For four years, with occasional trips off-site or visits from other clergy, Buliard pushed himself to the limit to turn the Inuit away from their traditional beliefs and toward baptism and Christian prayer. It was a time of huge transition: missions were reaching farther across the tundra, residential schools were being established in the north, and tuberculosis was infecting people in remote communities.
Early in 1953, Buliard’s life altered again when Anthony Manernaluk, a fifteen-year-old whose parents had died of TB, came to live with him at the mission. Manernaluk became Buliard’s guide and companion; he kept the priest’s mitts and boots clean of snow, hunted and fished, and built igloos when they traveled together. He helped compensate for Buliard’s terrible eyesight, clumsy hands, and relative inexperience. The duo continued to travel in search of families on the move. They met people such as Ninayok and her husband, Sabgut, and hunters like the man Arnadjuak.4 And of course, people also came to see Buliard at his cabin.
At least some of the Inuit held Buliard in high regard. And in his own way, Buliard cared about them. But he never learned to appreciate the Inuit’s sophisticated concept of “nuna” — an Inuktitut word that encompasses the land and all of its biological and spiritual relationships. Buliard could not acknowledge the Inuit lifestyle without yearning to change it. In a letter home to France, he put it this way: “When one has seen the Inuit living like animals and now sees them behaving like saints, how could there remain any doubt about the effectiveness of your prayers and sacrifices?”5
No matter what Buliard may have thought of them, as time went on, people around the island came to him more and more frequently. He had supplies. Manernaluk and others taught the priest some of their skills, changing his relationship with the land; Buliard’s missionary work did the same for them. His presence — especially his reliable supply of tea, ammunition, and relief rations — drew people to the island. In just a few years, families who’d survived entirely on wild foods, mainly caribou, began integrating Buliard’s provisions into their subsistence economy. Soon, some of the local Inuit, like John Adjuk and his wife, stuck close to the mission. They had come to depend on it.
Then, on October 24, 1956, seven years after Buliard’s arrival, everything at the Garry Lake mission suddenly changed. Buliard, by then forty-two years old, hitched up his dog team, planning to head a few miles onto the frozen lake to check his fishnets. As his clumsy hands set up the harnesses, Adjuk came over and expressed concern. Buliard’s helper, Manernaluk, had been sent south to be treated for TB, so the priest was going out alone. Adjuk warned him that a storm was coming.
Buliard left anyway. The bad weather set in, and later five of his dogs returned to the mission. There was no sled with them and no priest. Adjuk went searching, but the blizzard had obliterated any tracks. Buliard’s nets were untouched. He was never seen again.
That night remains a mystery. Did his bad eyesight lead him astray? Did he plunge through a thin patch of ice? The RCMP launched a brief murder investigation, but no one was ever charged. Everyone around the mission, for the most part, accepted his disappearance. Manernaluk, though, was deeply saddened. “When I heard of Father Buliard being lost,” he said, “I felt I lost a parent.”6
Officials in Baker Lake, nearly 300 kilometers southeast, didn’t get word of Buliard’s disappearance until January 1957. The news had been passed from the Garry Lake Inuit to missionaries farther north, then down to the RCMP in Churchill, and finally to Baker Lake. In June, Father Ernest Trinel was flown in to replace him. Caribou were sparse at the time, and some families were struggling, so Trinel picked up where Buliard had left off and gave out relief supplies. But this act would become highly controversial.
Distributing food and gear was a common practice at Arctic missions; it was part of their religious charity. But it also drew people to men who were trying to convert them, and that didn’t sit well with some government officials. By the time Trinel arrived at Garry Lake, the federal government was encouraging a policy of increasing Inuit “independence”; the supplies were considered food aid and should only be used if the government deemed them necessary. That in itself was a problem; officials knew very little about life on the tundra and could often go months without getting any information about local residents.
In August of 1957, after two months at the mission, Trinel sent a message to Baker Lake: “A community of 60 Eskimos menaced to starve at Garry Lake.”7 The caribou had not come, and Trinel saw the situation as life-or-death. Government agents came in with a relief shipment in August and again in September. The nearby storehouse was stockpiled with food, and Manernaluk and others were put in charge of distributing it, but not everyone agreed that the rations were needed. Douglas Wilkinson, the Northern Affairs officer based in Baker Lake, called the food drop “the worst thing that could happen.” He claimed the Inuit had “hoodwinked the father into giving out most of his supplies.”8 Meanwhile, Trinel was worried he himself wouldn’t survive the winter. He left for Baker Lake in early December. On December 15, a final shipment of food arrived at the storehouse.
That winter was cold and grim. The lack of caribou meant people were not just hungry, but also poorly clothed. The government had given out fishnets, but they didn’t do much good. It was another example of the government’s ignorance about life on the land; a person cannot venture very far to fish in the middle of winter if he doesn’t have proper clothing to keep him warm. Ninayok and Sabgut had put up lots of fish in the fall but had given them away to people who were even worse off than they were. A man named Angeelik shot nine caribou, but they were soon consumed. By early in the New Year, Ninayok told an official, “all the Eskimos were forced to eat their dogs.”9
The situation became desperate in January and fatal by February. With barely any food left, starving and freezing, Arnadjuak and a companion traveled from their camp to the storehouse to see if they could gather supplies. Inside, they started a small stove. It exploded, and both men ran out into the cold. As the building burned, Arnadjuak ran to a nearby structure, crawled between two mattresses and died. His companion made it back to camp, but he had none of the food his family was expecting. It wasn’t long before they all died of starvation.
Between late February and early March, a total of seventeen people died in the Back River region. One man was found frozen next to a fishing hole. The RCMP was responsible for making a winter patrol through the area, but did not do so. Father Trinel and government officials didn’t make contact with Garry Lake until April 24. On May 10, Ninayok, who played an important role in piecing the story together, was evacuated for emergency medical treatment.
A
flurry of government and media attention followed, placing blame all around. Some accounts held the Inuit responsible; others tried to blame the caribou for not showing up. Nobody wanted to assume responsibility: not the missions, for their role in altering the area’s subsistence economy; not the government, for its ever-shifting relief policies; and not the police, for having failed to make their winter rounds. Some pointed to the storehouse fire as a single, clear cause, but a pathologist’s report on the deaths cited prolonged starvation and exposure: “definite evidence of severe malnutrition as evidenced by weight loss and extreme loss of all fat from the body.”10
After these events, the Department of Northern Affairs flew into action. Within five months they’d launched a dramatic project. They deployed staff to the Hudson Bay coast to choose a location for a new town. The site was recommended by civil servants from the south during an afternoon charter flight. A social worker tasked with comparing two sites wrote, “Relying only on my own unprofessional and superficial knowledge of the hydrography and geography of both areas I consider the Whale Cove site to be superior.”11 And so it was done. Some 500 kilometers from their homeland, a settlement for some of the survivors was built. The community was a conglomerate of Inuit speaking different dialects from different areas of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, some of whom — including those from Garry Lake — had never seen the sea. Over the next year, the remaining Inuit from the Garry Lake area were relocated to a variety of camps and relocation projects. In some places, families were given 240-square-foot insulated plywood cabins. In others, they were reported as “living the traditional life,”12 which meant tents and snow houses. The idea was to let Inuit people live independent lives.
The incoherence of the relocations is outlined in detail by Frank James Tester and Peter Kulchyski in their excellent book Tammarniit (Mistakes). As they say, “The idea that Inuit would be working with ‘freedom from undue interference,’ given the phenomenal plans being made for them, is more than ironic.” Government documents revealed plans to unveil, “for the first time in the Arctic,”13 a system in which Inuit would have to work in order to eat — never mind that they had been doing so for millennia.
It’s shocking how quickly this all took place. By 1959, just a decade after Father Buliard had set up the first-ever mission at Garry Lake, nobody was left. The people from Garry Lake had either died or been moved away, but the cabin stubbornly remained.
WE STASHED THE book in a pack and carried on across the lake. The sun approached the horizon slowly throughout the afternoon until the blue lake shifted toward silver. At the end of Upper Garry Lake, Levi dug some couscous salad out of the lunch bucket, and I ate mine with two willow twigs. Jen snapped a photo of my grubby grin and the yellow sky behind me. Then the current picked up and dropped us to the next lake, where Buliard faded to memory.
CHAPTER 8
STORM
LEVI’S BAROMETER STAYED sky-high as the lakes ticked past in a glassy calm. The water reflected the sky so perfectly that we seemed to be floating in a sphere of blue. The beauty lifted our spirits, and we alternated between reverent silence and silliness.
Around midnight, Tim stood in the stern of his canoe and steered while Drew powered the bow forward. “Manicotti!” Tim yelled.
We all turned and stared.
“Rigatoni! Cannelloni! Lasagna!” Tim held his paddle in the air above his head.
“I know all the pasta!” he cried in a terrible Italian accent.
Drew egged him on: “Penne!”
“Fusilli!”
“Macaroni!”
The tundra can make you manic, but for that evening Tim had shaken his grief, and that was enough to keep us going a little longer.
THE MORNING BROUGHT continued calm, though the barometer had started to dip. We kept our eyes trained ahead, until the horizon line started to blur. The edge of the world became hazy, and then little pieces of ice started floating by.
Drew looked back and then looked forward again. “Um . . . ”
Slowly, the thickness of the horizon resolved into a long gray band and then a silver sheet. As far as we could see, Lower Garry Lake was frozen solid.
Levi eventually broke the silence. “Let’s get up high and take a look at this.”
A small rock outcrop gave us some vantage. We scrambled to the top and huddled around the highest rock, which was about the size of a dining room table. Tim and Jen sat down, while Alie studied the map and Levi scanned with Tim’s binoculars. Drew snapped some shots, and I shoved my hands into my pockets, incredulous. I had never been so surprised by something that, in retrospect, was unsurprising. We should have planned for this, I thought, but we hadn’t.
“I wonder what it’s like on the south shore,” Alie said. We had been hugging the north edge of the lake. Perhaps the wind had pushed the ice up here, and the south side was clear.
“We could try it,” I said.
“It’s 20 k to get down there, and no guarantees,” said Tim.
“Looks like there’s a gap between the shore and the ice,” Jen offered. “What about that?”
I took the map from Alie and reviewed where we were on the lake. The ice could go on for 50 kilometers for all we knew.
“I don’t suppose waiting is an option?” I asked. Levi just looked at me. “Let’s camp,” I said.
We spent that evening weighing our options while surrounded by the brightness of the ice. Heading to the south shore could work, but it would mean at least an extra day, and it might be for nothing. Waiting was unrealistic. Portaging would be incredibly arduous. Picking our way between the ice and shore would be slow but safe, though we didn’t know when the ice would close in, and then we’d be surrounded. The longer we talked, the more it came back to walking. We would have to walk across the ice. Precisely what every Canadian child is told never, ever to do.
The situation reminded me of the movie Never Cry Wolf. My parents took me to see it when I was six years old, not realizing how much it would terrify me. The main character, grasping his gun, falls through the ice. The current pulls him away from the hole, and he’s left pounding up from underneath. The camera follows him underwater through a chaos of bubbles, then cuts to the surface where the forest stands neutral and silent.
THE NEXT MORNING we met for granola and the morning workout of getting our wet suits on. We planned to paddle until we couldn’t and then work like dog teams to haul our cargo across the ice. We had no idea how long this would take.
I secured my damp wet suit around my ankles and began rolling it up my bare legs as mosquitoes chomped on my exposed thighs. A light wool shirt would protect my trunk and shoulders from the irritation of the neoprene, but my legs started to prickle immediately. This could be a long day.
“Let the quest for the Northeast Passage begin!” Drew cried.
We paddled over to the gap between ice and shore. Small pieces clacked against our hulls, and soon we were shoving small bergs aside with our paddles. As the pieces got bigger, we rammed them out of the way and kicked off from shore when necessary. I had anticipated thinner ice that sat on top of the water, like back home, but this stuff floated several inches above the surface and drooped an arm’s length below. As we pushed and kicked our way through the ice, which was still floating, we got used to its weight and character. After 7 kilometers, the channels and gaps closed in. Time to walk.
“Seems pretty solid,” said Tim as he tested his weight on it.
Each bow person carefully got out, grabbed the bow line, and hauled in as the stern paddler churned a couple more strokes before reaching a leg out and climbing onto the ice. It had a clear layer on top that looked like bubble wrap and popped as we walked across it. Levi and I had Bluebell, our longest boat. I was reluctant to leave her side. Shallow pools littered the ice surface, but it felt solid enough beneath my running shoes. Levi grabbed the bow line; I grabbed the stern line. We leaned into the ropes and felt her begin to slide.
Jen and Drew d
rag their canoe across kilometers of ice. CREDIT: LEVI WALDRON
Within minutes, sweat prickled into my suit and my back began to ache.
“We can’t do this all day,” I said. Then my foot broke through a patch of gray ice, and I dropped to my knees.
We tried different rope lengths, front and back, side by side. We tied the ropes up by our shoulders and down at our waists. A good lean forward and small steps helped, but the boats still weighed a few hundred pounds. After a while, Levi found the winning system. He tied the bow line to the middle of a paddle, and we pushed against it — one on each side of the rope — in unison. We moved ahead with short steps and tried to stay on the white ice; the gray stuff would swallow our feet. We jumped small channels, learned to cling to our boats when the ice got rotten, and invented smooth bobsled-like transitions to cross small pools.
“This is getting fun,” said Tim.
After a slow 4 kilometers, we stopped for lunch. Drew stripped down to his waist. His orange chest hair moved in the breeze as he paced the ice with a chunk of Gouda cheese in his hand. Despite the ice, we were sweating profusely, and the mosquitoes had found us. Even out on a huge frozen lake, escape was impossible; if they could find us out there, they could find us anywhere.
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