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Chapter 16 | Joy Cohnstaedt (continued) The Inuit themselves lived in prefabricated housing heated by oil stoves. No matter the size of the family, their homes were rarely bigger than three small rooms. The surrounding area was an open-air workshop where the men would work on their skidoos, fish and meat hung on lines, and women stretched skins to be cured. Sleds and other supplies could be found on the roof, or against the walls. Children played until all hours of the bright night. Few dogs remained and those that did were tied up; the government and Hudson Bay Company had convinced the Inuit to give them up for safety reasons and because of the need to feed then. The hunters and their families had entered into a cycle of dependency on the Company’s supplies, such as gasoline and foodstuffs, which were shipped in once or twice a summer by boat, at a cost well above southern prices. When the price of seal and fox skins dropped, as it did, the dependency was even greater. I returned to the Canadian Arctic regularly in the 1970s and early 80s. By now I had experienced at first hand internal colonization. Not only did the community administrators control the towns and villages, but they could also control who came into the community (Rankin Inlet was one of the few communities to have a public bunk building called the “Rankin Inlet Outlet Inn” where transients could stay). Once when I was traveling overland by skidoo and sled to a village some considerable distance away, I was denied access to the community by the administrator because he didn’t want any anthropologists in town. They might unsettle the residents. As I knew I would otherwise need to camp on the snow and ice, I used the radiophone to call ahead to the government administration office, only to be told that there was no place to stay. In defiance, a local schoolteacher said I could stay with his family, and I did. Throughout my travels in the north, the teachers and nurses provided shelter for me. In the days before regular telephone service, radio, and later TV, their offer of hospitality was the way they kept in touch with events in the south. It didn’t matter that we were strangers. When the DC 3 I hitch-hiked on to fly to Repulse Bay crashed near the settlement, the Inuit arrived quickly to bring us to safety, and when it came time to leave, I hitch-hiked on another plane to the next community. This was all an adventure for me, but for the Inuit, life in the Arctic was no longer independent. Many young Inuit were sent away against their will for the upper grades of school or to schools run by missionaries. Most non-Inuit women were sent south for childbirth, and other medical needs that could not be met by the nursing station and required a medical evacuation. But the time when there was mutual gain had long passed. At first, the land and culture of the Inuit had been exploited by business and overrun by missionaries and government — the latter, albeit, in an effort to keep the Inuit from starving and to provide security, health and education. Before and following World War II and during the Cold War, the benevolence of the dominant society resulted not only in the loss of their independence but also the traditional skills necessary for their survival. They were moved and reorganized throughout the Arctic to meet political and resource needs. Their labour was exploited and through social reorientation — especially the education system — their culture was assimilated to that of the south. In 1969 I was studying cultural anthropology with D’Arcy McNickle, the first indigenous academic to be hired as a university professor in Canada. I found myself in meetings among First Nations leaders who were discussing the federal government’s White Paper. The Paper was promoted as bringing equality to First Nations but it had been developed without the participation of Aboriginal peoples and met a wall of resistance. The old Indian Act remained in force. But the effect of the White Paper was enormous, research about Aboriginal peoples and their rights increased, as did the politicization of the Aboriginal peoples themselves. Each summer in the early 1970s my husband, our young family and I camped on the Stoney reservation at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, participated in sweat lodges and attended pow-wows — until the American Indian Movement (AIM) joined the informal gatherings. AIM helped to foster Aboriginal politics in Canada. Camping here became uncomfortable for us, but not for our children, two of whom are Métis, of Woodland Cree and French heritages. Though the reservation began by welcoming non-Aboriginals it soon became a contested site and we no longer visited. (Recent allegations of fraud and misappropriation have focused on the management of the Stoney reservation that held such promise as a model community 30 years before.) |
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