This week I watched the Documentary Broken Promises: The High Arctic Relocation. It’s a short NFB film available to watch online for free. It concerns an alarming part of Canadian history in which Inuit families were “selected” to go inhabit the far northern reaches of Canada to help maintain sovereignty of the north against the US and Russia, in the 1950s.
They were promised a way to return to living off the land. They were promised it was a land of plenty. They were promised they could return if they did not like it.
Instead, they were dropped in a frozen wasteland, purposely far from military bases so as not to encourage dependence or handouts. They had nothing with which to build and food was scarce. And when they asked to come home, they were told they had to pay their own way, but they had no money. Government reports of success were falsified. It took 30 years before they were offered passage home.
The interviews with the survivors are heartbreaking. This is the kind of Canadian history we don’t teach in school. There were all sorts of political and economic motivations and none of the decisions involved those who were made to go.
As I struggle to define for myself what Canada is, these stories are necessary to gather and understand. My grandfather spent his career offering health services in our northern lands and often had stories of the Inuit people he met. His home was filled with works of art, gifts from the Inuit people for his work. I feel drawn to know more about this land which called to him. Northern Canada is a great mystery to me, and unlocking its beauty, history and stories is something which calls to me.
This is just one story about 15 Inuit families - just a small pocket of people, but it signifies a larger untold story that must be uncovered.
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