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Clyde River stars in Mountie movie

Historical film highlights fight for Canada's Arctic sovereignty

JANE GEORGE

Elijah Pallituq is the skilled Greenlandic guide Ittukusuk. (PHOTO BY VERA SALTZMAN)

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Clyde River recently played at being Hollywood when residents became actors and a church hall was transformed into a set for a film called The Muskox Patrol.

The film chronicles the darkest, coldest, most remote beat in the history of northern policing. It's produced and directed by Ole Gjerstad, the filmmaker behind Kikkik and The Bridge to Mars, about NASA's use of Devon Island as a testing ground for Mars exploration.

The Muskox Patrol covers the period between 1922 and 1933, when a handful of members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were dispatched to three tiny posts in the High Arctic. Their mission was to show the world that the High Arctic was Canadian territory.

The movie tells the story of the three young Mounties who were sent to the High Arctic during the last years of the dispute between Canada, the U.S., Denmark and Norway over who had jurisdiction in the region. Although some signed on for just a year, it took them five years to get home.

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Props brought up from Montreal transformed the former parish hall into a vintage Mounties post. (PHOTO BY ANDREI KHADBAD)

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However, due to the land skills of the Greenlandic Inuit and the hardiness of the Mounties, no one in the Muskox Patrol, as the mission was called, died.

"We use archive film, memoirs and the letters of three men - Cpl. Harry Stallworthy, Const. Herbert Patrick Lee and Const. Paddy Hamilton - to convey the deep sense of isolation the Mounties faced," Gjerstad said in an interview last week.

After the hour-long film is finished next year, it will be broadcast on Canada's History channel, in Norway, and, Gjerstad hopes, on other networks, as well.

But financing the $500,000 production hasn't been easy.

While polar adventure tales are in vogue now, Gjerstad said it's the more extreme stories that receive the most interest from television broadcasters.

Gjerstad invested his own money in the film to ensure the story of the Muskox Patrol would be told.

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Peter Iqalukjuaq, Andrei Khabad and Brian Barry inside the redecorated parish hall. (PHOTO BY VERA SALTZMAN)

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When scouting for a place to shoot the film, Gjerstad discovered that Clyde River offers scenery that's a fair stand-in for the High Arctic.

Gjerstad said Kakivak Association helped by providing money that allowed four Inuit Broadcasting Corp. employees to receive on-the-scene training during the Clyde River shoot.

Most of the film's budget will remain in Clyde River, where the crew stayed for two weeks while filming 10 sequences in the former Anglican parish hall. In the spring, they'll return to the community to shoot outdoor and dog team shots.

"We have to be careful, but we'll be spending a lot of money in Clyde River," Gjerstad said.

Gjerstad and his crew transformed the parish hall into a 1930s RCMP post on Ellesmere Island's Bache Peninsula. With the help of local coordinator Joelie Sanguya, Gjerstad hired 12 people who were eager to test and hone their acting skills. An RCMP constable and two teachers would moonlight as Mounties, while Kangiklugaapingmiut would take on the roles of Greenlandic Inuit.

Gjerstad brought props from the 1930s, including vintage tobacco tins and a Union Jack flag for the set. To recreate an authentic period atmosphere, he also found audio recordings of 1920s broadcasts and music the Mounties enjoyed.

"I like to listen to the 15 minutes of news every night from KMOX in St. Louis. These announcers get quite a kick out of calling us 'top of the world Mounties,'" Stallworthy wrote to a friend during his years in the North.

In addition to the re-enactments shot in Clyde River, The Muskox Patrol also features interviews with the Mounties' younger colleagues and descendants, testimony from Norwegian and U.S. explorers and authors, the diaries of Captain Joseph Bernier and anecdotes from descendants of the North Greenlandic Inuit, such as Nookapinguaq, who were hired by the RCMP to ensure the officers survived.

"Then, there's the muskox, which evoked so much passion at all levels of the Canadian government that it became the emblem of Ottawa's sovereignty campaign - the facade for the Mountie mission," Gjerstad said.

Although its main purpose was to establish Canada's sovereignty, the Muskox Patrol was sent as a search party to find a missing German expedition. They barely survived the mission, as there was no two-way communication or re-supply options beyond the once-a-year call of the supply ship. But, faced with starvation, the Mounties preferred to eat sled dogs before agreeing to kill muskox.

On their way home, ice delayed the return of the three Mounties by yet another year.

"It was my best year and I'll tell you why: I had raised my own dogs, I'd become more proficient in the language of the North Greenland people we were travelling with. I had also done a lot of practicing building snow houses. That's an accomplishment you don't learn in five minutes. I had become a real northern man," Stallworthy told CBC radio after he had returned home.

By the time the Mounties went home, Canada had reasserted its sovereignty over the High Arctic. In 1900, the Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup had claimed the region for the King of Norway, but 30 years later he accepted a $67,000 cheque to relinquish his claim.

As soon as the foreign threat to sovereignty subsided, the High Arctic police posts were closed down and nothing was said about Arctic sovereignty until 20 years later, when the RCMP and Inuit were once again deployed there.

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