|
October 27, 2006
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
October 27, 1920 — Board Recommends High Arctic Police Posts
KENN HARPER
In 1919 the Canadian government set up the Reindeer and Musk-ox Commission — muskoxen had been completely protected under the Northwest Territories Game Act of 1917 — to study the economic and biological potential of these two animals.
In July, two months after the appointment of the commission, officials sent a request, via the British Foreign Office, to the Danish government, formally asking it to prevent the Inughuit of northwestern Greenland from killing muskoxen on Ellesmere Island.
In this letter, the Canadian government offered to place its own personnel on the Greenland side of Smith Sound to control the movements of the Inuit, a bizarre suggestion when one considers that there were no Canadians in Ellesmere Island on the opposite side of Smith Sound, which Canada claimed nonetheless to be Canadian! The Danish government, with no official presence in north-western Greenland, responded that it did not administer the part of Greenland referred to, and sent the request on to Knud Rasmussen, owner of the Thule Station, a trading post.
When Rasmussen responded, Ottawa misunderstood his reply and concluded incorrectly that Rasmussen had designs on Canadian territory. This caused a crisis in Ottawa, fueled, as was often the case in those days, by the ever-self-serving Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who misrepresented the contents of a letter that Rasmussen had written to him. As a result, James Bernard Harkin, the civil servant most concerned with Arctic sovereignty at the time, reported in a memorandum to his deputy minister: “...it would appear that neither Mr. Rasmussen nor the Danish Government seem to recognize that Canadian authority is dominant and exclusive in Ellesmere Land… There seems to be an inference that Denmark has some authority in the area in question.”
That same year, the Canadian government had established a second board with interest in the Arctic, the Advisory Technical Board on Canadian Sovereignty, a small body comprised of senior civil servants. Fuel was added to the fire on Oct. 1, 1920 when Stefansson lied to that board by telling them that Rasmussen had told him he intended to complete the exploration of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, operate trading stations in Ellesmere Island, and colonize the island with Inuit from Greenland.
An undated confidential memorandum in Harkin’s papers sums up the civil servant’s understanding of Canada’s position: “The situation as to sovereignty in the northern islands, therefore, appears to be that Britain has had an inchoate title which now probably through the lapse of time may be considered to have terminated; that the Low and Bernier expeditions may have established a ‘fictitious’ title which also has probably lapsed; and therefore, that apparently Denmark or any other country is in a position to acquire sovereignty by establishing effective occupation and administration.” The conclusion was unmistakable — Canada’s title to the Arctic Islands was not sound.
Once Canada realized the invalidity of its claim, it then had to decide if the islands were indeed worth having. At the Oct. 1 meeting, Harkin put it simply: “Do we want them, or do we not? Apparently if we want them we have to do something to establish our title.”
The government decided that it indeed wanted at least Ellesmere Island, for two reasons, one economic – it might have value - and one sentimental: “Ellesmere and the other northern islands have always been regarded in Canada as Canadian, and there doubtless would be a strong sentiment against their being taken possession of by any other flag.” This was of course self-serving nonsense – the majority of the Canadian public had no idea where Ellesmere Island even was.
Stefansson’s statements, enthusiastically endorsed by the ill-informed Harkin, put Ottawa into a tizzy about Denmark’s – and Rasmussen’s – plans. On Oct. 27, 1920, the board recommended to W. W. Cory, Deputy Minister of the Interior and Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, that Canada should quietly establish its sovereignty by building three permanent posts of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Ellesmere Island, that Inuit be moved from other locations to Ellesmere, and that a trading company be encouraged to set up a post on the island. This is the backdrop against which the first police post on Ellesmere Island was established at Craig Harbour two years later.
A footnote: The board also recommended an emergency plan in the event that Denmark acted to occupy Ellesmere Island that year, before Canada could establish its posts. It suggested a ludicrous scheme in which Canada would borrow a dirigible from the Imperial Air Station in Scotland, load it there with a group of police officers and launch it towards the Canadian Arctic. The police would parachute out onto Ellesmere Island in the dark of winter to preempt any action by the Danes. Fortunately the police were never called upon to enact this hare-brained scheme.
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
October 20, 2006
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
October 25, 1825 — Hockey Night in Déline
KENN HARPER
Canadians are hockey mad. So mad in fact that intense debate surrounds the question of where the game was first played.
Hockey may have evolved from the Irish game of hurley, or indeed from any number of other games played on the ice in cold countries. But for it to be hockey, there is a consensus that it must be played on skates. And that is where the consensus seems to end.
Does it need rules? Does it need organized teams? Does it have to have a recorded score? No one seems to agree. And so there are competing claims for the location of the first “hockey” game to ever be played. It goes without saying that the location has to be in Canada!
The Society for International Hockey Research sought to clarify the issue with a definition: Hockey is a game played on an ice rink in which two opposing teams of skaters, using curved sticks, try to drive a small disc, ball or block into or through the opposite goals.
Long Pond in Windsor, Nova Scotia has laid claim to the title of hockey’s birthplace. In 1876 a writer reminiscing about his school days at King’s College between 1816 and 1818 wrote, “The Devil’s Punch Bowl and Long Pond, back of the College, were favorite resorts, and we used to skate in winter, on moonlight nights, on the ponds. I recollect John Cunard... having his front teeth knocked out with a hurley...”
This has the advantage of a reference to skating, and a reference to hurley, but no specific reference to “hockey.”
Other locations vying for the honour as the home of our national game are Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; Kingston, Ontario; and Montreal. Certainly there is no doubt that Montreal was the site of the first documented and organized hockey game, between two teams of identified members and with a score recorded. That match took place at Victoria Rink on March 3, 1875. But the game’s origins are earlier.
The honour, in fact, belongs to none of the places yet mentioned, but to a tiny hamlet of 650 people in the Northwest Territories.
In 1825, John (later Sir John) Franklin embarked on his second overland expedition to the Arctic Ocean. He passed his first winter at Great Bear Lake in a fort he constructed there and named, naturally, Fort Franklin. A small lake nearby, Grey Goose Lake, was entirely frozen over by Oct. 11. From then until heavy snow fell, the smooth ice formed a surface for outdoor sports.
In Franklin’s journal for Oct. 20, 1825, he wrote: “We were visited by the first decided snow storm which continued without intermission 36 hours. Though this change put a period to the amusements of skating and the evening games on the ice we could not but rejoice, as there was now sufficient snow on the ground for the putting in practice the winter modes of travelling.”
Although this quotation refers to skating, there is nothing to indicate that the “evening game” was hockey. The evidence lies elsewhere. In 2003, researchers discovered a letter that Franklin wrote to a British geologist, Roderick Murchison. Franklin wrote, “Til the snow fell, the game of hockey, played on the ice, was the morning’s sport.”
The two references taken together, to “skating,” and to “the game of hockey, played on the ice” would seem to clinch the case for Déline, as Fort Franklin was renamed in 1993, as the place where the game was first played. On Feb. 16, 2006, the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories passed a motion recognizing Déline as the rightful claimant to being the birthplace of hockey.
The website for the community of Déline goes even further, stating that, “Sir John Franklin and the Dene played the first recorded ice hockey game at Déline, in 1825.” However, there is no evidence that Dene participated in the games that were played — nor can it be proven that they didn’t. All we know is that there were about 50 people at Fort Franklin that fall. Most were British officers and seamen and French-Canadian voyageurs. There were two Inuit guides, a Metis interpreter, four Dene hunters, three women and six children, and one young “Dogrib lad.” Perhaps some of them laced up skates and played the game — we’ll never know.
There is one other mystery embedded in this story. Franklin wrote to his friend about “the game of hockey, played on the ice.” He writes as if the game and the name were already known. He didn’t have to explain to Murchison what hockey was. He assumed that Murchison knew. Was hockey already well-known under that name?
For now, perhaps we should be cautious and give Déline the honour of being the North American birthplace of hockey.
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
October 13, 2006
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
October 14, 1892 — The “Evelena” Reaches Boston with Inuit for the World’s Fair
KENN HARPER
CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE
A large group of Inuit who were taken to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in
January of 1893. Are you descended from any of these people?
 |
In January I wrote a column about Nancy Columbia, “the most famous Inuk in the world,” born in January 1893 in Chicago before the opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition there. Her mother was one of a large group of Inuit taken from Labrador the previous summer, to be exhibited in an “Esquimaux Village” at the fair.
In the summer of 1892, a ship, the Evelena, was chartered by promoters to scour the Labrador coast for Inuit to take to the exhibition. The promoters promised the Inuit that they would be paid for their attendance and performances at the fair.
In return for lodging and food and a pittance in real money, they would be expected to put on demonstrations of kayaking, dog-sledding, native music, and hunting and fishing methods. The promoters promised to return them to their homes at the end of two years and to pay them “a gift of 2000 Newfoundland shillings, each shilling being 20 cents in United States money, or $100 for two years labor.”
There would also be “very liberal donations” at the end of their two years servitude. Each man was promised “one Winchester rifle and 200 rounds of cartridges” and each family would receive “one barrel of pork, three of flour, one of pilot bread, twenty gallons of molasses, ten pounds of tea, 200 pounds of salt, thirty pounds of rice, and 100 fish hooks...” In addition, each woman was promised “thirty yards of calico and four woolen blankets.”
The Inuit who accepted the promoter’s promises and agreed to go to the fair were from three groups on the Labrador coast north of Hamilton Inlet. (In the records that exist their names are spelled inconsistently, and some of the names may be inaccurately rendered in what follows.)
The first group was comprised of two families of unbaptized Inuit from the northern coast. Kupah, a man of about 40, was from near Nachvak, a brother to Semigak, who was an influential leader in that area. Kupah’s wife was Kuttukittuk and they were accompanied by their two young daughters, Mali and Tiguyak, and an adopted son, Pamiuk (also known as Pomiuk.) The other family was headed by Kangeraarsuk and his wife, Tuglavina, who brought their daughter, Sikiipa, a girl of 7 years, and their 14-year-old son, Degouluk, who drowned while in Chicago. Another female who was part of this family group was Kamialuit; at 26, she was too old to be the daughter of Kangeraarsuk, but may have been his wife’s daughter.
A second group was made up of Inuit who were members of the Moravian church. Although the missionaries tried their best to dissuade the people from going, four families succumbed to the promoter’s enticements and boarded the Evelena. Zacharias, born at Okak but later associated with the mission at Hebron, was accompanied by his wife, Naemi, and two daughters, Justine and Tapia. (Zacharias later adopted the surname Martine, later shortened to Martin.)
Abile and his wife Helena were associated with the mission at Zoar and traded at the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Davis Inlet. They were accompanied by their 15-year-old daughter, Esther, who gave birth to Nancy Columbia in Chicago. Two families with the surname Lucy were associated with the Hopedale mission. They were Joseph Lucy and his wife, Charlotte, accompanied by their son, Tomasi; and Joseph’s brother John Lucy, his wife Katarina, and four children (Julia, Abraham, Simon and Jonas). A fifth family group was probably also associated with the Hopedale mission; this was the family of Simon and Sarah Manak, their two children (Peterusi and Abraham), and two other family members, Maria and Jakob (whose relationship is unclear).
The third group of Inuit was made up of people from the Rigolet area, an area not served by a Moravian mission. Jonas Palliser was accompanied by family members Susie (perhaps his wife, although the record is unclear), and seven other dependents (Mary, Lucy, Sam, John, Tom, Esther and Susan). Another Palliser, Peter, was probably Jonas’s brother. George Deer and his wife, Maggie, took their two small children, Sarah and Peter. James Suglo and his wife Salomie, took four children (Maggie, Augustina, Liza and Tom). There were also three single men, Abraham Tooktoosina, Peter Mesher and Tommie Deer.
An interpreter also accompanied the group. He was Robert Ford, a settler from the Davis Inlet area, accompanied by his wife, Susan, and two young children, William and Mary.
Of course, the promoters cheated the Inuit. None returned to Labrador with the rewards they had been promised. The missionaries had been particularly worried about Zacharias, fearing that “his influence for mischief would be increased if he came back with big stories of America.” But the demeaning experiences of Chicago had changed Zacharias. On his way back to Hebron, he told the missionary in Nain, “I have returned quite a different man. Trouble has taught me to pray... We are glad to be once more at liberty, and not continually looked at as if we were animals. We shall never go again.”
(The author would welcome information from any readers who may be descendants of any of the people mentioned in this article. Contact kennharper@hotmail.com.)
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
October 6, 2006
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
Oct. 7, 1894 — Preaching in a Sealskin Church
KENN HARPER
When Reverend Edmund James Peck — Uqammak to the Inuit — and his assistant, Joseph Parker, arrived on Blacklead Island in Cumberland Sound off the east coast of Baffin Island in the summer of 1894, they took up their quarters in a building that had been provided to them by the Scottish whaling company operating there.
The building was nothing more than a shack, really, only 200 square feet in size. They had not only to live in it, but to cram their year’s supply of perishable goods into it.
Although there were a number of Scottish whalers on the island, Peck and Parker had come to minister to the Inuit. Some time after their arrival, Peck took a census and found that there were 171 people living on the small island, in some 40 tents.
Immediately, the two missionaries established a routine which they generally followed rigidly unless they were travelling. Much of that routine centred around the learning of Inuktitut. Peck already spoke the language, from his almost two decades of missionary work on the Quebec coast, but Parker was new to the North and to the language. Peck had not only to learn the nuances of the Blacklead Island dialect that differentiated it from that of Quebec, but also to instruct Parker in the basics of the language. The routine, which required strict self-discipline, was as follows:
“Rise 6:45 a.m., light fires, prepare breakfast; breakfast 8 a.m., prayers 8:30 a.m.; study of Eskimo language with Mr. Parker from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.; visiting and preparing Eskimo addresses from 10 a.m. to noon. Then came the preparation of dinner. Dinner 1 p.m., private reading and study from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., school for children from 3 p.m. to 4:15 p.m., visiting and exercise from 4:15 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., tea 5:30 p.m.; after tea, prepare for evening meeting, which is at 7:30 p.m.; after the meeting, study of the language with Eskimos; family prayer at 10 p.m.; then private reading and devotion till 10:45 p.m. This ended the day and bed had been earned.”
The cramped quarters the two men shared were too small to accommodate many visitors, and they badly needed a place of worship. The solution to their problem was ingenious, and it was provided by the Blacklead Inuit themselves. They constructed a large tent of sealskin. Indeed it was so large that Peck referred to it as a sealskin “tabernacle.”
Peck wrote: “Our church — if such it can be called — is twenty feet long and about ten feet wide. It is made principally of seal skins sewn together, which skins are stretched on a frame and seats are placed inside on which the people sit in rows.”
In a letter to the Church Missionary Society, he wrote, “When I mention the encouraging fact that the whole structure was erected, and to a great measure planned, by the Eskimos themselves, friends will readily see that we have every reason to thank God, and toil on for his people’s salvation without doubt or despondence.”
Peck held his first service in the sealskin church on Sunday, October 7. For him, it was “a very happy but wearing day.” In his journal, he wrote that “we visited the people from tent to tent, and invited them to come to our opening meeting. Many came, and they joined heartily in the few hymns they knew.”
This was the humble beginning of Peck’s missionary activity on Blacklead Island, an era that would last through four two-year stints, each punctuated by a year’s furlough in England. In 1905 Peck finally left Blacklead for good, leaving the mission without a white missionary, but in the capable hands of the Inuit that he and his colleagues had instructed and inspired.
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
TOP
|
Nunavut 99
