Monuments to be unveiled for Canada’s High Arctic Exiles

RANDY BOSWELL
POSTMEDIA NEWS

More than 50 years after the controversial relocation of 22 Inuit families to some of the world’s most unforgiving terrain in Canada’s Far North, two monuments paying tribute to the country’s “High Arctic Exiles” are set to be unveiled next week on Ellesmere and Cornwallis islands.

The sculptures will be dedicated less than a month after the relocated Inuit and their descendants received a historic formal apology from the Canadian government for the broken promises that followed the migrants’ arduous voyage in the 1950s across thousands of kilometres of Arctic land and sea from as far south as Inukjuak in northern Quebec.

The quest for an official apology — finally delivered in Inukjuak on Aug. 18 by Indian Affairs Minister John Duncan — had been a key motivation when Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. announced the planned monuments in 2008.

The memorial sculptures “played a major role in ensuring the apology was done,” acting organization president James Eetoolook told Postmedia News on Friday.

“The Inuit play a major role in Canada’s Arctic sovereignty, and we are proud to be Canadians,” he added. “But these people who faced such hardships were forgotten.”

The sculptures are to be unveiled Wednesday in Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island and on Friday at Ellesmere’s Grise Fiord. Those two communities were the key destinations for the relocated Inuit families from Inukjuak and the Baffin Island hamlet of Pond Inlet.

“The Government of Canada apologizes for having relocated Inuit families and recognizes that the High Arctic relocation resulted in extreme hardship and suffering for Inuit who were relocated,” Duncan said in issuing the formal apology last month.

“We deeply regret the mistakes and broken promises of this dark chapter of our history.”

When the Inuit land-claims organization announced its plans to construct the monuments, Eetoolook said Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic “is on the minds of politicians around the world, the media and opportunistic businesses that look forward to an ice-free Northwest Passage.”

He noted “there is no better time” to erect the monuments as “a reminder” to the world that “this land belongs to Canada, not because of the lines drawn on a map, but because of the Inuit who sacrificed everything to live here.’’