Nunavik woman seeks her father, known only as “the cook”

Here’s Jeannie Sala (centre) as she looked about 15 years ago in Kuujjuaraapik. (PHOTO COURTESY OF J. SALA)

Jeannie Sala, centre in green, sits with her family — they support her search for her biological father, she says. (PHOTO COURTESY OF J. SALA)

Jeannie Sala, shown here when she was a teenager, holds her niece. (PHOTO COURTESY OF J. SALA)

Jeannie Sala of Kuujjuaq is looking for her father, who never got to meet her and likely never realized he had a daughter in northern Quebec.

The 55-year-old wife, mother of six and grandmother to 18 wants to find her father so that her family can know “its roots.”

“I would like to fill that void. It’s a very big void,” she said. “When I was growing up people would pick on me. You’re a Qallunaat, you don’t have a father.”

That’s a situation she’d like to change, if only she can locate her biological father.

Sala doesn’t know anything about her father except that he was a cook at the mid-Canada line radar site in Great Whale River in 1957/

Her mother Annie Meeko Tuckatuck, then 27, didn’t speak French or English, so couldn’t tell her which language he spoke.

And, back in those days, people referred to newcomers by their jobs. So Sala’s father became known simply as “the cook.”

Sala did ask her mother, before she died in 1997, to tell her more about her father.

“But she would say, ‘if you want to know your father, you have the same features. You look just like your father, you walk like him.'”

Sala did learn he was “a very slim guy, with beautiful eyes.”

“She was in love with him, and, to her knowledge, he was in love with her.”

But when his employers learned that he was a regular visitor to her tent, they sent him south and sent her mother across the river — “to die,” Sala said.

“That was the last she heard of him,” she said. “I used to think how cruel that would be.”

A family living to the north of Great Whale took in her mother, who was widowed with four children, and brought her back to Great Whale River, now known as Kuujjuaraapik, to give birth.

Because she was not married, her child was to be given up for adoption.

“At my baptism, she not allowed to hold me: a married couple had to hold her while I was baptized, because she was not good enough or clean enough to hold me.”

Sala, who was adopted out to the Sala family, grew up feeling “like a rejected person.”

With her curly light hair, pale skin and light brown eyes, Sala was often taunted for looking different.

Now Sala knows it’s a “long shot” to find out who her biological father was, because she doesn’t have a name.

But she’s hoping that somewhere, someone will connect her story — or the photos posted here — with his.

“The main thing is that I don’t want to know him because he’s got money. I just want to know where my roots are.”

Anyone with information about the handsome cook who was her father can contact her through Facebook.