A Nunavut tragedy—Part Three: The Broken Men

Peter Kingwatsiak, in an interview room at the Baffin Correctional Centre in Iqaluit in Dec. 14, 2015, six months before he was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for 25 years. (PHOTO BY THOMAS ROHNER)

Cape Dorset, a community of roughly 1,400 people on south Baffin Island, has suffered more than its share of shootings and death in the past decade, including the death of Mappaluk Adla, 22, in 2010. (PHOTO BY THOMAS ROHNER)

The third in a three-part series on the 2010 murder of Mappaluk Adla, 22, in Cape Dorset. Today, we explore why so many Inuit men commit violent acts and pass through the Nunavut justice system while beaten, bruised and scared women and children look on from the wings.

When a Nunavut court sentenced Peter Kingwatsiak in June to life in prison for the murder of his stepbrother Mappaluk Adla in 2010, about 20 of Adla’s family members and friends were present in the Cape Dorset Community Hall.

But Adla’s father, David Adla, was not among them.

That’s because David Adla was killed 15 years earlier, in 2001, by his common-law partner, a woman he loved. David had been beating her for 11 years.

Once, she tried to leave him but her eyes were so swollen from his beatings she couldn’t find the doorknob.

David smashed a table over her back and she stopped looking. Years later, after another beating, she stabbed David three times in the back when he sat down to tie his shoes.

Mappaluk Adla was four years old when his parents separated and 14 when his father was killed. And he grew up wishing he had a father figure, someone to teach him hunting skills.

“It broke my heart at times like that when he wished his father was with us so that he can take him hunting,” Adla’s mother, Kumaarjuk Pii, told the judge at Kingwatsiak’s sentencing. “Having a father figure was a big thing for [Mapp].”

Kingwatsiak’s father, who was dating Adla’s mother at the time of the murder, wasn’t at the sentencing either. Kingwatsiak’s father didn’t come to his son’s trial in June 2015.

“I asked my dad to come to [the] trial so I’m not so alone, by myself. I’m ashamed [my family] didn’t come,” Kingwatsiak said in an interview from an Iqaluit jail shortly after his trial.

In December 2015, when Kingwatsiak was back in court for closing arguments, his mother sat in the courtroom, but he ignored her. “I told [my family] I’m alone now, I don’t need them,” he said later, from jail.

At his sentencing, Kingwatsiak’s words failed him. He tried to ask Adla’s family for forgiveness and to tell them about his newfound faith in Islam, but everything came out jumbled. Finally, Kingwatsiak looked around the room for his father.

“My father, my dad, where is he? Where is my father?” Kingwatsiak asked. “I wanted to show you when I apologize… I have become a man. I have [had to] find [on] my own [how] to be a better man. I want to be a good man.”

All over Nunavut, men are absent from families and communities, often due to violence.

About one in 10 Nunavut men aged 18 to 65 were behind bars in 2015, a larger proportion than anywhere else in Canada. And in 2011, one in five Nunavut families were headed by a single mother—nearly twice the national average.

A 2008 survey conducted by the National Aboriginal Health Organization asked 20 Inuit men across Canada about the state of their mental well-being.

Those men agreed that the cultural upheaval lived by Inuit in recent decades created deep feelings of powerlessness among many Inuit men.

Their traditional roles as hunters living at land camps disappeared. At the same time, the rapid growth of a wage-based economy continues to leave many Inuit men without formal education and therefore unemployed, most of those surveyed said.

And the change in family and community dynamics has left many Inuit men unsure of their role and value as fathers, husbands and sons.

Those surveyed cited jealousy and anger as the most common personal problems they deal with daily and said violence and abuse are now commonplace in Inuit communities.

Broken pride, broken men

It’s not hard to imagine generations of Inuit men, overcome with feelings of powerlessness, retreating to lonely, angry places within themselves—places from which many of them lash out in violence at themselves, each other and those they love.

Inuit society, perhaps led by its women, needs to address the broken pride of its men in order to stop the violence and abuse, some Inuit elders and academics say.

Some reports, including the NAHO survey, suggest Inuit women have adapted to the cultural changes better than Inuit men. For example, seven out of 10 Inuit employed by the Government of Nunavut are women.

And more women have graduated from high school than men every year since the creation of Nunavut, a territory where the overall high school graduation rate is already about 20 per cent lower than everywhere else in Canada.

Those same academics, elders and reports suggest that health and support services for men, including mental health services, lag behind those for women.

For example, women’s shelters in Nunavut help battered women, but there are currently no shelters specifically to help the abusers.

And this is nothing new: “There is more emphasis [at the shelters] on helping the women than the men who are the problem in the first place,” former Nunavut premier Eva Aariak said in 2005.

But things may be changing: A new men’s shelter—the second in Nunavut and the first outside of Iqaluit—is set to open in Cambridge Bay before the end of 2016.

And men’s groups and services have recently started up in communities such as Rankin Inlet, Cape Dorset and Clyde River. Nunavut’s Family Services minister also used this year’s family violence prevention month, November, to talk about the importance of programming for men and boys.

But the lack of men’s services was not mentioned by the Nunavut court when Kingwatsiak was sentenced. Nor did the court mention the link between violence by Inuit men and the cultural upheaval of recent decades.

Perhaps that’s because the violence among Inuit men is so commonplace, it’s not worth mentioning.

Closure for an open wound?

Nunavut Justice Bonnie Tulloch concluded Kingwatsiak had an adolescent brain at the time of the murder. And the court found Kingwatsiak lived a hard childhood, marked by neglect, sexual abuse, suicide attempts and an intense anxiety over his parent’s separation. Then, Tulloch sentenced Kingwatsiak as an adult to life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years.

Tulloch told Adla’s family what judges in Nunavut often say in such cases: “Nothing this court can say or do will bring Mappaluk back… The best this court can do is provide all of you… with the closure needed in your healing journey.”

But can the court really provide closure? “At this moment I’m still wishing that it’s a horrendous nightmare and that I will soon awake,” Pii, Adla’s mother, told Tulloch at Kingwatsiak’s sentencing.

Tulloch said this was the hardest case she ever had to rule on. Then she got on a plane and flew 400 kilometres back to her home in Iqaluit.

Back in Cape Dorset, Adla’s mother said her son’s death also renewed the grief she felt over the death of his father, “which has no expressible words to describe the pain,” Pii said.

Another judge found in 2001 that Adla’s father David had viciously abused the woman who killed him for more than a decade before the killing. “There is no justification for the action of [the accused,]” the judge said in that case, and then moved on to the next case.

Neither that judge nor Tulloch made any reference to the fact most men in Nunavut don’t have access to culturally-sensitive mental health and support services until they are arrested—and many not even then.

Kingwatsiak has undergone some treatment since his arrest but it has been self-driven.

“I struggled so much with my family, I hurt [inside] a lot. That’s why I want treatment,” he said from an interview room at the Iqaluit prison, leaning forward in a plastic chair, his elbows resting on his knees as he held back tears. “Treatment for adolescents, about what’s the difference between a 20-year-old and a 25-year-old… I feel like I became an adult in jail.”

In the Kingwatsiak and Adla families, it was sometimes the old, the young or women who protected and helped heal each other. Like when, as a youth, Adla would ask his mom if friends could stay over to protect them from their parents’ drunken fights.

Adla would sometimes adopt young cousins as brothers because he thought they needed his protection, Pii said at Kingwatsiak’s sentencing. Growing up, Kingwatsiak would run with his sister to hide at their grandparent’s house when their parents drank too much and fought.

And while Kingwatsiak’s father did not come to the trial, his grandfather did.

One day at trial, Kingwatsiak asked the court sheriff if he could shake the hand of his grandfather, who sat in the court gallery.

“I’m close to my grandparents, my dad’s parents. I can talk to them about both sides of the family, about what happened,” Kingwatsiak said from jail, after his trial.

His grandparents taught him hunting skills and how to be respectful of others. They still act as a bridge between the two families, Kingwatsiak said. “They said as long as I say sorry and seek forgiveness, they’ll never turn their backs on me.”

If leaders in Nunavut and Canada are serious about addressing the many social ills that plague contemporary Inuit society, perhaps they need to look at the broken pride of Inuit men.

Meanwhile, many Inuit go on living, despite the statistics and trends of violence, by the grace and love of those around them.

You can read the first instalment in this series, A Nunavut tragedy—Part One: The Victim, here.

You can read the second, A Nunavut tragedy—Part Two: The Killer, here.