Family doctor nurtures 46-year relationship with Nunavut community

Bruce McFarlane, then 26, smiles for the camera as he eats a piece of Arctic char during his first year in Cambridge Bay. (PHOTO COURTESY OF KAREN AND BRUCE MCFARLANE)

A hippie is how some in Cambridge Bay remember Karen McFarlane, 26, seen here in her knit poncho during that first year in Cambridge Bay. (PHOTO COURTESY OF KAREN AND BRUCE MCFARLANE)

Find the doctor: Shortly after their return to live again in Cambridge Bay, Bruce and Karen McFarlane sit with members of the extended Hogaluk family. (PHOTO COURTESY OF BRUCE AND KAREN MCFARLANE/CECILIA HOGALUK)

The way it was: Bruce McFarlane fishes with a friend in 1972. (PHOTO COURTESY OF KAREN AND BRUCE MCFARLANE)

CAMBRIDGE BAY—Cambridge Bay, September 1970: 550 people, three vehicles—and a new doctor.

Dr. Bruce McFarlane and his wife Karen arrived in Cambridge Bay on Sept. 6, 1970, on one of only two flights that landed in the western Arctic community each week, amidst a blizzard with a wind so cold that the gas line on the nursing station’s truck froze as they drove into town.

Now, the McFarlanes are back in Cambridge Bay, which they call their “second home.” The town now has a population three times greater than in 1970 and nearly as many vehicles as there were residents 46 years ago.

Bruce McFarlane came back to Cambridge Bay in 2014 to practice medicine full-time, after first returning as a part-time physician starting in 2005.

Today, Bruce and Karen live in the same brown-and-white house where they stayed so many years ago.

And, looking together at their photos from 1970 and 1971, you can peer into that past.

The couple, now both 72, arrived in Cambridge Bay as a newly-married 26-year-old pair in 1970.

He had just finished his residency at the University of Toronto hospital; she had a graduate degree in social work. He answered an ad for a doctor’s position in the Northwest Territories, so they packed up and headed to Cambridge Bay, a long trip by air via Edmonton and Resolute Bay.

In his bags, he took medical reference books and a sound system, along with a few records; she brought materials and dyes to make batik.

They were “hippies,” says a Cambridge Bay woman who remembers the young, long-haired, bearded Bruce and Karen, in her knitted poncho.

“Yes, here we are,” said Karen, showing off an album’s photos marked “young Karen” and “young Bruce” during a recent interview at their home.

In those days, “everybody knew everybody” in town, and the two threw themselves into the life of the community.

“For most of us, the first year we practice our trade is intense, and it was for me, and we were in a new culture, meeting new people,” Bruce said.

Karen started a job, “supposedly in youth protection,” she recalls, but she questioned her role—”What am I doing in this culture? I can’t even speak the language, less know what I’m doing.”

So she quit and had more time to visit—forging friendships that have lasted a lifetime.

Bruce would spend two weeks in Cambridge Bay, then fly east for two weeks to Gjoa Haven and communities then known as Spence Bay (Taloyoak) and Pelly Bay (Kugaaruk). After a break back home, he would head west to Coppermine (now Kugluktuk) and Holman Island (today’s Uluhaktok) for another two weeks.

Communication then was “really different”—there was a good telephone line to Yellowknife and Edmonton but only a CB radio to the east.

Karen remembers how she would wake up in the middle of the night hearing “shouting from the radio and him [Bruce] shouting back.”

And, in some places, like Pelly Bay, there were no nurses, just a nun as a lay dispenser and no regular medevacs anywhere—only the famed Arctic bush pilot, Willy Laserich.

When people needed emergency medical help, Bruce would fly out of Cambridge Bay with Laserich, treat them and, if needed, go on with them to the hospital in Yellowknife.

Bruce travelled with his microscope to examine spinal fluids, for example, and brought antibiotics to treat the sick.

That year he saw 12 cases of infectious meningitis—an often fatal brain infection—among children.

But he saw no heart disease, no diabetes and no high blood pressure, although there was a lot of tuberculosis which affected a third of the population in Cambridge Bay and one in two people in Kugluktuk.

Bruce himself caught hepatitis A, a serious liver infection, and only knew so when he started to turn yellow, a sign of liver disease.

September 1970 gave way to dark, even colder weather that stretched into 1971, but that didn’t bother Bruce and Karen, originally from Manitoba.

“I loved it. I still love it because you just kind of hibernate,” Bruce said.

So Cambridge Bay was “a good fit” for them. Then, you could feel the past around you, they remember.

“People were out on the land a lot,” Bruce said. “Watching how they related to each other, I think we learned a lot, important lessons about life. We’re both still learning a lot from the people in the community.”

He didn’t think at the time that “this is a culture in peril.”

“There were many strengths. People were speaking Inuinnaqtun,” he said. That’s not the case today in Cambridge Bay, where in 2012 only 70 people spoke the language and English predominates.

Then, snowmobiles, little yellow ones, were rare, and many people still ran dog teams—like the dog team that took Karen to Bathurst Inlet on the mainland during the spring of 1971.

The warmer weather and 24-hour sun also brought camping and fishing.

“I just remember people catching [Arctic] char, cleaning them and putting them in a pot of boiling water and eating and everyone had pilot biscuits,” Bruce said.

“It was a different sense of time and the meaning of life. Our southern culture is so project-driven and we have plans, we have goals, things we want to learn. That was a rich and wonderful thing to see.”

But in September 1971, they left Cambridge Bay and its store stocked with canned butter, powdered eggs, powdered milk and orange-flavoured Tang crystals.

“When I left a year later, that’s what I thought orange juice should taste like—Tang,” Bruce said.

Bruce went on to lead a rural family medical practice, two hours north of Toronto, for 34 years.

The McFarlanes’ first of four children was born after they left the North: Corinna Ekvanna, named after Gwen and Emily Angulalik’s mother “who made much of our winter clothes,” Karen said.

Bruce had always thought about ending his career in Cambridge Bay. He retired in 2003 at 59, but soon he felt more rested and started to think about the North.

On his return to part-time doctoring in Cambridge Bay in 2005, he discovered a different place, with new medical issues such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and other stress-related problems.

“The stresses of that [cultural] transition. They were apparent then, but we just didn’t have those diseases. These are diseases that indicate the cultural context, the easy access to food, the wrong food, lack of physical exercise, and continued smoking,” he said.

And you can still find a lots of infections, but now ones like MRSA, short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a skin infection that cannot be killed by common antibiotics, and RSV, the respiratory syncytial lung virus, which sickens many Nunavut children.

While life on the land was dangerous, suicide was not a big part of the conversation in 1970-71.

“Suicide is a much bigger issue now,” Bruce said.

“No matter how benign the intentions of the colonizer, you can’t have one culture taking over another culture in the space of a few years without a huge impact, dislocation, confusion. So the nurses and doctors working in this context can’t avoid it. It’s a big part of everybody’s life.”

The years did bring a much roomier, $22-million health centre to Cambridge Bay with computers, a laboratory, x-ray technicians and an ultrasound machine along with midwifery—a “huge step forward,” he said, allowing women to give birth in Cambridge Bay.

“Medicine has got technically way more competent. In some ways, it’s profoundly better,” said Bruce, who now carries an Android phone that links him to updated online medical information.

But when asked if Nunavut will ever produce enough homegrown doctors and nurses for the territory, Bruce remains doubtful.

“It’s going to be a dilemma for a long time. The longer the training is, the longer it’s going to take people in the North to stick it out,” he said.

And doctors from the South will continue to leave the North because their families are in the South.

“I really have two homes, but this is my second home,” Bruce said. “I’ve invested a lot in this home, but down south is where my kids are, where my grandkids are.”

But being again in Cambridge Bay provides a rare opportunity for this physician: “My understanding of the community is deeper, [as is] my understanding of colonialism. I am an older person. I’ve been through more in life.”

And, in Cambridge Bay for yet another year, Karen plans to finish the sewing projects she’s started with her long-time friend Cecilia Hogaluk, who was only a teenager when they first met.

As they are today: Karen and Bruce McFarlane stand in the doorway of their home in Cambridge Bay, which they first stayed in from 1970 and 1971. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)