Ghoulish memories of Hall Beach corpses still haunt Nunavut legislature

It’s an issue that refuses to die: more than 10 years after the issue was first raised in the Nunavut legislature, the relocation of Hall Beach graves more than 40 years ago arose once again during the assembly’s current sitting.

In 2000, Enoki Irqittuq of Hall Beach, then the MLA for Amittuq, described how several men in Hall Beach had used their dog teams to move 20 graves by kamotik in 1968 for local officials who wanted to use the land for housing.

“Some of them had to wait until the ground was thawed enough and had to deal with things like corpses thawing out and flesh falling off and very putrid smells,” Irqittuq said.

“Some of the blood that melted off these corpses ended up on their mitts as well, not just their kamotiks, but also on their mitts. After they had transported the corpses, they couldn’t eat for days afterward because the smell of death was so strong, and the sights had been so horrible. They couldn’t eat.”

Irqittuq, who raised the issue in the legislature several times in 1999, 2000 and 2001, said “some of the graves belonged to family members.”

“The people who dug up the graves had a very hard time because they were digging up graves that were very old and some were recent adult graves and children’s graves. The old coffins, when they were dug up, had children that had been wrapped in newspapers or cardboard. They had disintegrated to the point where they fell apart when you dug them up. That was especially with the children’s graves.”

Irqittuq said when the settlement council asked these men to do this unpleasant task, they were told they would be given a “substantial” amount of money.
They never received payment, Irquittuq said.

They wished to receive $5,000 each, the mayor of Hall Beach told Nunatsiaq News in 2001.

Today only one of the men involved in the relocation of those graves remains alive, the current MLA for Amittuq, Louis Tapardjuk, said Feb. 24 in the Nunavut legislature.

Tapardjuk asked Health Minister Keith Peterson if he’d ever heard back from Ottawa about a 2001 commitment to Nunavut’s health department from the federal minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development “to research this event”… and “contact you as soon as we have some substantial evidence for payment.”

“Can the minister confirm for me whether he or his predecessors ever received a follow-up from the federal government and, if so, can he indicate what information was provided,” Tapardjuk asked.

Expressing his sympathy to people in Hall Beach, and noting it “must have been a very traumatic experience for those individuals,” Peterson said there was “no evidence” that such a second letter was ever received from Ottawa.

“I can write to the federal minister,” Peterson said.

In 2001, then-health minister Ed Picco had agreed to host a community feast and healing workshop as a way of dealing with trauma around the relocation of graves in Hall Beach because “the federal government would have responsibility for remuneration.”