For new cemetery, Iqaluit council looks at side-by-side graves for families

Iqaluit’s Municipal Cemetery in Apex gradually re-emerges from melting snow this month. City councillors were baffled, April 29, to find that the new site will follow the same burial procedures as the old graveyard in Lower Iqaluit — which don’t allow family members to be interred side by side. (PHOTO BY PETER VARGA)

Two years to the month after Iqaluit city council selected a windswept field in Apex as the site of the city’s new cemetery, the site stands ready to accept its first graves.

In those two years, city council and designers created a site that responded to the opinions and demands of residents, suited for a growing population of mixed origins and religious beliefs.

Even so, councillors were stumped, April 29, by one demand that residents never made.

Project officer Richard Sparham presented a draft of a new cemetery bylaw to the engineering and public works committee of the whole that evening.

Coun. Kenny Bell noted that, just as in the city’s half-century-old graveyard, the new Iqaluit Municipal Cemetery won’t allow family members, loved ones or friends to be buried next to each other — unless they happen to have died around the same time.

“Right now, we just bury people in the order that they die,” Sparham told council.

The practice of filling the cemetery with graves in an ordered fashion, one after another, doesn’t allow families to reserve spaces for future burials.

Sparham said the order of burials would be covered by cemetery administration, not the cemetery bylaw.

Most city councillors, including Mayor Mary Wilman, said they were surprised by the practice, even though Iqaluit has done it that way for decades.

“I just assumed that everything was up to the family, and how I wanted my family to be buried — whether they wanted to be together or not,” said Wilman.

“So my understanding is it’s not up to the family, but that it’s up to the cemetery administration?”

Sparham clarified that the new cemetery’s administrators, like the old, would simply fill up the burial grounds in the order that deaths occur.

“I would assume that a person would have enough heart to ensure that everyone (of a family) is buried together,” Coun. Bell said. “But I’ve seen worse here.”

Bell pointed out that there seemed to be no chance that family members can ever be buried together — unless they coincidentally die at about the same time.

“Maybe there’s a way that families could buy plots,” Bell suggested. “I know you don’t want to do that, but I don’t see why we wouldn’t.”

Sparham wondered why that matter had never come up in the two years of planning and public consultations.

The city’s director of engineering, Meagan Leach, said she could not recall that anyone in public consultations had ever brought up the need for side-by-side family burials.

All design planning for the new facility assumed ordered burial without the possibility of reserving plots, she said.

“The site has particular constraints, because of the type of tundra (terrain) it is,” she said.

Leach suggested that the city’s engineering department could show how burial plot reservations would affect or change the cemetery plans and costs, and councillors agreed.

The old practice of burying family members separately at the new cemetery disappointed Coun. Noah Papatsie, who expected the new site would be a great improvement — in terms of management as well as design.

“I’m really hurt that my parents are separated at the old cemetery,” he said.

Many graves at the old cemetery are not marked, Papatsie said.

“I still don’t know where my brother is, and that’s really disappointing.”

Joanasie Akumalik, the chair of the engineering and public works committee, noted that burial is less restrictive in Nunavut’s small communities, where sites have few restrictions on space.