New book questions legacy of Hearne’s Bloody Falls story

Sahtu and Tlicho Dene gather in Kugluktuk, in a photo taken in 2008. Cameron’s book points out that the Qallunaat narrative of Inuit-Dene relations is constructed to create a form of knowledge that serves the interests of settlers. (PHOTO COURTESY OF EMILIE CAMERON)

Far Off Metal River by Carleton University geography professor Emilie Cameron looks at the legacy of Samuel Hearne’s Bloody Falls Massacre narrative. (COURTESY OF EMILIE CAMERON)

How powerful is one story? Just ask the Inuit of Kugluktuk.

Nearby, at the Bloody Falls on the Coppermine River, is a type of ragweed called senecio lugens. In Latin it means “to mourn.”

It’s a tribute of sorts by Western science to the Inuit massacred there by Dene raiders in 1771, as witnessed by explorer Samuel Hearne.

For people in Kugluktuk, Hearne’s story has only ever been a cultural footnote. And the “massacre” may not have even happened as described, say some historians.

But for one researcher, the influence of Hearne’s memoir goes beyond a flora textbook: it’s a story that’s unfairly grown to characterize the region.

In her book Far Off Metal River, author Emilie Cameron argues Hearne’s account of the Bloody Falls Massacre has less to do with the region — or its people — as it does with outsiders, or “Qallunaat” themselves.

“Qallunaat tell this story as though it’s only about Inuit and Dene, but I think it’s more a story about Qallunaat,” Cameron told Nunatsiaq News from her home in Ottawa.

Cameron is an assistant professor at Carleton University’s Department of Geography and Environmental Studies. She’s spent 10 years researching the impact of Hearne’s story from early-colonial times through to the present.

“Mostly I became interested in how important the story was to outsiders and how Inuit in town could speak to it if asked, but it was clearly not the centre of their own lives and history,” she explained.

Hearne was contracted by the Hudson’s Bay Co. in 1769 to investigate rumored metal deposits at the then-unknown Coppermine River on the frontiers of their fur trade empire.

After two failed overland attempts from Churchill, Hearne successfully reached the Coppermine on his third journey — traveling as the sole European in a group of Chipewyan and Dene.

According to Hearne’s 1795 published account, upon his arrival, he watched in horror as his Dene guides fell upon a camp of Inuit at the base of the river, slaughtering men, women and children as they slept.

“It’s told by Hearne as a vicious, bloodthirsty, classic tale of Indigenous savagery,” Cameron said.

Hearne never found the vast copper deposits hoped for at the Coppermine and his HBC benefactors largely regarded the expedition as a failure.

But the “Bloody Falls Massacre” — as it became known — nevertheless caught the imagination of British audiences, becoming a classic tale of European exploration in the North.

It also came to characterize the Inuit and Dene as inherently hostile towards each other.

But why? Cameron believes Hearne’s story hit all the right notes for its colonial audience.

“In those early days, it became very important for the British to think of themselves as people that were affected by violence and that Indigenous people are savage,” Cameron said.

“It’s a lie, but a very helpful lie because it allowed the British to think all the violence they carried out in their various colonial holdings was justified.”

Misrepresentative stories such as Hearne’s have been told, rehashed or invented by Qallunaat through to the present. Eventually, Cameron believes, a story can be told often enough that it stops being questioned.

“The weight of knowledge production from the South is so heavy and our sense of knowledge is so inflated that it oversells the story.”

Inuit and Dene gatherings attended by Cameron during her research testify to the richness of history shared between the two nations.

“You can’t boil it down to this one event that may or may not have happened in the 18th century. It’s absurd,” she said.

At the end of the day, reminds Cameron, many stories like Hearne’s had everything to do with money, despite being propped up as reflective cultural anecdotes.

And she thinks it’s important for Qallunaat to know that.

Producing knowledge and mapping the North is not neutral, Cameron stressed, and there’s a direct line of succession between Hearne’s quest for copper and examples of recent exploration — such as multinational companies conducting seismic testing offshore of Baffin Island.

“The underlying interest of settlers in the North has always been, and remains, economic exploitation. If you send people to map resources it leads the way to those resources being extracted,” she said.

Cameron wants her book to challenge Qallunaat to reexamine their relationship with the North, and the influence their knowledge has on the region even today.

“It asks to us come to terms that [Qallunaat] knowledge and our claims are narrow and often illegitimate and yet very powerful,” she said.

Far Off Metal River was published in the summer of 2015, with a paperback version set to be released this March.

In Canada, order your copy of Far Off Metal River from UTP Distribution at:

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