Nunavik doctor shares decades of experience in Qingaujaaluk

The cover of Qinguajaaluk, Dr. Normand Tremblay’s memoir of nearly 40 years spent in Nunavikk.

If you were looking for a young doctor from the South eager to work in the North, you couldn’t do better than to have hired Normand Tremblay.

For nearly 40 years, Tremblay practiced in Kuujjuaq, arriving when that community was still known as Fort Chimo.

At the time, there was no hospital at all in Nunavik and Tremblay served as the sole physician for the entire Ungava coast.

During those early years, Tremblay lived in modest lodgings, worked whenever he had to, delivered hundreds of babies, served as a de facto psychiatrist, and organized medical evacuations in the worst weather possible to communities that didn’t even have airstrips

You can read about his experiences in his recently-published book Qingaujaaluk: médecine, aventures dans le Grand nord québécois (Qinguajaaluk: medicine, adventures in Quebec’s far North) — which traces Tremblay’s career from 1969 until his retirement in 2008.

The book, named after a mountain 60 kilometres from Kuujjuaq — one of Tremblay’s favourite spots, is dedicated to the Inuit of Nunavik, and especially to his fellow residents of Kuujjuaq.

However, many will have trouble reading its 500-plus pages, as the book is written in French, Tremblay’s first language.

That’s unfortunate because Tremblay recounts many stories that Nunavik residents, past and present, would be interested in reading, and which Tremblay hopes they will be able to read if the book can be translated into English or Inuktitut.

Included in his memoir are tales of his travels around Nunavik as well as many medical stories.

Some of his experiences as a doctor are disturbing, such as when he talks about the violence he witnessed and the many emergency treatments he carried out on patients.

But many other stories are touching, such as his recounting of a difficult medevac of a man with a history of alcoholism.

Many years afterwards, this man, long since recovered, thanked Tremblay for giving him water during the trip and gave him a savik as a present.

“This knife has the same importance as a man for me. It helps me build what I need, no matter where —an igloo where I can sleep, your friend,” the man wrote Tremblay in a note.

During his years of practice, when expert medical care was 1,500 km away in southern Quebec, Tremblay saved many people from death or disfigurement: in 1971, he dealt with the first recorded cases of life-threatening botulism, and, on another occasion, he pulled a hook out of a young boy’s eye, saving his vision.

On one harrowing trip south, Tremblay gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a woman travelling on the flight to keep her alive.

There are two remarkable things about this book.

First, Tremblay reveals a memory for detail that makes you sure he was an excellent doctor, able to remember medical lore, his patients and their case histories, without needing to check on a computer.

Second, Tremblay never complains about his adopted community of Kuujjuaq, even when some kids in Kuujjuaq set fire to his apartment, and never complains about the tough working conditions, the isolation, lack of access to quality food or the high cost of living.

Tremblay clearly relished his many years in Nunavik: he loved going out the land to hike, hunt and fish, and he took long canoe and kayak trips around the region.

A bit of a loner, his closest friends were other francophone workers, but he made deep connections with many Inuit, young and old, and the traditional Inuit way of life.

At the beginning of his book, Tremblay quotes Samwillie Annahatak’s reflection that “I prefer the kayak and a dog team to hunt, because these allow you to think about life.”

Having an interest in anthropology before he arrived also didn’t hurt: Tremblay, who studied anthropology after medicine, was ready and willing to live in another culture.

He arrived with long hair and blue jeans in 1969 — and he left as a much older and wiser man, having spent nearly all his adult life in Nunavik.

But the doctor’s story ends on a sad note: someone torches his beloved cabin — which turned out to be on Inuit-owned lands after the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement.

And his collection of books and documents on the North, aimed at helping to inform doctors, are thrown out of the health board’s documentation room.

He makes bureaucratic errors, becomes the subject of an internal investigation, and gets on the wrong side of the administration at the Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Social Services, known during that period as a hard place to work.

“Increasingly isolated… I was working in an unfavourable atmosphere where I felt ill at ease, and this only increased,” Tremblay writes about the year 2008, when he retired at age 65.

There was no longer “any question of spending my retirement in Nunavik, as I had always planned.”

“And that is how I turned my back on all those things which had kept me busy for so many years and without which I could not have imagined living at a certain period in my life,” he writes.

And so, Tremblay headed south, to mull over his legacy.

“Many of the youth whom we knew in our first years, Annie, Sheila, Willie, the Adams brothers, Shirley, made their way to become leaders of their community,” he writes.

Back in the South, Tremblay started to write his memoir, which also features many interesting black and white photos, of people he knew as well as of events, such as the 1979 flood in Kuujjuaq, which put much of the community under water.

“I think this book could be useful to young Inuit, because of its historical interest, and for others who are interested in Nunavik, either for work or to visit,” Tremblay told Nunatsiaq News.

You can buy Qingaujaaluk at Tivi Galleries in Kuujjuaq or through online book sellers

Qingaujaaluk
Médecine et aventures dans le Grand Nord québécois
ISBN 978-2-89634-229-7