Long-time Arctic Oblate missionary dies at 92

Ataata Rogatien Papion, a long-time Oblate missionary, died earlier this month at the age of 92. (HANDOUT PHOTO)

Many in Nunavut still remember with fondness a Roman Catholic missionary who served in the Eastern Arctic for decades: Ataata Rogatien Papion, who died on March 13 in France at the age of 92.

“Rest In Peace, Father Papion — Qujalijunga Igluligaarjungmualauqsimagavit! Naglingnaq,” said one message posted on a Facebook news site from the Kivalliq region, on which Papion’s death was announced.

“You took pity on my parents,” another man said.

The solitary, self-reliant man, first arrived to the North from France in 1947. By learning Inuit ways and Inuktitut, Father Papion managed to get by mainly on his own at a time when few non-Inuit were venturing into the Arctic.

For nearly 50 years, Papion lived around the Hudson Bay area: in Ikpik or Thom Bay near Taloyoak, Arviat, Baker Lake, Whale Cove, Rankin Inlet, Chesterfield Inlet, Coral Harbour and Repulse Bay, where, as an Oblate missionary, he arrived in 1947.

Born in 1921 in France, where his parents ran a restaurant, Papion was ordained as a priest in 1946.

Papion asked to go to Laos in southern Asia because he did not speak English. But, instead, the Oblates sent Papion to Hudson Bay in 1947.

He was 26 years old when he arrived in what is today’s community of Repulse Bay.

From Repulse Bay, Papion then went to Thom Bay near Taloyoak from 1949 to 1953 where there was a small Catholic mission.

But life there was hard: by 1951, Papion was suffering from a lack of vitamin B.

And in 1953, because of these health problems, he was sent to a mission closer to the hospital in Churchill, to Eskimo Point, the community now known as Arviat.

Returning to Repulse Bay, where he lived on and off from 1978 to 1987, Papion also served in Whale Cove, Rankin Inlet, Chesterfield Inlet, Baker Lake and Coral Harbour.

In 1998, Papion finally left the Arctic for good, heading to Winnipeg for hip surgery. From there, Papion went back to France, where he spent the rest of his life in a retirement home for aging Oblate missionaries in Lyons.

“I was always alone,” Papion said about his life as a missionary.

“I had to feed myself, me and my dogs. I have always been accustomed to solitude and used to managing on my own,” he said in an interview on the website from the retirement home.

But there were encouraging moments for the missionary: in that same interview Papion also recalled receiving a letter from a patient in France who was part of the “Missionary Union of the Sick.”

“She asked me the name of an Inuk for whom she could pray. I only got back to her answer a year later, [and] I gave her the name of a shaman,” he said.

“A year later, she got back to me: [that she had prayed] for ‘not only the sorcerer, but his entire family.’ Several years later, the sorcerer and his family were converted.”