Taissumani, April 16

Graham Farquharson, the founder of Nanisivik.

The honour that all explorers yearn for is to have a spot on the map – or a number of spots — named for them.

When I was a young man, I lived for many years in Arctic Bay, first as school principal and then as owner of a small business there.

For three years I was on the settlement council and it was my privilege to serve with and learn from such wise men as Levi Kalluk, for many years the mayor of the community, Philip Qamanirq, carver and orator extraordinaire, and Isaiah Attagutsiaq, leader of an industrious and hard-working family.

Those were exciting times in Arctic Bay because a major industrial development was planned for a site about 20 miles away. A lead-zinc deposit, first discovered over half a century earlier, was about to go into production on the edge of Strathcona Sound at a site that would eventually be named Nanisivik. This provided the potential for jobs for Inuit from Arctic Bay and other northern communities.

The debate over Nanisivik was twofold. Should a townsite be built or should it be a fly-in, fly-out mining camp? And should there be a road linking Arctic Bay with the site?

As a council we opposed the development of a townsite. The community had some experience with fly-in, fly-out employment, because for some years, men from Arctic Bay had been employed on a rotational basis in the High Arctic at PanArctic’s oil exploration sites.

If a town site were built, it was apparent that some Inuit from Arctic Bay would move there with their families, as well as Inuit with families from other communities.

Of course a large contingent of qallunaat would live there as well. Some on council expressed the view that Inuit from diverse communities shouldn’t live together, and that the town site and the road would lead to the ruination of Arctic Bay, in the 1970s still quite a small community. So we opposed the building of a town site and a road.

Countless meetings with the consultants charged with making the mine a reality followed. At these meetings I had another privilege. It was to meet – on the opposite side of the negotiating table – a gentleman.

His name was Graham Farquharson and he was the president and founder of Strathcona Mineral Services, a Toronto-based mining consultancy.

Graham had been born in Timmins in 1940 and had spent his life in the mining business. He was only 33 when he took charge of the Nanisivik project.

And he was determined that there would be a town site built at Strathcona Sound, and a road linking Arctic Bay and its workers with the site. When he was younger he had worked at a fly-in site in the Yukon and shared living quarters with a miner who headed for the bar in the nearest town after every shift.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life this way,” he thought. “Why should anyone else have to?

Graham Farquharson was a determined man and his argument won the day. A town site was built at Nanisivik and a road joined the two communities. A jet airstrip was built and Arctic Bay benefited, not only from jobs, but from much reduced freight rates.

One might think that, with his desired town site on the drawing board, Graham and his associates would visit Arctic Bay less often, but that simply wasn’t the case.

His office was in Toronto, but on almost every visit to Nanisivik, Graham found a reason to visit Arctic Bay. He even had an Inuktitut name – Nujakittuq, the one with short hair.

He was one of the founders of the Midnight Sun Marathon, a standard 26-mile marathon that followed the road between the two communities. It was billed as the world’s toughest marathon – the last stretch of it was all uphill, from the dock back up to the Nanisivik townsite.

Graham didn’t smoke or drink and was in top physical shape – of course he participated personally in the marathon for many years. (The world’s toughest marathon is no more. It was a casualty of the closing of Nanisivik.)

In mid-January of this year, Graham Farquharson was inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame. At the ceremony he commented on the three biggest decisions of his career.

One was to make his famous telephone call, in his role as consultant, to the senior officers of Bre-X advising them of his opinion that there was no gold at their site in Indonesia. Bre-X was an elaborate scam and Graham had exposed it. Six billion dollars of shareholder “value” was wiped out.

But the other two biggest decisions of his career were both to do with Nanisivik. The first was to bring the site into production in the first place.

The second was the decision to build a family town at Nanisivik and not a fly-in camp. “Despite its location, technical challenges and youthful management, Nanisivik went on to be a great success,” he said.

At his induction ceremony, Graham lamented that Nanisivik was the last mining town built in Canada. Newer mines are fly-in sites. He urged developers to reconsider the benefits of building mining communities.

Graham’s determination to build a townsite at Nanisivik was the right course to take. Inuit benefited greatly from that decision.

At the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame ceremony, his colleagues described Graham as a man who has “earned his distinction as a senior statesman of the Canadian mining industry by demonstrating a commitment to integrity, fairness and technical excellence.”

It was my privilege to know Graham Farquharson — Nujakittuq — when I was a young man in Arctic Bay. He was then, and remains today, a gentleman.

Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.