Now he knows what the Senate is

In 1977, then-minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, Warren Allmand, approached Willie Adams in Rankin Inlet to ask if he would like to become the first Inuk to hold a seat in the Canadian Senate.

Adams' response was one simple question.

"What's a senate?" he asked.

"I'd never heard of it before," he recalls now with a chuckle.

Allmand explained how the senate worked, that Adams would be appointed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to represent the Northwest Territories, and that if the job suited him, he could hold the seat until mandatory retirement at age 75.

When he heard the salary, he admits candidly, he was definitely interested. For a father of 10 children, that had to be an important consideration.

A week later, Trudeau's office called to ask Adams to fly down to Ottawa from Rankin Inlet to meet with the Prime Minister to discuss the senate appointment.

"I said no."

"I'm an electrician and I have two houses to wire," he told the PMO. "I don't want to hold up the carpenter. I can come down in a week."

In the end, Adams did make the trip to meet Trudeau. He did become the first Inuk senator – originally representing the NWT and since 1999, Nunavut.

And now, 32 years later, he will do two big things this month:

1) on June 10 he will retire as Canada's senior senator; and

2) on June 22 he will turn 75.

That's 11 years after a 1998 editorial in Nunatsiaq News suggested Adams' then-21 years as senator was "a long time to hold office without having to face an election."

It needs to be noted though, that even then the newspaper also admitted: "No one could ever suggest that Adams has not represented Nunavut and the Northwest Territories to the best of his ability."

Sitting with his wife Mary Hands in an Iqaluit hotel room last week, preparing to participate in the Lafontaine-Baldwin Symposium's Saturday round table discussions, Adams reflected on a career that many are now calling distinguished.

The same work ethic that made him tell the prime minister's office he couldn't come down for the most important interview of his life until he had wired two houses, has served him in good stead in the senate, where he has served his Inuit people honourably and steadfastly.

As a longtime member of the senate committees on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources, on Fisheries and Oceans, and on Transport and Communications – all subjects of vital interest to Inuit Nunaat – Adams has diligently done his homework, and has spoken up for his people when the occasion called for it.

He not only voted against his own Liberal party's Firearms Bill in 1995, for example, because it clashed with the subsistence hunting needs of the Inuit, but resigned from the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples over the matter.

And in 2006, he called for a probe into Nunavut's Davis Strait turbot and shrimp fisheries, concerned about foreign involvement, potentially harmful fishing methods and what happens to fishing royalties. He also called for an "audit of Inuit benefit from the fishery."

And he has spent a lot of time on the road – or in the air.

Every time he was off from the senate, he was back in Rankin, Hands recalled, sitting beside her husband. And especially in the beginning, that was a trip that took two days each way.

"Even though we have been together for 32 years," she said, "I've only seen him for 16."

Hands added that even after all these years in the position, her husband still diligently plows through all the submissions, papers and reports that come his way by virtue of the office.

Adams does not look like a man closing in on his 75th birthday. Trim and fit, and with styled silver hair and beard, he is every inch the distinguished senator. Except that perhaps he seems too straightforward, too down to earth, even humble.

A man of the people, one might say.

Adams was born near what is now Kuujjuaq in Nunavik, and moved to Rankin Inlet by way of Churchill, Man., where he became an electrician for the federal government.

Not surprising in the small world of Inuit Nunaat where family histories and big events are so often intertwined, he left Nunavik on the same voyage of the C.D. Howe that took John Amagoalik and his family to Resolute in the infamous forced relocations.

And in Rankin, he was hired to work for the RCMP by Siila Watt-Cloutier's father.

While continuing his work as an electrician, Adams ventured into politics, serving first on the Rankin Community Council, then the hamlet council when those were formed, and finally as a member of the NWT council, before it became the legislative assembly.

All of which brought him to Trudeau's notice and eventually to that long senate career.

"It's been a good job. Very interesting," he said simply.

Three days after the senate honours his career on June 10, Adams and Hands are hoping to bring his nine remaining children, 30 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren to their home outside Ottawa for a big family party.

It's a major challenge as the family is scattered across the country, in Rankin, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto and the Ottawa area.

And after that?

"He's already talking about going goose hunting," said Hands.