Convict blames sanatorium stay for life of crime

JOHN THOMPSON

When Adamie Nutaraluk, a 53-year-old inmate in the Baffin Correctional Centre, considers the anger he feels every day, he traces it back to a life-saving trip he took when he was five years old, to the Hamilton Mountain Sanatorium.

The journey cured his tuberculosis, but he says it also robbed him of his language during his childhood. He’s felt anger ever since, which he says is a big reason why he’s been in and out of prison since the 1970s.

“I can only blame myself, and the way I was treated as a kid,” he says. “I always wanted to fight back as a kid.”

It’s quite likely that if Nutaraluk was not sent south for treatment, he would have died from tuberculosis, which health professionals at the time feared would wipe out the entire Inuit population in Canada’s eastern Arctic. Yet he remains angry and bitter about the experience today.

Close to 1,300 Inuit were evacuated from their homes and sent to the Mountain Sanatorium, which was the largest facility of its kind in the British Commonwealth, between 1955 and 1963.

Many were evacuated aboard the C.D. Howe, the Department of Transport’s supply ship, which doubled as a floating medical station.

Nutaraluk was flown out on a DC3 with two other Inuit. He threw up shortly after take-off. Then he cried.

Memories of the journey recently flooded back, after Nutaraluk’s teacher in BCC, Ryan Boyko, visited the former sanatorium, now Chedoke Hospital, in December. While there he discovered, at an exhibit commemorating the site’s role as a sanatorium, one photo of five smiling children. He immediately recognized one as Nutaraluk.

But Nutaraluk doesn’t remember smiling much during his stay, from April to September in 1959.

Everything, from the macaroni he was fed to the flush toilets he was told to use, was alien. And he hated it all, he says.

He says he resented being told when he could nap, and having to ask permission to go to the washroom.

He spoke no English when he arrived. But by the time he returned home to Apex, he had trouble speaking Inuktitut with his family and friends. “I couldn’t understand them, and they couldn’t understand me,” he says.

He used to look forward to seeing a truck driver with the Department of Transport, who was the only person he knew who spoke English.

“I used to be happy when he came around, because he was the only person in the world I could speak with, even though I was with my own family,” he says.

“It was more painful than a cut,” he says. “A cut you can bandage. A feeling takes more time.”

“You can’t seem to find a bandage for a feeling in your life.”

A different story is told by a plaque at the former sanatorium, which describes how administrators took pains to comfort Inuit patients, by providing soapstone for the men to carve, and sewing materials for the women to make clothing. Some carvings remain on display at the hospital.

As well, Arctic char was provided at times for Inuit patients, tells the book Chedoke: more than a sanatorium.

But the forced evacuations are often remembered in Nunavut with pain, largely due to the language barrier between Inuit and federal employees. Many patients taken aboard the C.D. Howe did not understand where they were going, and why. Neither did their families.

Meanwhile, the problem of how to smoothly transfer patients awaiting surgery from Nunavut to the South continues to confound health administrators today.

The odd screw-up of medical travel flights remains an immensely emotional issue, which MLAs regularly bark about inside the legislative assembly.

The threat of tuberculosis hasn’t disappeared, either. The disease is spread by the coughs and sneezes of an infected person, and it flourishes in places where people live in overcrowded housing.

That’s why tuberculosis is known as a disease of poverty, and why it’s again on the rise in Nunavut, where the same overcrowded conditions exist today, to the concern of the territory’s health practitioners.

For Nutaraluk, his journey to the sanatorium was just the beginning of a long line of encounters with institutions he says had one thing in common: indifference towards his own feelings, and his culture.

His later visits to hospitals he always hated, and he always fought to get out. “It hurt my feelings. They didn’t respect me as a human being,” he said.

At Frobisher High School in Iqaluit, he says teachers beat him with belts and yardsticks for speaking Inuktitut.

And then there’s prison. Currently he’s serving a year-long sentence for assaulting another Iqaluit man. That man didn’t show him much respect either, he says.

Today, with 13 weeks left of his sentence, he sometimes thinks about the sanatorium. “That’s the place where I learned time is more important than people’s feelings,” he says.

In some ways, Nutaraluk never left the sanatorium. At BCC he still wakes and sleeps only when he’s told.

And if he wants to go to the washroom, he needs to ask permission first.