Half a century of good works

GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS

Fresh off a cargo boat, Rev. Mike Gardener’s first sermon to the people he knew as “Eskimos” came out in Inuktitut words he didn’t understand.

It was 50 years ago, and the Anglican minister of Lake Harbour, now known as Kimmirut, insisted that the 24-year-old Gardener do his preaching in the local language.

Gardener, ordained only the month before in London, England, was keen to meet the challenge, having taught himself how to sound out Inuktitut syllabics from a translated Bible.

But he was so nervous, he blocked out everything around him.

“I don’t know what their reaction was,” Gardener said, sitting in his home office in Iqaluit this week.

“I dread to think what the people thought, but I did attempt it.”

Gardener, now 74, is a fixture in Nunavut’s capital, after a long career as a minister and tireless volunteer in several communities throughout the territory.

The frail, gentle man has no special plans to mark his near-50 years of preaching in the eastern Arctic. Like all Anglican ministers, he was ordained on Trinity Sunday, which falls on May 22, this year.

But Gardener does plan to keep working. He retired in Iqaluit in 1996, but still conducts Bible study groups and counsels parishioners and accused persons.

He provides opening prayers at nearly every major event in the community, from veterans’ memorials to fund raisers for the crisis line.

Plus, he drums up support for food drives, serves on non-religious boards like the Workers’ Compensation Board, and still conducts services at St. Jude’s Anglican Church, in Inuktitut or English, every few weeks, or whenever he’s needed.

“He’s known to everyone,” said Susan Spring, head of the Iqaluit’s Rotary Club.

“He’s one of those kind souls who would do anything for anybody.”

Gardener grew up in a town west of London, in a non-religious family. He was inspired to become a missionary when he was 12, after the principal did the daily prayers at his school.

That day, Gardener was transfixed by his story about David Livingstone, a famous Scottish missionary who worked in Africa.

The only catch was Gardener didn’t like tropical temperatures.

“Somehow the two clicked,” Gardener recalled. “That I be a missionary, not where it was hot, but where it was cold.”

After being ordained, Gardener left England in June, 1955 with his fiancée Margaret Porter. They were under strict orders from the Anglican bishop of the Canadian Arctic not to live together in the same community until they were married.

So, Gardener left Porter back in Toronto temporarily, and travelled by DC-3 plane to Kuujjuaq, then known as Fort Chimo.

Once he reached Baffin Island on a Hudson’s Bay Company supply boat, he threw himself into life with the Inuit, visiting them in the outpost camps and learning Inuktitut.

He had more comfortable housing than most people in the settlement, with wind-powered electricity and a coal stove. But Gardener preferred to get out on the land, and experience the Inuit’s more traditional lifestyle and language.

“That’s part of being a minister in the North,” he said. “You have to understand what’s behind their words and thinking. So, to do that, you have to be with them all you can, and share their lives.”

Meanwhile, Gardener had to wait two months before he could speak with Porter again, when she arrived in Pangnirtung. There was no phone connection between Lake Harbour and the South at the time, and her move allowed them to talk over a single-side-band radio.

After a winter apart, the two married on board the medical ship, the C.D. Howe, in Frobisher Bay, because there was still no church in the community. They returned to Lake Harbour and had two girls, Susan and Ann.

They moved to Cape Dorset in 1960, where they lived for a decade. During that time, they adopted a boy named Kim, and had their third daughter Pat. Next, they lived in Pangnirtung for 11 years.

They settled in Iqaluit in the early 1980s.

Gardener has noticed a couple of major changes over the years. He said there’s more tension among Christian denominations with the rise of more evangelical churches. However, he said most groups get along well in Iqaluit.

Also, education in the communities has improved since the days when he had to fight the Government of the Northwest Territories to provide even Grade 8 schooling to his daughters in Pangnirtung.

But Gardener’s favourite change has been what he describes as people’s willingness to “better understand the Christian faith.”

Gardener estimates he’s baptized thousands of Inuit, but takes equal pride in counseling people as adults.

“They’re not in heaven yet,” Gardener said. “But this brings a peace within their families… whereas, it had reached the point where they almost wanted to give up.”

Over the next year, Gardener plans to write a booklet about Christianity in Inuktitut and English, that has what he calls “a northern perspective.”

He admits he’s heard criticism of missionaries changing a people’s culture, but Gardener makes no apologies about promoting Christianity.

“It’s like a hospital to start to heal you,” Gardener said. “We’re called to Jesus, just as we are, because no one person is perfect.”