Homecoming draws memories and past residents to Quaqtaq

A special reunion on Aug. 12 will bring together Inuit elders, a doctor, two anthropologists and a teacher who lived in the Tuvaaluk area of Nunavik – around the community now known as Quaqtaq – from the 1940s to the 1960s.

“We’re just trying to give a history lesson to the community,” said Johnny Oovaut, the mayor of Quaqtaq and head of its cultural committee.

Oovaut said the idea for this unique get-together came to him “like a lightbulb” when he was in an airplane, speaking about the past with an elder.

The week of activities includes a community feast, a visit to the sites of a former trading post and weather station, slide shows and discussions.

The entire community is expected to participate, to learn more about “who we are and where we come from.”

Oovaut hopes invited guests who knew Quaqtaq in its early days will share their memories of a period that few now remember.

On the guest list is Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, 71, an anthropologist who has traveled widely around Nunavik and Nunavut.

“I haven’t been there [to Quaqtaq] since 1966, so it’s very moving for me to return,” said Saladin d’Anglure in an interview from France. “My very first stay among Inuit was in Quaqtaq 50 years ago.”

While he visited Quaqtaq so long ago, Saladin d’Anglure made a short colour movie, which has now assumed a much larger historical significance. That’s because it visually recorded the Tuvaalumiut traditional way of life.

As part of his work, Saladin d’Anglure also recorded a traditional song, asking the women who were singing the song to repeat it several times for him. Only much later did he realize that the women had changed the song’s words to mock him, saying the young Qallunaaq looked like a snowy owl and commenting on his character.

“I fear there will be some older ladies who will still sing it when I come there,” Saladin d’Anglure said. “And I thought it was an old traditional song when they sang it, so I said ‘more, more, more,’ but they were making up the song about me. I didn’t understand it at all then, because I didn’t speak Inuttitut yet.”

Saladin d’Anglure’s first stay in Quaqtaq is also memorable because this is when he first met Inuit people, discovered “the precision of Inuit thinking” and experienced their tradition of hospitality and humour.

Saladin d’Anglure was only 19 when he arrived in northern Quebec in 1955.

“I wanted to go to Greenland, but Father Steinmann told me in Greenland, ‘It’s very developed. There is one place,’ he said, ‘in the Canadian Arctic where the people have kept their traditions: it’s northern Quebec.’ So it was this way that I ended up in northern Quebec, although it was a bit difficult to get to Nunavik. There were no regular flights.”

Saladin d’Anglure hitchhiked by air to Kuujjuaq from Schefferville and then on to Kangirsuk. He arrived by dog team in January to Quaqtaq. There, he found one large community of 100 living in igloos and another community of about three igloos nearby.

He soon became friends with George “Aqqiqiq” Koneak, who was working at the Cape Hope radio station as an interpreter.

Although Saladin d’Anglure would end up returning many times to the region, he stayed mainly in Kangiqsujuaq, known then as Wakeham Bay. There, he worked with Mitiardjuk Napaaluk, author of the Inuttitut novel Sanaaq, which he translated into French.

Many years later, one of Saladin d’Anglure’s students at Université Laval, Louis-Jacques Dorais, would go to Quaqtaq to carry out his fieldwork in anthropology. Dorais became deeply attached to the community, also learned to speak Inuttitut and later published a book on the community, Quaqtaq: Modernity and Identity in an Inuit community.

Dorais is also expected back in Quaqtaq for the reunion, along with 90-year old Tamusi Ongirk from Kangirsuk, elders from Kuujjuaq, Aupaluk and Inukjuak, David Wiebe, a former teacher, and Ron Brooman, whose father worked at Cape Hope in the 1930s, when, Oovaut notes, everyone still dressed in caribou clothing.

Archaeologist Daniel Gendron from Nunavik’s Avataq Cultural Institute will also be in Quaqtaq to speak about the region’s 4,000 year-old history.

Residents of Pangnirtung, who have a connection with Dr. Harold Burgess, a former doctor at the St. Luke’s Hospital, are also extended a special welcome to attend, said Oovaut.