Kunuk meets Kiviaq

Zacharias Kunuk drops the telephone receiver back into its cradle and looks at the camera. He’s not smiling.
“They don’t want to talk to us,” Kunuk says, “they” being the leaders of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., the supposed protector of Inuit rights in Nunavut.

After repeated invitations, NTI officials refused to be interviewed for Kunuk’s fine new documentary, Kiviaq versus Canada, which records Kunuk’s encounter with Canada’s first Inuk lawyer, the charismatic populist once known as David Ward and who now bears no other name but the one he was given as an infant: Kiviaq.

If you watch only one television show this year, watch Kiviaq versus Canada this winter on History Television. You’ll get a welcome respite from the pro-Nunavut propaganda that saturates public talk in the Arctic, and gain exposure to a new way of thinking about Inuit rights in Canada.

In this hour-long film Kunuk not only celebrates Kiviaq and his quixotic one-man struggle to win for Inuit the rights and entitlements that Indians have enjoyed since the 19th century; Kunuk also exposes the hollowness that he and many other Inuit have discovered inside the heart of the once-celebrated Nunavut project.

“We don’t have Nunavut,” Ward declares in the middle of a lengthy disussion with the Igloolik filmmaker, explaining that land claim agreements failed to create a new relationship between Inuit and Canada because they fail to acknowledge Inuit identity.

On this, Kunuk and Kiviaq stand on common ground. “When we got our land claim we thought we were getting our land back,” Kunuk tells him, pointing out that the government still has the power to impose hated quotas on hunters. “There is nothing we can do.”

Kunuk is not the first Nunavut beneficiary to walk away in frustration after a run-in with officials at NTI, the Government of Nunavut or any of the other remote bureaucracies in Nunavut and he won’t be the last.

But unlike everyone else, he got a chance to record his frustrations on digital video tape. And he wants to show us that Kiviaq’s pugnacious spirit can teach you how to be brave.

“Here’s a guy who’s not scared,” Kunuk says, after another frustrating confrontation, this time with inside the lobby of les Terasses de Chaudiere, the towering edifice in Hull where the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development is headquartered.

Kiviaq came into the world some time in 1936, along a trapline near Chesterfield Inlet, born to Kumatnaq, a woman who the Inuit of the Kivalliq remember well. But Kiviaq’s non-Inuit neighbours in working-class Edmonton knew her only as “Marie Ward,” the only name that Kiviaq’s domineering stepfather, Charles Ward, allowed her to use.

For reasons that still aren’t clear, Ward, then an RCMP officer at Chesterfield Inlet, took Kumatnaq, Kiviaq, and Kiviaq’s sister to Edmonton in 1939. “He possessed things,” Kiviaq says. Ward made sure that his stolen possessions — Kiviaq and his mother — did not speak Inuktitut; he commanded them to pass as white people. Kiviaq became David Ward.

“I lived in total confusion,” Kiviaq says of his miserable childhood, a time spent fending off bullies who picked on him for being a “flea-bitten Eskimo.”

Then he learned how to box. At 13, he beat a 21-year-old man in a Golden Gloves event, and everyone else, including his father, stopped beating him. Kiviaq went on to fight 112 bouts, punching his way to 108 victories. In 1956, he became the only “Eskimo” to ever play for the Edmonton Eskimos, as a halfback, but a broken neck brought an untimely end to what could have been a brilliant career in professional football.

Kiviaq then worked as a model and open-line radio host, served for many years on Edmonton City Council, and in 1976 ran unsucessfully for mayor. After his defeat, he enrolled in law school and in 1983 became Canada’s first Inuk lawyer, an achievement that produced a congratulatory letter from Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

But no one in government gave him what they give every year to treaty Indians: a free college education. It’s that experience that lies at the heart of the lawsuit that Kiviaq filed in 2004. He discovered that Inuit, especially Inuit who do not reside in the Arctic, get little or no recognition as aboriginal people.
That is why he scoffs at the Nunavut land claims agreement, the Nunavut territorial government, and all the other structures produced by modern land-for-cash treaties that create “rights” only within geographically defined areas. And he asks the simple questions that Nunavut’s creators never answer, such as why Inuit rights are now guarded by corporations that reside in a baffling legal limbo.

To provide some academic back-up, Kunuk puts Frank Tester, the well-known Arctic social historian, in front of the camera. “The federal government has done a clever, clever, thing here,” Tester says, arguing that Ottawa created Nunavut to dodge its fiduciary responsibilities to Inuit for housing and other services, dumping them instead onto Nunavut’s underfunded territorial government.

Notwithstanding the complex issues that he raises, the object of Kiviaq’s lonely quest is simple: “I want everything the Indians have, except reserves.”

At 70, his only worry is that cancer will take him before that happens. But now that the truth of his life is recorded on digital video, he does not fear the decade-long grind that awaits his case and he does not fear death: “It’s not really important now that I’m alive.”

Kiviaq versus Canada, directed by Zacharias Kunuk, produced by Katarina Soukup, and distributed by Kunuk Cohn Productions Ltd. and Igloolik Isuma Productions Ltd., premiered this past Saturday at the Edmonton International Film Festival. History Television will broadcast it during its 2006-07 winter season.