Louie Kamookak, a remembrance

Recently, I was awarded the Louie Kamookak Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

The Kamookak Medal honours the contributions of the late Louie Kamookak, an Inuit historian and educator. It is awarded to individuals or organizations that have made Canada’s geography better known to Canadians and to the world — as Louie did.

I was honoured and humbled to receive it.

So this is a good time to remind readers of who Louie Kamookak was, and his importance to Nunavut and to Canada.

Louie himself was the recipient of many honours during his all-too-short life.

In 2015, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society awarded him its Lawrence J. Burpee Medal, which is given to individuals who contribute to geographic literacy and exploration, and who help to make Canada better known on a national or international level.

The following year, he was invested in the Order of Nunavut, and the year after that he was named an officer of the Order of Canada. He was also named honorary vice-president of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society in 2016.

All of these honours disguise the overriding fact of Louie’s life — that he was humble and self-effacing. He didn’t seek honours, they just naturally came his way because of his achievements.

Louie died of cancer on March 22, 2018. He was only 58.

As a self-taught historian living in Gjoa Haven on King William Island, Louie was unique among Inuit in his obsession with what to him was a local story, but one with international interest.

That story was the mystery of the disappearance of Sir John Franklin and his two ships, Erebus and Terror, on Franklin’s 1845 voyage to traverse the Northwest Passage, and the associated mystery of where Franklin’s body lies.

In addition to being a hunter and a teacher, Louie was a voracious reader.

He read the usual Qallunaat-authored histories of the lost expedition and brought a skeptical eye to some of their claims. He was also a listener to the tales of his own people, stories he had been hearing since his childhood.

Unusually, he brought a skeptic’s ear to some of those stories as well.

“The oral tradition tells a lot of history,” he said, “but isn’t always very accurate.”

He was referring to stories he had heard elders tell of Qallunaat men hauling a large boat on a sled, and of men scattering in different directions and dying. Eventually, he realized this was a melding of two stories, one being of an expedition led by John Ross on Boothia Peninsula, the other the final march of the Franklin expedition’s desperate men.

Louie set himself the task of sorting out the conflicting stories he heard from Inuit elders, and at the same time correcting some of the errors and misconceptions he found in the Qallunaat tales.

From these very different sources, he sought to create a narrative of what he thought had actually happened.

His grandmother had once found relics left by the stranded Franklin crewmen — among them, metal spoons and forks. Louie was fascinated by such discoveries, and by the role his ancestors had played in the events.

He told Up Here magazine, “I come from a long line of high-profile Netsilingmiut people.”

But his lineage also included a Qallunaaq grandfather, William (Paddy) Gibson, who had been a longtime post manager with the Hudson’s Bay Co. on King William Island and had himself been a keen researcher into the Franklin mystery.

He didn’t share the obsession many researchers have had for finding the ships — they were finally discovered in 2014 and 2016 — saying that, although finding the vessels was important, “it’s not my mission. I’m looking for Franklin.”

He was troubled by the growing disdain for Franklin in intellectual and popular history circles ever since Pierre Berton wrote unflatteringly about him in The Arctic Grail.

Margaret Atwood joined in the contempt for the dead explorer in 1994 when she famously told CBC: “He [Franklin] was a dope.”

Louie disagreed, saying, “Franklin was a good man.”

Louie recalled: “There’s a story that says the leader of a great ship died, there were shots and [his men] put him in the ground. That leader was a great shaman.”

Then he added wryly that every good Inuit story needed a shaman.

When he was a boy, his mother had told him about “a mound, and at the end of the mound there was a rock with markings on it. The mound was the length of a human, and because it was the length of a human they were afraid to go near it.”

This, Louie thought when he was older, was Franklin’s grave. It was his quest to find it.

“I want Canada to be able to return his body to England,” Louie said. “I want to prove my grandma’s story was right.”

He remained obsessed with finding Franklin’s resting place until his own early death.

He never found it.

It remains for future searchers, perhaps Inuit, to achieve Louie’s goal of finding the elusive grave.

He also wanted to find the location of another grave, that of his father Paddy Gibson. Gibson died in a plane crash near Kugluktuk in 1942.

A newspaper article a month later said that he was buried in Toronto. But where in Toronto? A few years ago, it was learned that Gibson’s remains were sent to his sister there; he was buried in Resthaven Memorial Garden in Scarborough, a neighbourhood of Toronto.

Louie Kamookak was once described as a “living library of Central Arctic oral history.”

John Geiger of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society said, “Louie was the last great Franklin searcher. He was a gentle man and a teacher of great wisdom, not only for the Inuit but for all of us.”

Taissumani is an occasional column that recalls events of historical interest. Kenn Harper is a historian and writer who lived in the Arctic for over 50 years. He is the author of Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs: Knud Rasmussen and the Fifth Thule Expedition, and Thou Shalt Do No Murder, among other books. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.