Stolen walrus carving returned to family after seven years buried in sand

It was Friday, June 14, community cleanup day in Iqaluit, and Erika Alexander had volunteered to pick up garbage on the beach behind the elders home.

She saw what looked like an old Lululemon bag and bent down to pull it out of the sand.

“I thought there was a rock in the bag,” she said. “But once I completely got the bag out of the sand, this large dancing walrus carving fell down.”

She was shocked. And a little excited.

Erika Alexander holds the walrus carving she uncovered during the community cleanup in June on the beach behind the Elders’ home in Iqaluit. (Photo courtesy of Erika Alexander)

Alexander carried the carving home, cleaned it and brought it to the RCMP on Monday morning.

The next night, Nunavut RCMP posted a photo of the carving — made from soapstone and about 30 centimetres tall — on its Facebook page hoping to locate the owner.

Within minutes, readers tagged Iqaluit resident Geneva Chislett in the comments.

“As soon as I saw it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s unbelievable,’” Chislett said in a phone interview Wednesday.

“It looked a little weather-beaten, but right away I knew it was our carving.”

Geneva and her daughter, Katie Chislett Manning, hadn’t seen the statue in nearly seven years after it was stolen from their home with about 25 other carvings in July 2017. The statue was worth a couple of thousand dollars then, she estimated.

The theft came as Geneva and Katie were already dealing with the hardest time of their lives.

On July 6, 2017, their husband and father, John Manning, 57, was medevaced to Ottawa after being badly injured in a boat explosion outside their family home in Iqaluit. The two flew with him.

Manning died three days later. A friend, Noel Priddle, 50, also died in the explosion and another man was injured.

When Geneva and Katie returned home, they noticed something wasn’t right. The ground-floor window was open and so was the door of a mini-fridge. As Geneva walked up to the second floor, she noticed a tiny white walrus tusk on one of the stairs. “That’s weird,” she thought.

In a few moments, she realized the carvings her late husband had been collecting for more than 20 years were gone.

“It was devastating, and it was upsetting that somebody would do that to us at the worst time in our life,” Geneva said.

The RCMP posted this photo of a walrus carving on its Facebook page looking for the owner on June 18. Geneva Chislett was tagged in one of the comments the same evening. (Photo courtesy of RCMP)

She and Katie later learned a neighbour had broken into the house and stolen the carvings. The neighbour was sentenced to 45 days in jail in 2018.

The dancing walrus was most important to Geneva and Katie. It was a Christmas gift from Manning.

He was the kind of person who “wore his heart on his chest,” Katie said of her father. He was a “Christmas person,” who loved big surprises.

Katie was about seven years old when, one Christmas morning, her dad woke her up along with Geneva to show them their surprise gift at the front door.

It was the big, green dancing walrus carving.

“It was a really big gift, and he was proud of it,” Katie recalled.

Manning loved Inuit carvings and would buy them from sellers on the streets. When someone approached him in a restaurant to sell him a carving, he usually bought one, she said.

Now, seven years since the break-in, only one other carving has been returned to the family — a dancing bear with a fish in its mouth. But over the years, it lost both its legs and the fish.

Geneva didn’t sleep the night she saw the RCMP post about her statue. She picked it up from the detachment the next morning. Though it was cracked and both tusks were missing, “No matter the state it’s in, we are happy it’s back home,” she said. “It’s going to be a comforting thing for us to see it every day.”

It was three days after Father’s Day, and just a few weeks before the anniversary of Manning’s death on July 9.

Geneva said it felt like a sign. Almost like another one of her husband’s surprise gifts.

“Never in our wildest dreams, would we have ever thought that after seven years we would get this carving back,” she said.

“He’s always looking at us, he’s always watching over Katie and watching over us.”