The passing of a generation

In 1936, when Graham Rowley first set foot in the Canadian Arctic, the world was a vastly different place than it is now.

That year, an Italian army, sent by a dictator named Benito Mussolini, started a war in Ethiopia. In Germany, another dictator by the name of Adolf Hitler created a new air force that year, called the “Luftwaffe.” Yet another dictator, Joseph Stalin, was terrorizing the entire population of the Soviet Union. In Canada, an odd little man with a squeaky voice, William Lyon Mackenzie King, was elected prime minister for the third time. All of those people, like the times that produce them, have been dead since before most of us were born.

But nowhere has the quality of life changed more completely than in the eastern Arctic.

In the 1930s, the Canadian government “governed” the Arctic by doing as little as it could possibly get away with it. Except for two small church-run hospitals in Pangnirtung and Chesterfield Inlet, there was no health care. There were no schools. There were no social workers, unless you count the handful of RCMP members stationed at a few scattered detachments. In the entire eastern Arctic, the total non-Inuit population consisted of no more than about 50 people. There was no “government,” as we would understand that term today.

During the four years he spent exploring and doing archaeological research in the Foxe Basin area, Rowley made life-long friendships with the Inuit of the region, especially with the people of Igloolik. He maintained those ties almost until his death on New Year’s Day.

But he was much more than a much-loved person who enjoyed the respect of the Inuit. After serving in the Second World War, he became a powerful and influential civil servant within the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources – the department we now know as DIAND.

Through most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Rowley served as secretary of the federal government’s Advisory Committee on Northern Development. In that position, he was responsible for co-ordinating all government policy for northern Canada, and for co-ordinating all government research in the North.

That doesn’t mean he was necessarily a key decision-maker on all issues. But it does make him part of what is now a distinctly unfashionable group – the federal civil servants of the 1950s and early 1960s who brought government to the Arctic.

It was those federal officials who reversed the do-nothing northern development policies of the 1930s. They oversaw the first schools, the first nursing stations, the first co-operatives, the first welfare programs and the often traumatic relocation of Inuit into permanent communities. Ralph Ritcey, another fondly remembered civil servant of that era who died recently in Ottawa, ran adult training and education programs for Inuit set up under a policy framework that Rowley and his colleagues would have helped create.

Despite all of the good things they brought, Rowley’s generation is not always remembered fondly. Many regard them as arrogant colonizers, and not the well-intentioned public servants they really were.

Because we are still coping – sometimes blindly – with the painful changes brought about by Canada’s long-delayed decision to modernize the Arctic in the 1950s, it’s easy to blame history for our current social illnesses. That’s especially easy to do when history is not well understood or remembered.

Take a quick look at who is running the Arctic now, in Nunavut, Nunavik, the Northwest Territories and other Arctic regions. Are they really more enlightened or humane than those of the 1950s and 1960s?

At 92, Rowley’s death was neither unexpected nor untimely. But with his passing we have lost an irreplaceable memory, a vast storehouse of historic knowledge, and one of the last members of the generation that brought modern ways to the Canadian Arctic. He is the kind of person who streets and public buildings ought be named after. JB