Facts and Images

On August 10, 1956, an Inuit woman named Kaujak left the Inuit community of Arctic Bay on the ship the C.D. Howe to begin her journey to the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, Ontario. For months Kaujak had been getting weaker and weaker. She was increasingly unable to hunt and fish, and the medical personnel on the patrol ship had diagnosed her with tuberculosis. Her grandson Sakiassie, standing on the shore, followed the ship with his eyes until it passed out of sight beyond Uluksan Point. He never saw her again.

In June 2008 I received an email from Anna, Sakiassie's daughter, who for several years had been trying to figure out what happened to Kaujak. "My name is Anna," she wrote. "A few years ago I was in search of my dad's grandmother that passed away on the train to Hamilton[;] they unloaded her body before reaching Hamilton." The only trace of Kaujak Anna had been able to find was an index card from the municipal offices with Kaujak's name and disc number typewritten on it. Handwritten in ink was the word "Dead" and the year "1956."

A month later I arrived in Arctic Bay, a hamlet of approximately eight hundred people at the north end of Baffin Island, to speak to Sakiassie and other survivors of the tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged Canadian Inuit communities during the 1950s and '60s. Surrounded by high hills and rocky cliffs, the houses in "Ikpiarjuk" (literally, "the pocket") cluster around an almost landlocked bay. Children play unattended on the gravel roads and at the shore, skipping rocks and jumping from one piece of ice to the other. ATVs and pickup trucks careen through the streets, spewing rocks and dust, but inside Sakiassie's house it is neat, orderly, and quiet. His house looks out at the bay toward Uluksan Point. Anna serves as my interpreter as we begin to talk.

Kaujak raised Anna's father, Sakiassie, as her son after his own father drowned in a hunting accident when Sakiassie was only a year old. Anna tells me that Sakiassie was very attached to Kaujak and that she "was able to do things a man could do. She was a very good fisher. She would go fishing, dry fish." Each spring when Sakiassie goes fishing, "a lot of the techniques [he uses] he learned from her." Anna continues, "She was very able woman ... She was able of doing things that men were capable of doing. She was able to build qarmat [sod houses]. The year before she left she couldn't build the qarmaq and she developed an infection on her stomach and on her back ... When the ship came in to screen people for TB they screened her, and that's when they sent her away."

Sakiassie was fourteen years old when Kaujak was sent away on theC.D. Howe. I ask him whether he remembered the day of his grandmother's departure. "Yes, I remember very clearly," he tells me. Her illness had been getting worse and she began to pay visits to family members, even distant relatives, saying she might not live long enough to see them again. Sakiassie was very worried. "It was very painful when the helicopter came from the ship to pick her up to move her," he tells me. Kaujak was taken from her camp outside town to the ship where the medical team was waiting. Kaujak tested positive for tuberculosis.

When the x-ray technician discovered a shadow on the lung, Inuit generally weren't allowed to return to shore for fear they would never return to the ship. But for some reason they made an exception for Kaujak. She made a last trip to shore in a small skiff. Sakiassie didn't get to speak to her. He was unloading the ship's supplies at the time, and he saw his grandmother smiling and posing for a photograph—all from a distance.

That fall—it was in October, though Sakiassie doesn't remember the exact date—the Hudson's Bay Company manager called him on the radio to let him know that Kaujak was dead. Nothing else was said.

For years after that, when the ship returned on its yearly patrol, Sakiassie would go to the beach where people were loading and unloading its cargo, and patients were disembarking after being at the sanatorium, to listen. He listened for his grandmother's name in the hope that someone would mention her, her death, or anything about her. As Anna described it:

Each year, whenever the ship came in to do a screening, he would rush over to where the patients' area was near the ship to see if he could overhear anyone talking about his grandmother. He was afraid to ask about her so he wouldn't ask. He would just hang around to listen to see if anyone would mention her—to see if they've seen her or there's any news of her—and he would check to see if she was on the boat ... He did this for many years.

I was confused and tried to clarify. "Each year when the ship came ... he still didn't know if she was alive or not?"

She left in August and in October they heard she had died and that's all that was said. No mention of where her body was, how she died, nothing. They were just informed that she had passed away. That's all the news that they got.

IDENTIFYING INUIT

Kaujak's story, although unusual in that she died on the train and not in the southern sanatorium, is not an unfamiliar one. In the 1950s and '60s tuberculosis was known as the "Scourge of the North," (Albrecht 1965: 153) and "that ubiquitous disease of the Northland" (Ward 1952: 292). Between 1954 and 1964 approximately 8,600 Inuit patients were looked after in southern hospitals, and $12.5 million was spent on their hospitalization (Moore 1964: 1193). In 1956, the year Kaujak left Arctic Bay for the sanatorium, the tuberculosis mortality rate among Inuit was calculated to be 232 per 100,000 (Grygier 1994: 84) and it was estimated that one out of every seven Inuit was in a southern hospital being treated for tuberculosis (Phillips 1967: 219–20). Dealing with the epidemic was a priority for Canada's Northern Administration and especially the Indian Health Services Department, and segregation of tubercular Inuit in southern sanatoria was considered the most expedient way to curb the rate of infection (Ward 1952; Phillips 1957; Grzybowski, Styblo, and Dorken 1976: S8).

In the Eastern Arctic where Kaujak lived, most of the tuberculosis evacuations occurred via the C.D. Howe, the ship the RCMP used for their annual patrol of the region. The ship was equipped with "a complete sick-bay, operating room, x-ray room, dental office and laboratory, and a complete medical party and dentist to staff it" (Moore 1956: 232). In fact, the C.D. Howe, which appears in many of the photographs and stories I collected, becomes something of a minor character in the history of the period. Leah Idlout d'Argencourt, an Inuit woman from Pond Inlet who published an account of her evacuation in the magazine Inuit Today, captured the momentousness of the C.D. Howe 's annual arrival: "The first glimpse we had of the C.D. Howe was always amazing to me. Rounding the side of a steep cliff, she would...