Melanie McGrath - The Long Exile - A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic

One of the side effects of the war was that it gave thousands of American soldiers their first experience of Arctic conditions and their first real sense of Inuit lives. While the war was on, attention was focused elsewhere, but once it ended, stories began leaking out from the American service personnel of the terrible conditions they had witnessed during their Arctic tours of duty. Many Inuit living around the American airfields, among them Fort Chimo on Ungava, appeared to be poorly clothed and thin and under constant siege from white men's diseases. They noted the Inuit's cruel and arbitrary dependence on fox fur prices which meant that any surplus a family was able to accumulate during a good season was immediately wiped out the moment fox prices fell. They saw how, if an Inuk man got ill, then his family often went hungry because the extended family, though anxious to help out, had nothing to give. If the illness was protracted, the entire family would wind up dependent on the goodwill of the local Hudson Bay factor, or they would starve. The RCMP detachments were too widely spaced to be of much use. In extreme cases, whole families died together. These were tough men and women, living in the most extreme conditions, hard-working and uncomplaining, Canadian citizens whom Canada seemed to have forgotten. The stories coming from the Arctic were a far cry from the cheery, upbeat world of Nanook , and the American press jumped on them. The Boston Globe was among the first to run scandalised reports. Other newspapers followed.

As Southern Canadians and Americans were beginning to learn the truth about life for many Inuit, Josephie Flaherty's fortunes changed for the better.

Out of the blue, the Radiosonde manager offered Robert Flaherty's son the job of station piliriji or choreboy. Why he picked Josephie out is not clear, but it may have had something to do with the fact that Josephie was a half-breed and as such was considered, somehow, more suited to the job. It may simply have been that Josephie was strong-looking with competent hands and a diligent manner and that he smiled a good deal.

Accepting the job meant, for Josephie, having to leave Aqia-tusuk's camp and going to live in the choreboy's hut beside the station. This Josephie was at first reluctant to do, feeling pushed and pulled by the competing claims of his stepfather and the Radiosonde manager, but he soon saw that by this one small sacrifice, his family could be relieved of some of their insecurity. With the meagre allowance from the choreboy's job he could at least look after himself and help them out and in some way help pay back the family for the years of care they had given him, even though he was only partly theirs. Accepting the job also meant being able to marry the woman he wanted. Finally, and this is not a trivial point, saying yes meant that Josephie would not have to say no to a white man. And so for the first time in his life the young Josephie moved far from his family camp into a hut on the south shore of the Innuksuak River in the settlement of Inukjuak and became a wage earner.

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