Twenty-Four

Connections Inland

While sailing into Wager Inlet may not have led the eight-eenth century qablunaat explorers to the Northwest Passage, what the long, fjord-like arm of the sea did offer, unbeknownst to them at the time, was a way to penetrate the unknown interior of continental North America’s most remote northern reaches. As time would reveal, these travel routes were well known to Aivilingmiut around Ukkusiksalik, who had long headed inland from the end of the inlet to hunt for caribou and muskoxen. Across the tundra plains to the west were friendly people, the Hanningajurmiut, living in the valley of the Back River around the two biggest lakes, Pelly and Garry Lakes. To the northwest, closer to the Arctic Ocean, there were strangers, known to the Aivilingmiut but feared. “They were known to be murderers,” said Tuinnaq Kanayuk Bruce, speaking of the Nattilingmiut, reflecting the sentiments of her people from a time long before the arrival of qablunaat. These strangers lived on the coast to the north, around the mouths of the Back River (and upriver to Franklin Lake) and Hayes River in Chantrey Inlet. By coincidence, they too called their home territory Utkuhiksalik (same word, same meaning, but slightly different dialect[1]).

The connections among different groups of people provide some insights into the tapestry of travel routes that covered the land in the time before the qablunaat arrived. The people living directly around Ukkusiksalik were part of the larger group known as the Aivilingmiut, who occupied the entire northwest corner of Hudson Bay. Historically, they were most closely related, culturally speaking, to the Iglulingmiut to the north. They were not closely related — which some, even today, often hasten to point out — to the Nattilingmiut, the coastal people to the northwest around King William Island and the Boothia Peninsula, nor to the people who lived on the tundra inland from Ukkusiksalik to the west, chiefly the Hanningajurmiut.

As the stories unfold, and the fear of strangers wanes, the travel route between Ukkusiksalik (Wager Inlet) and Utkuhiksalik (Back River) becomes more and more well-trodden. In 1879 a search party looking for clues to the fate of Sir John Franklin was guided across this route by Inuit.* In 1926 the Hudson’s Bay Company traders were led by Iqungajuq over this route to make first contact with the Nattilingmiut, hoping to encourage their trade.** From their posts on the shores of Hudson Bay, both the RCMP and the Roman Catholic missionaries followed suit.***

While some Inuit from Utkuhiksalik, looking to trade their fox skins in the mid-1920s and later, went northwest to the Perry River on the Arctic coast, and some went south to Baker Lake, others went southeast to Tasiujaq in Ukkusiksalik. The post journals there record occasional arrivals of Inuit travelling across this inland passage.

March 16, 1926: “Keemallinckgo arrived in p.m. Keemallinckgo is the first of the natives from Hayes River.”

May 15, 1926: “Kaam-o-kauk [Qamukkaaq] and Kec-malliaukz with families arrived in from Backs River. Took thirteen days.”

The oral testimony collected from the people associated with this area also relates travel along this route during the first half of the twentieth century.

Qamukkaaq and his wife, Arnalluk, both Nattilingmiut, had three daughters: Madeleine Naalungiaq Makiggaq in 1926, Monica Ugjuk in 1931, and Mary Qablu Anawak in 1932.[2] All three were adopted out. All three were baptized by the Roman Catholic missionary Father Buliard during one of his long trips by dog team from the Repulse Bay mission to visit Inuit families on the land. According to church records, this was in December of 1942, the time of Father Buliard’s first attempt to reach the Back River by travelling inland from the head of Wager Inlet, all part of the church’s ongoing efforts to recruit Inuit followers in the far-flung camps.

Madeleine was born at Ta’yaitquq, northwest of Tasiujaq. As the eldest, she remembered best the visit by Father Buliard. “We loved that man. My husband knew that Father Buliard wanted to travel, so he went to Tasiujaq to pick him up. Before they travelled farther, he baptized all of us in camp, so now we had first names. He named us after his family and relatives. He named my mother-in-law after his mother, Cecilia; my father-in-law after his father, Joseph; my husband after his brother Juani; me after his sister Magdelina; and my younger sister after his other sister, Monica.”

Monica Ugjuk was raised in the interior along the Back River. She recalled travelling as a child all over the vast territory from the mouth of the Back River, up that river inland to the area known as Hanningajuq [the Pelly Lake and Garry Lake region], south to Baker Lake, and east to Hudson Bay. “My adoptive parents never lingered in one spot all the time,” she reminisced much later, in her seventies. “I was with parents who travelled all the time. They travelled in the winter and summer, walking or going by dog team, always travelling.” As part of this itinerant life, she recalled visiting the old HBC post established at Tasiujaq in Ukkusiksalik.

After baptizing the families in this area just west of Tasiujaq, Father Buliard wanted to travel north to the coast over the trail to the Back River. “Anawak and my husband took him to Utkuhiksalik by dog team,” recalled Madeleine Makiggaq. “When they reached Amuyat, Father Buliard wanted to be left with the families there. They told him, ‘Inuit do a lot of travelling, so you might happen to be left alone.’ But he just said, ‘That’s all right.’ So Anawak and my husband left him there.” Much later, in the spring, as the weather started to warm, Madeleine remembered the day a bedraggled Father Buliard staggered into their camp: “The dogs were so skinny. And he had bad sore eyes from the sun. We caught him at just the right time. I had compassion for him.” They nursed the priest back to health. “He was overjoyed when he knew that he was going to eat and drink tea.” Then they delivered him back to the HBC post at Tasiujaq.

This inland territory surrounding the Back River became Father Buliard’s mission in life. It was as if he looked beyond the hills at the head of Wager Inlet and dreamed of what he might accomplish for his church. Contemplating this, he wrote in a letter to another priest: “I am very happy. If only, I had an Oblate Brother to help me, a little house, a few fishing nets! Not a sick person would die without having seen the priest; I could visit all the Eskimos without fear of hunger!”[3]

He continued his travels through the region, always with this dream in mind. On more than one occasion, he travelled by dog team right through to Baker Lake, becoming more familiar with this interior country than any qablunaaq before him. Father Buliard established his mission post on an island in Garry Lake, Back River, in 1949, built his “little house,” and engaged a young Inuk named Anthony Manernaluk to serve, in effect, as the Oblate Brother the priest had wished for. Manernaluk acted as his guide for several years as Father Buliard visited Inuit camps for hundreds of miles around his tiny mission at Hanningajuq. Then in 1956, while Manernaluk was down south in Manitoba to be treated for tuberculoisis, Father Buliard mysteriously disappeared in a blizzard at Garry Lake.**** No one replaced him there, and within two years all the Inuit of Hanningajuq had either died of starvation or been evacuated to Baker Lake.

Monica Ugjuk remembered the starvation time. “We didn’t have enough meat during the fall, while we were camped near Umingmaktuuq. The three of us were left in the camp [Monica, her adopted father, Tiinaaq, and adopted mother, Tinuuriq]. At that time food was hard to find, although my father tried fishing. My mother, at times, could not walk; she used to crawl on the ground, trying to gather lichens and moss for fire. Without my know-ledge, my mother was saying to my father that she wanted to be left behind, because she could not walk, and she was an old woman, too. When we were just about to leave her behind, I remember crying so hard, going out of the iglu. My father and I started walking toward Hudson Bay. After we left her, she got picked up while she was still alive, by a man named Qabluittuq, who saved my mother’s life. I haven’t forgotten that; I will always be grateful, for the rest of my life.” Eventually, they were all reunited in Chesterfield Inlet.

All of these stories serve to weave together the places and the people that make up the larger view of the land lying inland from the head of Wager Inlet. Ukkusiksalik was not an area in isolation from its surroundings; it played a central role in the history of this remote corner of the Arctic as a result of its connections to the people and places lying inland to the west.