Thirty-Eight

The Mysterious Disappearance of Father Buliard[1]

Late October on the barrenlands is a stormy time of year, the wind howling and the early snow of winter whipping across the frozen tundra and newly formed lake ice. It is a difficult time for travel — not enough snow on the land for easy sled travel, and lakes where the ice can be precariously thin.

On October 24, 1956, Father Joseph Buliard, a veteran of seventeen years in the Arctic who must surely have understood the difficulties and dangers of travel at this time of year, made the fateful decision to leave his tiny mission on an island in Garry Lake, on the Back River, some 450 kilometres west of Tasiujaq and 300 kilometres northwest of Baker Lake. Though it was not a particularly cold day, he dressed warmly in a caribou-skin inner coat under a heavy duffel parka, caribou-skin pants, and caribou-skin kamiit. As he left his cabin, he did not lock the door — it was his habit to lock up only when going on extended trips. He expected to be absent only a few hours. He hitched his six dogs to the sled, ready to depart.

Emerging from his tent a hundred metres away, John Adjuk noticed the missionary’s preparations and approached to talk. (Father Buliard spoke fluent Inuktitut.) Adjuk expressed concern that the weather was deteriorating. As he recalled, there was already a white haze enveloping the landscape and a light snow was falling; that, combined with the warm air, offered a warning sign — a blizzard was coming, thought Adjuk. It was not a good day for travel, even a short distance, implored the Inuk. There are fish in the net and the dogs are hungry, countered the priest. He was determined to go, despite the weather and the warning, and his own weaknesses.

Father Buliard pulling fish from his net in 1955.
Diocese of Churchill Hudson Bay: BLP04-9M/Fr. Guy Mary-Rousselière

Shortly after his arrival in the Arctic many years earlier in 1939, Father Buliard fell through the ice near the Repulse Bay mission and severely froze his hands. Though his fingers were all saved, they were never the same. He suffered terribly from cold hands and a loss of dexterity. That, on top of his extremely poor eyesight, made him ill-suited for travel alone in Arctic conditions. He had, in fact, become lost and disoriented on more than one occasion. For several years prior to 1956, while based at his mission in Garry Lake, Father Buliard had been more than a little dependent on his guide and companion, Anthony Manernaluk, to keep him safe and comfortable. Although they had travelled hundreds, if not thousands, of miles together by dog team, it was always Manernaluk’s skill that kept them alive.

Manernaluk, living in Rankin Inlet years later, remembered his years with Father Buliard fondly; he spoke of him as he would a father, more so than a Father. “Before, he was always cold, hands and feet,” recalled Manernaluk, who came to live with the priest as an orphan at age fifteen. “But when I travelled with him, he was never cold. I kept his mitts and kamiit clean, no snow, not frozen.” Always, when they stopped for the night, Manernaluk built their iglu in great haste — the priest never managed to acquire this skill — so Father Buliard could take shelter inside while his young Inuit companion fed the dogs and organized the camp. By the time Manernaluk crawled into the iglu, “Father Buliard had tea and bannock ready,” he added with a smile.

In the summer of 1956, Manernaluk became so seriously ill that he was flown out to Baker Lake, and then Churchill, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. “When I was in that hospital in Churchill, Manitoba, and when the doctor told me that I had to be sent down to Brandon, to hospital, I tried to tell the doctor that I didn’t want to go. I knew that Father Buliard wouldn’t make it on his own and I wanted to be with him, so I tried to force the doctor to send me back home.” But to no avail, with the result that Father Buliard was left to fend largely for himself.

Adjuk and his wife — in need of religious education so she could be baptized — came to camp nearby the mission. Another young man (identified in RCMP reports alternately as Andy Semigia or Anthime Simigiak, who himself perished in a storm a year later while hunting, at age nineteen) stayed some of the time with the priest in the mission. But none of them were as devoted to helping and caring for Father Buliard as Manernaluk had been full-time. So it was that, on October 24, 1956, when he set off to check his nets for fish, Father Buliard travelled alone.

Father Buliard with local Inuit at his mission in Garry Lake.
Diocese of Churchill Hudson Bay: GLP04-3M

“I tried to tell him that a storm might be coming,” said Adjuk, who survived to over ninety with the memory. “But Father Buliard said he needed food for the dogs, and he left anyway. Shortly after, a blizzard started. The winds were very strong, so that the snow was blowing. He didn’t make it back home. He was never seen again. If he had listened to me, he would not have died.”

There has been much speculation about what happened to Father Buliard. The first version of events — ultimately proved incompatible with the facts — came with the news of Father Buliard’s disappearance, which reached the outside world only several months later. An Inuk reported the third-hand details to the mission in Gjoa Haven, whence Father Pierre Henry sent word south in January 1957, saying: “This is the story. Anthime Simigiak had been visiting Father Buliard’s mission. Before nightfall, Fr. Buliard accompanied him home with the dogs of the mission. Anthime’s father, Sabgut, had his tent set up on the opposite shore of Garry Lake. On returning, after having accomplished this kind deed, the missionary turned away on glare ice proceeding toward the mission. Unfortunately, the dogs went straight ahead, without taking the detour to avoid the undercurrent which freezes only very late in the season. That is how the catastrophe took place.”

Adjuk, who was closest to the scene, by his own account actually saw Father Buliard after Simigiak had departed the mission. Apparently the last to see the priest alive, Adjuk told it this way to the RCMP, an account which he has repeated on many occasions over the last fifty years of his life. After the missionary left with his dog team, the wind picked up, and the snow started drifting. Visibility reduced such that the priest could not be seen, even though his nets were, on a clear day, within site of the mission, just a few miles away across the ice. The next morning, Father Buliard had still not returned, and the storm continued. Nevertheless, Adjuk walked out to where the nets were and found nothing: no sign that anyone had been there, the ice apparently undisturbed, the nets untouched. There were no tracks visible; the blowing snow had obliterated whatever clues the dogs and sled had left. Worried, he walked to Sabgut’s camp on the mainland, where he told Sabgut that the missionary had not returned. Over the next few days, Sabgut and Adjuk made some effort to search on foot for Father Buliard, or at least for some clues to his disappearance. They found nothing and, quite naturally, accepted his loss as part of the delicate balance between life and death on the barrenlands. In one Inuk observer’s words at the time, “We accept death from causes such as starvation, drowning, freezing to death, much easier than white men do, as we live with it all the time.” As Sabgut later told the RCMP, the dogs probably smelled some caribou and chased after them. Then the father, with his poor vision, could not find his way back home. Perhaps, he suggested, the dogs had run away with the sled — it was known that Father Buliard was adequately but not highly skilled with the dogs. Nor could he build an iglu. Probably, he froze to death, lost on the tundra.

There are, however, other theories, which may reveal nothing more than the vivid imagination of some non-Inuit writers and RCMP investigators, but which must nonetheless be told. Adjuk dismissed them unequivocally. “A person who was not there to see wrote about someone drowning Father Buliard, wrote lies about the Inuit. This liar wrote that some Inuit men drowned Father Buliard. It was his imagination. He had never even been to Garry Lake.” Adjuk was referring to a book, The Howling Arctic, written by Ray Price, published in 1970, several years after the events, which contains a chapter about Father Buliard’s disappearance. By this account, which the RCMP tried in vain to confirm through repeated investigations, a self-declared shaman named Kukshout plotted to murder the priest. (Kukshout was undoubtedly a powerful figure in the Garry Lake area but, according to Adjuk, he did not perform any “wonderful” acts, as befitting a shaman.) Kukshout had had disagreements with Father Buliard, according to the priest’s diary, even though he was baptized Roman Catholic and had previously served as a guide for the missionary. The police based their rationale for motive on Kukshout’s desire to remove Father Buliard’s influence, which, they argued, served to diminish Kukshout’s power over “his” people. The RCMP claimed to know, absolutely, that “Fr. Buliard while at Garry Lake always slept with a loaded rifle next to him at all times,” because he feared attack from someone in the area.

The police theory held that Kukshout intercepted Father Buliard on the ice, en route to his nets, shot him dead, and then — with the help of two other men, Sabgut and Simigiak, who both lived in the same camp as Kukshout — put his body through a hole in the ice, where it dis-appeared, never to be seen again. To a significant extent, this thinking is based on what happened to the priest’s dogs. Sometime later (there is confusion about whether it was days, weeks, or months later), five of the dogs returned to the mission. No one ever said they were coated in ice. They were no longer attached to a sled. Someone, theorized the RCMP, had released them. And clearly, they had not plunged through thin ice, taking Father Buliard with them. One thing is clear in the RCMP reports — a year later, Kukshout was using these dogs as his own. That, it might be argued sensibly, was only practical.

The other curious circumstance that the police offered to support their theory was the untimely disappearance of Simigiak, one of the supposed witnesses, while out hunting a year later with Kukshout, who returned to camp with Simigiak’s rifle in hand. Many years later, in 1978, Sabgut reportedly committed suicide, tortured, some said, by allegations that he had played a part in the disappearance of Father Buliard. At the very least, it all adds up suspiciously. Not until the winter of 1979–80, a few months after the passing of their principal suspect, Kukshout (who, ironically, died as a result of breaking through the early winter ice on a lake near his home in Whale Cove), did the RCMP close their file on this case.

There have been other, even wilder, rumours. An officer in the Canadian army, who was responsible for retrieving Father Buliard’s diary from the mission in 1961 while engaged in a northern mapping survey, reported hearing that the priest’s body — with a knife still stuck in its back – had been found three hundred kilometres downstream, where the Back River reaches the ocean.

Some people suggested that an Inuk who disliked or envied Father Buliard had placed a curse on him and, when he died, a sense of respon-sibility befell those around Garry Lake who knew of the curse. An RCMP document records this idea and adds: “When Buliard became lost and did not return, this particular [Inuk] spread the word that his wish had been obeyed by the spirits and that he had gotten rid of the Father.” Still others suggested that it was an Anglican plot to undermine the competition.

On the other hand, one police officer wrote: “To my knowledge there is no support for the rumour that Fr. Buliard was murdered.” He goes on to describe other times the priest was lost on the land. “It was almost an annual occurrence with this wandering Priest, to go missing. Emergency messages were dispatched over the CBC Northern Messenger programme to the effect that ‘Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Fr. Buliard travelling somewhere on the Barren Lands please contact your nearest RC Mission as soon as possible.’ There was hardly a spring passed when the aforementioned did not happen. The fact this Priest would disappear and succumb to the elements of the Arctic is no surprise to me. It was surprising to me indeed that he survived as long as he did.”

There were several reports that Father Buliard had predicted his own death. “Sooner or later,” he told his fellow missionaries, “I’ll finish by going through the ice, the rivers up there are so tricky in so many spots.” One of his closest friends and his biographer, Father Charles Choque, reflects that “his idea was that time was short and he had to really do the preaching as much as he could in his life. He knew that something would happen to him. Because of the way he was living, he knew that one day something would happen.” Adjuk’s wife recalls that Father Buliard told her, not long before he disappeared, that the “next time he became lost, he would never come back,” and he asked her not to worry, only to pray for him.

Father Choque, who served in Baker Lake during the time that Father Buliard had his mission at Garry Lake, has clearly given much thought to what happened on that tragic day in October 1956. “We don’t know,” he said. “We don’t know exactly what happened, because we didn’t see anything.” Then, in what was perhaps a moment of surprising candour, he added, “Personally, I think that he was killed.”

Most Inuit, however, and in particular those who knew Father Buliard, say that simply could not be. Adjuk, who was living beside the mission in 1956, points out that the Inuit needed Father Buliard; he was a source of tea and ammunition, and “because of this, we were happy about him being up there.”

“We loved that man,” said Madeleine Makiggaq, who was named at her baptism after Father Buliard’s sister. “When I think back and start remembering him, I still feel compassion for him.” Everyone who lived around Garry Lake, who survives today, says he was well liked and respected; no one speaks the slightest ill of him, or believes his death was anything but accidental.

None more so than Anthony Manernaluk, who was perhaps closer to the missionary than anyone. “When I heard of Father Buliard being lost, I felt I lost a parent.” Asked to explain why the RCMP entertained their suspicions for so long, Manernaluk was blunt. “I don’t know, and it’s not true.”