Chapter 2 ~ Melting Pot or Slum
We were met at the airport by Frank Delaute, the regional administrator for the Canadian Department of Northern Affairs, who promptly offered us accommodation in a government hut. After carrying camping equipment nearly two thousand miles from Nova Scotia to the Arctic, it came as a disappointment on one hand and as a relief on the other to discover there was comfortable lodging.
The hut, as it was called locally, turned out to be similar to a score of houses in Frobisher Bay. It had three bedrooms electric light, cooking range and that strange paradox, a refrigerator. Our first chore was to lower the thermostatically controlled central heating from 85 degree Fahrenheit to a more bearable temperature. Looking at my down filled sleeping bag and mosquito netting I felt like that girl who took her harp to a party and was never required to play.
An invitation to dinner came from the Delaute family and we delightedly postponed eating our tinned beef and walked over to their house across the sand and grit on which Frobisher was built. Inside, soft mmdc was played on a tape recorder as we sat down to a dinner for which all the ingredients had come from tins. Ham, pineapple, corn-on-the-cob, potatoes, butter and even the cherry pie.
The final kindness of the Delaute family on our first day in the Arctic was the loan of heavy bedroom curtains to keep out the midnight sun.
We stayed four busy weeks in Frobisher trying to understand why it was named by some “The Melting Pot of the Arctic” and by others more pessimistically as “The Slum of the Arctic”.
The population was a medley of two thousand souls: broad featured, brown skinned Eskimos, women who carried their babies in hoods on their backs and smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, men who harpooned seals through the ice and chewed gum; American service men who counted the days they spent away from home, and a cross section of Canadians such as you would find in any Canadian province.
The people lived in four separate areas. High above the town, crowning the skyline with its domes and radar screens was a semi-subterranean U.S. Distant Early Warning site. Its inhabitants seldom emerged from the self-contained camp, with its warren of leisure rooms, workshops and connecting tunnels except to collect mail from the post office where one would see them, etiolated by indoor living. They counted their time in the North not by months or weeks but by days. ”I’ve been here two hundred and thirty one days, one air man told me.
The town was inhabited by Canadian civil servants, teachers, policemen, administrators and nurses plus a few regularly employed Eskimos, who enjoyed the same accommodation and privileges as the non-Eskimos. About a hundred Eskimos lived at Apex Rehabilitation Centre, where natives returning from sanatoria in the South were given a chance to re-adjust to the Arctic climate before returning to living the hunter’s life. Those who were too sick to return to their original way of life were given a chance to learn technical and simple commercial skills.
By far the largest proportion of the Eskimo population lived in the village of Iqaluit sprawling across the delta of a shallow river. It was a cluster of dingy tents and packing case dwellings improvised from the jetsam of the white man’s rubbish tips.
Iqaluit was out of bounds to non-Eskimos, but it was the Mecca of about seven hundred people who had forsaken the harsh uncertainty of a seal hunter’s economy and they had migrated there from almost every camp in Baffin Island. Even in the Arctic there was a trend towards urban living.
Most of the former seal hunters had travelled overland by dog team and komatik, or sled, during the long winter. They no longer had boats for hunting in the more bountiful summer although the efforts of hundreds of Eskimos hunting in the waters of Frobisher Bay would have been unavailing. The waters there had never been noted for seal hunting. Unable to obtain fresh meat for either themselves or their dogs, they had to let the dogs die or shoot them, and scores of Eskimos were caught in the downward spiral of living on government relief rations.
The Department of Northern Affairs employed or found employment for as many Eskimos as they could, but for the rest, they were given a new kind of security. The department created partly for their welfare could not let them starve, and relief rations were taken by the sack load into Iqaluit.
The Eskimos could not be blamed for accepting security from hunger, no matter how squalid their lives appeared to be in Iqaluit, and it was no uncommon sight to see families sifting mounds of garbage at the town’s refuse dump, and bearing away some still-edible trophies.
In the summer, about half of the children I saw in Iqaluit were disfigured by the revolting scars of impetigo, induced, according to the doctor, by poor diet, uncleanliness, crowded living and foraging on the garbage tip.
Most, if not all, the Baffin Island Eskimos had been given religious instruction in the first sixty years of the Twentieth Century, but lamentably few had ever received any schooling and it was their inability to speak the English language, their ignorance of numbers and arithmetic and indifference to the division of time usually which forced them into the menial labour usually offered them in the town of Frobisher.
Fortunately, the migration to Frobisher coincided with the development of a new school with a curriculum adapted to the future practical needs of Eskimo children. Part of the tragedy of Frobisher was that still young Eskimo parents often sacrificed returning to their preferred old way of life for the sake of having their children educated.
The men who were lucky enough to find work and who proved themselves reliable were rented houses alongside the civil servants from Ottawa, with exactly the same facilities – daily delivery of water, central heating, electricity and sewage disposal, the latter a problem aggravated by the nature of the land.
North of Canada’s treeline, the sub soil is permanently frozen all year round. In summer, it may thaw to a depth of two or three feet, the top soil becomes a squelchy bog seeking to find a run-off while the earth beneath remains solid and impenetrable as an iceberg.
Faced with such impermeable land, construction and sanitary engineers in the arctic were harassed men. Except the technologically expert Americans. They had developed and installed a costly drainage and water supply system which was electrically heated, the former flushing for more than a mile into the shallow reaches of the bay even in the bitterest weather.
More economical consideration fashioned sanitation in the town. Unable to build underground drains, the engineers solved the problem by having dry closets installed in each house. Giant plastic bags were issued to the householders, and the bags were put inside the dry closets and gathered every morning.
It was this unexpected arrangement which brought us our first rendezvous with Eskimos. Inevitably, the sewage collectors were natives, who called at our hut each morning just after breakfast. They were disarmingly cheerful and spoke not a word of English and rattled to the door in a shattered looking truck. There were four of them, dressed in parkas, sealskin kamiks, or boots, and always wearing kid gloves.
We christened the leader Dan. He came with a boisterous shout and a grinding of gears, shuffled up the steps and across the floor, shedding Frobisher sand from his sealskin boots. He emerged from the bathroom with a firm, gloved grip on the plastic bag and always said, “Peeoyuk,” grinning and waving at us.
We learned that peeoyuk meant good, and I felt wonderment at a disposition which could find jollity in such labour.
Dan, we were told, was paid about two hundred dollars a month, and he certainly earned it.
Other Eskimos found regular employment driving water tankers from a lake more than a mile out of town. A few were caretakers of buildings and some were capable motor mechanics. One was the driver of Frobisher’ only bus.
Pointing the trend of Eskimo integration into the “civilised” North American way of life were road signs at the side of the road form Apex. The words, “Yield Right of way” were painted in both English and in Eskimo syllabics – the form of shorthand writing introduced by missionaries in the past century. Though most Eastern Arctic adult Eskimos have never been to school they are claimed to be one hundred per cent literate in syllabic writing which enables them to read the mission bibles but little else. There is a dearth of any other syllabic literature except for the terse black and yellow road signs pointing the way along the road to Frobisher.
