Chapter 6 ~ No Discrimination

It would be an understatement to say the opening of a cocktail bar in Baffin Island’s only hotel was a momentous occasion. The moment was historic, and like a stone cast into a pool its effect rippled through the population of Frobisher Bay.

For the first time in the history of the Eastern Arctic, liquor was on sale to the public, and the public included the Eskimos who had small knowledge, if any, of the fermentation of liquors.

Proprietor of the East Coast Lodge was an ex—RAF officer, Captain Alex Gallagher, who invited Rosemary and me to dinner one evening in his hotel.

It was a haphazard warren of rooms and passages, lacking in any style or design, but the proprietor said it had cost the enormous sum of two hundred thousand dollars to build, mainly due to the cost of importing all the materials and to the high rate of wages paid to employees in the North. For all its lack of taste, the East Coast Lodge had warmth, music, a friendly atmosphere and thirty-six different cocktails on the wine list.

We were generously dined on Arctic char, a delectable red-fleshed fish, seated in the intimacy of individually lit tables, burning electric bulbs at fourteen cents a kilowatt. Fourteen cents would about equal a shilling.

Although Captain Gallagher was a Scot, he spoke impeccable public school English and told us in a flood of conversation how he became a hotelier.

He commanded an RAF station in Singapore from 1945 to 1947, when he turned to commercial airlines and flew for Trans Canada Airlines until 1950, when he emigrated to Canada. For a number of years he was based at Frobisher Bay flying for Maritime Central Airways and it was while he was at Frobisher that he saw the possibilities of private enterprise and resolved to start a company.

He founded the East Coast Carriers freight agency in 1958 with six employees and half a million dollars in assets. While running the carrier’s business with air freight at thirty six cents a pound, he opened the hotel. Four bags of potatoes cost more than a hundred and fifty dollars before the highly paid kitchen staff put a potato peeler to them. It accounted for the high price of a meal. A hotel room cost between twelve and fifteen dollars a night and did not include breakfast.

He was apparently an adaptable, hard working man who performed every kind of job in his growing business. He drove taxis, was office manager, waiter, accountant, cashier and acted as advisor when and if any of his employees were in trouble. The Arctic has a way of magnifying psychological problems and emotional worries, he said.

He was a man with a sound, business head. In summer, the town was always crowded with thirsty construction workers and stevedores. He applied for and was granted a liquor licence within eighteen months. On April the First, 1960, he said, the Rustic Room had its gala opening. It had been advertised that only men wearing collars and ties would be admitted. In this way, it was hoped to deter unwanted customers. Within hours of the notice being put up, the Hudson’s Bay Company store had sold out every collar, shirt and tie in stock.

When the doors were opened, it seemed the whole town came in. Captain Gallagher said there was even an Eskimo girl in an evening gown, but from the knees down her dress was tucked inside rubber boots. A large proportion of the first night customers had to be bounced out.

House rules were introduced. “No one under 21 years of age may enter the lounge.” “No one in an intoxicated condition may enter the lounge.” Unofficially, Eskimos were to be limited to two drinks each, he said. Volunteers sat with them to say “no” and help them to be strong minded when friendly strangers offered drinks.

As Captain Gallgher spoke to us, a drunken Eskimo weaved across the floor, stopping to speak at each table. He was very gay and laughed with everyone. His sports jacket reached almost to his knees and his tie and enormous shirt collar sagged below the base of his wrinkled old throat. He was Pop, we were told.

“Pop gives us the same routine every night. He has two beers and starts to laugh. That makes him laugh all the more so he calls at every table. He bought his sports jacket specially for opening night” said the proprietor.

Captain Gallagher gave employment to a number of Eskimos, two men trained at the rehabilitation centre had helped to build the hotel. He said when the Eskimos wanted to go hunting in winter, they would, give him two days notice before leaving and then leave the hotel (which was centrally heated) for seal hunting through the ice and living in a snow house. He acknowledged that hunting was in the men’s nature. He accepted it and on the whole found the Eskimos a great success, hard working and reliable. Some of them had been with him from the day after his company was formed, and in the violent storms of winter, two of them had walked the three miles from Apex through a “white out” blizzard when not a vehicle of any kind moved.

“Won’t drink damage the Eskimos?” I asked him,

“You’d do more harm by discriminating against them,” he said, and excused himself from the table. He went to a far part of the room and sat at the keyboard of a great electric organ.

Some construction workers started to talk loudly. White jacketed waiters slipped over to a table and two people were gently but firmly piloted from the bar. Captain Gallagher’s fingers ran over the keys and Noel Coward’s “Tea for Two” swelled through the cigarette smoke. An overhead light gleamed on the proprietor’s smoothly brushed hair and the waiters returned from the doorway to serve beer at sixty cents a bottle and rum at a dollar a tot.

Some days afterwards we were being driven home in the late evening by the area administrator of the Department of Northern Affairs and we passed an Eskimo woman lying drunk on the ground. Nearby her small child was crying. Mr. Delaute put us down at our hut and returned for the woman and child, but she had disappeared in the few minutes he had been away.

We learned a day or so afterwards that a friend had been close behind us in a jeep. He had noticed the mother and child and picked them up and taken them to the entrance of Iqaluit, out of bounds to non-Eskimos, and out of harm’s way.

During the summer, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment at Frobisher Bay added two more cells to the barracks. The most frequent crime was drunkenness. There was another problem the authorities had to contend with – the incidence of venereal disease which brought tragedy to many Eskimo homes. Casual labourers, who spent a few months of the year in Frobisher earning high wages, were often carriers of the disease.

They could earn five hundred dollars, about one hundred and eighty pounds a month and were brought up in a society which will pay for sex. Eskimo women who had grown up in a society which regarded sex as a common natural function, came into contact with the white men and discovered they could earn money for a pleasurable occupation. It was probably the main reason why Iqaluit was put out of bounds to non-Eskimos. Such fraternising was discouraged.

There was one tragic case I learned of. It concerned a young woman who had lost her parents, she had spent years in hospital where she learned to speak English and she returned to the Arctic and was trained at the rehabilitation centre. She found employment and was rented a small hut. She was a friendly popular girl who enjoyed her new independence. She had been reared in an Eskimo camp where no one ever put a lock on his tent door and she never troubled to have a lock put on the door of her hut, so when a White construction worker noticed the girl lived alone, he tried the door and found no resistance.

The girl became gloomy and withdrew from her friends. When her condition deteriorated rapidly she was admitted to hospital, where the doctor diagnosed what is euphemistically termed “white man’s disease.”

It would seem to be a simple expedient to have all people entering the Arctic undergo a medical examination, but there is no Canadian law which requires such a precaution.