Part 20 (1/2)
As the economic plight ofthe Inult developed into a political issue and it became evident that the fur trade 334 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
could no longer sustain them, Ottawa inoved north with a vengeance, formally accepting the fact that education and welfare were its responsibilities.
Well-intentioned teachers, nurses, doctors, welfare officers and adminis- trators galore arrived in the Arctic. To itionitor the behaviour of the new arrivals, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police increased its northern presence, being charged, among other duties, with distributing family allowances and old-age pensions.* Government handouts were
*Some of their patrols were aniazingly infrequent. ”,lien an RC.MP constable arrivcd in the Belcher Islands on April 11, 1940, it was the first police visit since 1919. Official calls too ”ere rare. ”When I went to the Belchers in 1969,” said former Commissioner Stuart 11odgson, ”it A as the first public meeting that had ever been held there. As I recall, it was in a little oneroom schoolhouse that had been dumped offin the southern end of the Belchers rather than the north. As a consequence, a few houses were built for the local people, as their children were going to school.
Essentially, the main settlement was in the north end of the island. In any event, the meeting started about six o'clock and by midnight there were only myselfand the interpreter left. The rest ofour party had retired. At 2.00 A.M. as the meeting de,~ eloped into a sort of lull, I asked the people (all the locals were there-grandparents, parents, children and babiesthe entire settlement) if perhaps they would like to adjourn the meeting and they said, 'Oh, no.'At 2.30 1 again put the question to them, 'Have you anything more to talk about?' and they said no. I said, 'Well, perhaps we should adjourn the meeting,' and they again replied no, to which I said, 'Why not~'The reply was both astounding and humorous. They simply said that they had never had a meeting before and they thought it was a lot of fun. I was up the next morning at six o'clock. We had breakfast and left at seven to see the people at the north end of the island. When the plane landedand I opened the door, I was astonished to see the same people. They asked, 'Are we going to have another meeting?' The~ had travelled fifty miles overland that night in order to be there for another meeting.”
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Nurse at work in the Arctic
issued not as cash, which was still not a generally accepted means of doing business in the North, but as entries in RCMP ledgers. The police would itemize precisely what goods the people could receive and send the tally over to the FIBC store, which then handed out the merchandise. A typical 1945 monthly family ration consisted of fourteen pounds of flour, a pound of tea, three pounds of sugar, three pounds of rolled oats, two pounds of rice, six packages of Pablum and a gallon of coal oil. Not much to build a dream on, but better than starving. The notion of 336 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
receiving goods free from HBC stores that had previously traded them for furs was disturbing and not always understood. -The Mountie told me I could go into the trading post and buy anything I needed because I had family allowance,” recalled Matthew Innakatsik of Baker Lake. ”It didn't make any sense because I had never received anything for free before and I was afraid to do it.”
The combination of nervousness about Canadian sovereignty, the paranoid influences of the Cold War, which gave the Arctic unexpected strategic significance, and the growing awareness in southern Canada that the Inint were severely deprived lent impetus to the government's involvement. Free match-box houses were provided for Inuit families in the main settlements, with electricity and water at nominal cost. The North became fas.h.i.+onable. Experts arrived by the hour, it seemed-scientists and human manipulators, all eager to carry the white man's burden. Minnie Aodla Freeman, a wonderfully wise Inuit from Cape Hope Island, summed up the effect of the influx most succinctly when she commented that the ideal Arctic
*Relations between the Mounties and IDuit were not limited to u elfare.
”Almost all the single RCM Policemen had native girlfi-iends,” observed D-1- Cooch, a Canadian government ornithologist who specialized in on-site Arctic studies. ”It was no big deal. But I remember being told about a young constable posted to Pond Inlet who was a very fastidious individual and apparently afraid of women, behaving like a bashU monk. One time, when his senior colleague had to go on patrol to Arctic Bay, he was out about five hours when he remembered something and went back. He could hear noises from the ground-floor bathroom, so he looked in and there was the monk in the bathtub with one of the local girls, scrubbing her back. There was a candle and a bottle of wine beside them and my friend, Cliff, said he didD't have the heart to walk in and disturb them.”
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family now consisted of a husband and wife, four children and an anthropologist.*: After 1960, fainilv allowances and old-age pensions were sent directly to the intended recipients. Not only (lid some managers insist that old debts be paid before they extended any credit to their customers (a policy the Company claimed was not contained in their directives), but natives who dared send order forms to Eaton's catalogue department or any other compet.i.tor claimed their letters were occasionally mislaid. Even when orders did get through, usually on a cash- on-de livery basis, they could not always be claimed. Jean G.o.dsell, whose hushand was stationed with the JIBC in Fort Smith, recalled a typical scene when the long-expected mail-order goods finally arrived and the customers came to collect them: ”One by one, they appeared at the wicket, their dusky faces wreathed in simles which soon turned to black anger when they found they could not take the parcels off in debt, as was the case with the trading stores. . . . Naturally, most of the parcels went back, but others came in on the next plane; still more came in on the steamer, and it was quite soine tirne ere the mail-order houses realized that Marie Chandelle, Rosalie Squirrel, Elsie Lame-Duck et at. were not, despite their substan- tial orders, the type of customers they desired.”t
She married one- -Milton Freeman, a professor of anthropolo.*,, at the University of Alberta-and went on to write some of the best of the northern books, including SuTvival in the South and Life Aniong the Qallunaat.
tThe men had their own problems with mail-order catalogues, especially those pages featuring womens underwear. One trapper, gazing with fascination at the suggestive layouts,wrote awaV for ”the lady on the far right of page 59.”
338 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
Best of the newcomers to the North was James Houston, a Toronto artist who spent fourteen years on Baffin Island under contract to the Department of Northern Affairs, teaching the Inuit how best to market their soapstone creations. Carving, an intrinsic skill of the tnuit, had been used to fas.h.i.+on out of bone, stone and ivory the snow goggles, parka toggles, harpoons, arrowheads, ice-chisels, spoons, fish spears, talismans and toys that were part of their everyday existence. In 1949, Houston, a.s.sisted by Norman Ross, the HBC store manager at Port Harrison, collected a test group of Inuit carvings for the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in Montreal, which successfully sold the items. Gradually a market was built up for the best of the pieces. After a false start trying to produce bookends, ash trays and such, the carvers, under Houston's guidance, let their imaginations soar. By the late 1950s, the carvings had achieved international stature. The work was so successful partly because the carvers' own longing for a return to their ancestors' hunting days, expressed in their art, coincided with the southern buyers'
romantic notions of what ”Eskimos” were all about. The native artists responded to the material they were working. Their sculptures were not as much artistic as ritualistic, the crystallization of moments in time.
”These are not cold sculptures of a frozen world,” Houston noted. ”They reveal to us the pa.s.sionate feelings of a people aware of all the joys and terrors of life. They also reveal an enormous freshness and ingenuity, a hunter's sense of observation.” Once the soapstone trade was established, Houston and his then wife, Alma, moved to Cape Dorset.
”Oshaweetok, a famous Eskimo carver ... sat near me one evening casually studying the sailor head trademarks on two identical packages of cigarettes,” Houston later recalled. ”He noted carefully every subtle NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 339.
Artistand novelistjanies Houston
detail of color and Jorm, and he suggested to me that it must be tiresome for some person to sit and paint everV one of the little heads with exact sameness on an endless number of packages.... Looking around to find some way to denionstrate printing, I saw an ivory walrus tusk that Oshaweetok had recently carved. . . . Taking an old tin of writing ink that had frozen and thawed many times ... I dipped up the heavy black residue and smoothed it over the tusk. Taking a thin piece of toilet tissue, I laid it carefully on the inked surface and rubbed it lightly and quickly. Stripping the paper from the tusk, I saw that by good fortune we had a clear negative linage of Oshaweetok's incised design We could do that,' he said. And so we did.” That was how Cape Dorset's block printing and sealskin stencil printing industry was born, 340 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
its evocative images later gracing museums and private collections the world over. By 1960, the HBC was buying forty tons of ”Eskii-no” carvings a year for resale in southern Canada.*
The prints and carvings grew so profitable that the following year a native-run West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative was opened at Cape Dorset to market the art. Nineteen similar outlets were soon opened in other communities, over stern protests from the HBC. ”They were strongly against the move,” recalled Ben Sivertz, then Commissioner of the Northwest Territories and a co-op advocate. ”But the Eskimos took to it like ducks to water. We didn't have to tell therri what to do. They took over from the Hudson's Bay post manager the business of setting carving prices. Jim Houston told me lie was away when it happened, but when lie got back to Cape Dorset he was invited to a rneeting where everybody brought in their carvings. Each one was put on a table and all the carvers wrote down what they thought it should sell for,- they then averaged that out, and that was the set price. They did that on their own in place after place. The pieces were sent to Ottawa, where we dis- tributed them to the Handicrafts Guild and other merchandisers-in San Francisco, Paris, London and anywhere. The money was then sent back to the carvers, and that in fact was how cash on a large scale first came
*A less serious Company sideline was the U-Paddle Canoe rental service for adventurous holidayers who wanted to spend part of their summers following the trade routes of the voyageurs or exploring the wilder sh.o.r.es of the continent's sub-Arctic rivers. The Company purchased twenty-eight seventeen-foot aluminum canoes in 1964 and distributed them to posts at likely locations. There were enough rentals (at twenty-five dollars a week) to allow the H13C to break even, and by the time the U-Paddle service was abandoned twenty years later, the Company had a fleet of eightvcanoes, renting for a weekly $125.
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'rhe Hunt, mgraving b.yjuanisialzi, 190
to the North-though it still had to be spent in Hudson's Bay Company stores.”
As retailing compet.i.tion grew more intense, so did the scrutiny of the IIBC's methods and mark-ups. The Company maintained that its objective for mature northern stores (those established five years or more) was a 23-percent return on net a.s.sets (before interest and taxes). Some outlets exceeded that average and many others, particularly in the more remote areas, fell below it because of higher transportation costs. Testifying before the Northwest Territories Council on 342 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
May 27, 1981, Marvin Tiller, then head of the HBCs northern operation, gave a rare insight into corporate pricing policies. The retail price of non-perishable goods, he stated, included a mark-up of up to 25 percent on top of landed costs, with the margin rising to one-third on most perishable items. He pointed out that stock in the North turned over only one and a half times a year, compared with eleven or twelve times in the South. Instead of trying to refute the accusation that perishables at the HBC's Frobisher Bay store were selling at 70 percent more than comparable items in Montreal, Tiller boasted that ”to lay down fresh produce in Frobisher .)t only 70 percent more than Montreal prices is, in our view, a remarkable achievetnent of planning and organization.” Goods at the HBC stores were-and are--expensive, but most of the added margin is accounted for by transportation costs. In 1981, a five-pound bag of potatoes at Pond Inlet, for example, sold for a ridiculous $7.10. But its actual freight cost was $5.15. ”We are probably regarded as large and prosperous frorn money made out of the natives,” d.i.c.k Murray, the IIB(:s managing director, complained in 1966. -The fact that in ninety-eight cases out of one hundred our men are able and dedicated, and work under conditions that most Canadians would refuse to work under for any length of time, is simply not taken into consideration.”
perception of the I [B(: was changing. Clearest summary of that evolution was the observation of Adrian Tanner of Memorial University, writing in Queen's Quarterly. ”When I lived in an Arctic trading post community in the late 1950s, where trade with the Inuit was still conducted using Hudson's Bay Company tokens rather than cash, the two subjects which we learned to avoid at the segregated social gatherings of the white inhabitants were religion and impact of the Hudson's NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 343.
Bay Company on the native people. We who did not work for the Company found it remarkable that all Hudson's Bay employees, from the old-time traders to newest clerks who had just arrived from across the Atlantic, had a staunch and unquestioning loyalty to their employer and its past actions, and that when a subject like this was raised they seemed to quickly be reduced to irrational argument and wounded feelings. ... By the time I went north again in the mid- I 960s the Hudson's Bay Company fur trade and its effects on the native people had become something of a dead horse which the Canadian public was only too willing to flog, thanks to authors like Farley Mowat, and to some of the native political leaders.