An uncommon grave for Inuit victims of airplane crash

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/04/2009 (6256 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Editorial writer Catherine Mitchell recently travelled to the eastern Nunavut to help unravel a 60-year-old mystery — why were the bodies of Inuit people killed in an airplane crash near Norway House in 1949 never returned home when the bodies of non-Inuit killed in the crash were? This column is part of a special report on the tragedy featured in the Perspective section of the Winnipeg Free Press today.

 

WHY didn’t they come home?

It is a question on the lips of many relatives in communities along the western coast of Hudson Bay — why, when the non-Inuit bodies were shipped to their hometowns, would the RCAF not have flown the Inuit bodies back to Chesterfield Inlet?

It is a question that some have tried to answer, but most are only speculating — those who made the decisions or followed orders to take the bodies to Norway House for mass burial are dead or have not been found.

Father Charles Choque served as an Oblate missionary to the Eastern Arctic at the time. He was there when the RCAF Canso took off on Aug. 21, 1949.

Asked why the bodies didn’t come back, he says this in a recent email from his home in Ottawa:

"GOOD QUESTION. Maybe the Department of Northern Affairs could answer it. I am not sure that 60 (years) ago our people in the North were anxious to see a dead person sent back to them.

"When someone died, the survivors seemed in a hurry to dispose of the remains! If someone died in an igloo, the dead body was wrapped in skins tied with a rope made of… seal skin and was not taken out by the door but through a hole made in the back part of the igloo.

"Superstition?? Maybe. Of course, after 60 years of white contact, the northern mentality has changed, not always for the better.

"If a stranger visiting Chesterfield asks: Why didn’t they send back the bodies? You should insist to have them back! Of course, they would probably agree if the government accepts to pay for everything. It is of course hard to know in what condition they would be found!"

Peter Kulchyski, professor of native studies at the University of Manitoba, is more direct.

Kulchyski has written about the people of the Eastern Arctic and their historic contact with agents of the federal government and its administration as it began applying there.

He says that first and foremost, it would have been the cost factor that led decision-makers to take the remains of the Inuit to Norway House. He believes the flight north, given there were few planes headed that way, would have been more expensive than the flight south, where planes typically were based.

But, he hastens to add, if the transportation of the remains of the non-Inuit to their hometowns was paid by government authorities then that explanation falls apart.

As well, it likely wasn’t a priority to them: "There was probably the perception that it’s not as important," Kulchyski says. "They would have had to go to some significant effort to do that and in their view it probably wouldn’t have been worth the effort."

The cost of supplying services to the Inuit, in the 1940s and 1950s, was seen as an enormous burden by Ottawa, to the point that up to 1963, the government was still "seriously considering relocating all the Inuit to southern Canada." Day schools would not be established until the mid-1950s. "Baby bonuses," which arrived by mail to each Canadian home with a child, were dispensed by RCMP and not always willingly, Kulchyski says.

The cost factor would have dictated policy when Inuit were flown south for care in sanitoriums for tuberculosis — those who survived often returned, but those who died were buried in the towns or cities where they got medical care.

Kulchyski said he is convinced that an element of racism seeped into the way the Inuit families were informed of the crash — it fell to the priests or doctors in Chesterfield to give notice, while southerners heard by official telegram or letter.

"The people responsible did not care as much about their responsibilities to the Inuit."

It is risky to judge yesterday’s decisions with a 21st-century perspective. But it is also impossible not to draw an obvious conclusion from the fact the remains of the white people from southern Canada were returned south for identification, preparation and transportation to hometowns. The cost of that recovery — three flights into the crash site in a boggy piece of land surrounded by lakes — surely far outweighed any cost of a flight north back to Chesterfield.

It was wrong to leave the bodies in Norway House, although the people there handled them with care. The Inuit remains were consigned to an unmarked grave because no one in charge bothered to get their names from the Oblate mission in Chesterfield and send them to Norway House. It would have been a sign that some care, a modicum of responsibility was taken — a few phone calls could have seen that done.

That lack of respect and attention to a simple detail speak volumes, I think, about attitudes towards "Eskimos" in a frozen, faraway land who were, as they are now, Canadians.

 

catherine.mitchell@freepress.mb.ca