Review: The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic

The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic by Melanie McGrath
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This prompted me to watch Nanook of the North (1922) which I had neither seen before nor knew of the global fame and impact it had when released. What happened was that director Robert J. Flaherty had an affair with actress Maggie Nujarluktuk (also known as

Not only was this native population disrupted with forced locations, but their society was eroded by the introduction of alcohol which came out in later public hearings.

Inuit women began to appear at the Arctic Circle bar to reclaim their men, and soon enough, they also began to drink. The airmen quickly discovered these women could be bought for booze, cash or promises and the women were often too drunk to say no, or did not know how to say no to white men. When the first group of women had been used up, there were plenty more, and younger, down in the camp. And so it went on. A great many half-breed babies were born during that time, a good number of them with the tiny, shrivelled bodies indicative of foetal alcohol syndrome.

Fights broke out between jealous men and their wives, between husbands and between older and younger women. Inuit stumbled out of their huts into freezing nights high on rage and booze and too drunk to be able to feel frostbite setting in. There were a lot of amputations in those years.

By the mid-sixties almost every Inuit family in Resolute Bay had been affected by alcoholism. Things got so bad at the Inuit settlement that in some homes there was nothing to eat for days except the chewing gum the airmen handed out to the children to keep them quiet while they had sex with their mothers. A whole generation of Inuit children were left to bring up themselves while their fathers and mothers descended into squalor and depression. In the absence of any help, the children dealt with all this in the only way they knew how. Some learned to dissemble and lie, others sunk into states of apathy and denial. In the nine years from 1953 to 1962, fifty Inuit girls and boys were born in Resolute Bay. Thirty years later, nearly a third of them were already dead. Remembering it all brought Martha to tears. It gave her no comfort at all to know that, when it came to raw despair during those years, Resolute Bay had probably had the edge on Grise Fiord.

The testimony continued, and when the Commission broke for lunch, many of those who had heard the morning's witness simply sat in their seats, no longer able to trust their legs to carry them anywhere...

In the mid-1950s, lured by false promises of a better life, Inuit families were displaced by the Canadian government and left to their own devices in the Far North. In this icy desert realm, Martha Flaherty (granddaughter to Robert) and her family lived through one of Canadian history's most somber and little-known episodes. She later became a prominent figure in publicizing these wrongs. That is not covered in this book, but there is a documentary Martha of the North (2009) .

The breakdown of norms extended to the extreme case of Qimmingajak. Cannibalism featured in that family's descent into depravity during a period of extreme starvation and isolation in a traditional snow house (qarnaq). Qimmingajak consumed his campmates and ultimately his own son.

This book needed an Inuktut glossary, IMHO. Carefully, each native word was defined when first used, but that often was not enough help for me when reading further on.

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