Inuvik’s 50th Homecoming Anniversary Special Feature
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years 0 5 r e v o k i n I n uvi
A flavour of the day can be felt through this composite of yearbook pages from Inuvik’s schools in the sixties.
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Yearbook images courtesy of SAMS & SHSS
t n e m r e w o p m E l a rgin
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Building
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“We had to cut the bush to create trails, from Twin Lakes to the hospital,” said Colin. The area was overgrown with wild willow. “We made trails sixty feet wide, we cut it all the way to the airport. We didn’t have any powered chainsaws. Nothing. We just used axes. I sharpened my axes all the time,” he laughed.
ICRC Photo
ommy Thrasher, Inuvialuit elder, took me on a winter’s foot tour around Inuvik. His breath turned white as he pointed out some of the buildings he helped put up in this one-traffic-light town. “That’s the Anglican Church, I put up the steeple,” he said, “here’s SAM School, I helped build that too, and the Igloo Church, and look, there’s the post office. The third year I was here, this town was only as big as the post office,” he laughed.
The aboriginal construction workers would also set up tents along the river; as their population grew, the area became known as ‘Happy Valley’ or ‘Tent Town.’
Colin Allen “Back then they thought pilings would last forever, but now with global warming…oh well, some of the buildings are gone now, I worked on these buildings and I’m still here.” Tommy has a mischievous smile, and I could see the pride that he felt to have been part of the construction of this town. “Back then it was called East Three, because it was at the third arm that branched off the Mackenzie River. I had just gotten married, we lived in a bush camp about 30 miles from Inuvik. I heard they were building a new town, and they were looking for construction trainees…” That was 1954. Like many other aboriginal people who had moved to Inuvik for their first wage-earning jobs in the Mackenzie Delta, Tommy Thrasher’s life was forever changed. Before the new town was started, most Aboriginal people still lived off the land and lived a nomadic but self-sufficient life. East Three was a “no man’s land.” Colin too answered the same call to train as a carpenter. “When I was young, I trapped for my grandfather,” he said. “He raised me. I left home when I was eighteen, I never went back.” His grandfather had always kept the money from selling the furs that Colin trapped, and Colin felt his first taste of independence by moving to East Three. The first task at hand was to clear land to build on. There was nothing man-made in East Three, except for a few tents set up by the first construction team, made up of a small number of government officials and workers from the south.
Bertha Allen
Tommy Thrasher
When asked whether the building of Inuvik brought hope to the local people, Nellie Cournoyea said, “I don’t know if you would use the word 'hope'. It might have been the next big thing that was happening. It was the government’s proposition to move the town of Aklavik to another location because Aklavik was supposedly sinking. Well, we knew that a lot of people would never leave Aklavik and that it wasn’t necessarily sinking that badly.” “Inuvik was planned within the Cold War era. The government was really looking for a place where they could build a very large airstrip. They were looking at different sites to find a place where they could find the gravel resources or foundation to put the airport.” Employment became more important to aboriginal people as fur prices dropped. Colin Allen remembers continuing to return to the land with his family for all his holidays from work except one. However, while Colin made a good living as a carpenter in the beginning, he was told in 1972 that he needed certification as a journeyman to continue his work.
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Special Feature Nuitaniqsaq Quliaq “I had seven children and my wife,” he said, “I told them I am not going to Edmonton to take that journeymen training.” He took up the job of janitor at the school then. This was a common experience for other aboriginal workers, who lost their jobs to qualified Southerners over time. Nevertheless, Colin and Tommy are both nostalgic about the days of building Inuvik. “We built it, we were East Three,” said Tommy.
Settling
“Some of us came with our camping gear from muskrat camp,” said Bertha Allen, a Gwich’in elder who moved with her family to Inuvik around the same time as Colin. “Usually we head over to Aklavik, where there was a trading post, but this time, we moved all our gear to Inuvik. Employment went on after summer, then fall, and a lot of us never left.” Bertha said the living conditions in the ‘tent town’ was challenging. About fifty families had put up tents, some as close as a foot apart. “We stayed in a small tent frame, about 10 by 12 feet for a couple of years, and then someone built a house and left their long tent frame. To me, that was like a real mansion, moving from a small tent to a longer tent frame!” In fact, even as the town began to take shape over the first decade, with houses erected on both sides of the main Mackenzie Road, and the first school, hospital, office buildings and staff housing for government personnel were being built, living conditions for aboriginal people was not quite on par with that of southerners (personnel brought in to staff the RCMP, CPC, NCPC, Transport, National Defense, National Health and Welfare, Citizenship and Immigration departments.) Aboriginal people eventually moved into 5-12s, the 512 square foot cabins that government employees long had access to, but still had to wait another few years before the utilidor would reach their homes. The utilidor was a unique two-way system meant to pipe sewage, fresh water and heating to homes in Inuvik. The pipes are housed in metal containers raised above ground so as to prevent melting the permafrost underground. Bertha Allen had been one of the founding voices behind the first housing co-op in Inuvik. It was made up of both aboriginal people and people of other backgrounds. They ordered building materials from Edmonton to build their own housing. “We all helped assemble each other’s houses,” she said, “the men said, Bertha’s going to have the first choice of the house and lot that she wants, because she made the loudest noise.” Bertha would also become a champion of aboriginal rights, and native women’s rights, heading such as the Native Women’s Association, and other organizations that empower Aboriginal Northerners.
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Nellie Cournoyea, Chair and CEO of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation said, “You had the Canadian Forces as well as government, and mainly Indian Affairs thinking, so most of the housing was built for the government people who came into town and lived on the bases, they would have to be looked after the way they were in southern Canada.” “And Aboriginal people weren’t treated the same because it was presumed that it was their home and somehow they were going to make it by.”
“One of the many problems that this creates is the majority of the people coming in were Caucasian, and they appeared to be treated a lot better and with more respect than anyone else, and so you create a kind of racism. And people expressed what came out as dissatisfaction and anger. The only thing that was possible to do then was to find a mechanism to support the aboriginal people, as a society, because they weren’t part of that other society.” Historical photos left: Nellie Cournoyea (first female and first Aboriginal premier) and Noah Carpenter (first certified Inuvialuit doctor) are good examples of aboriginal empowerment.
Resilience
In fact, the split became known as the ‘west side’ and the ‘east side’. “We were using chemical toilets,” Bertha Allen said. “The other part of town, the side with the hospital was lucky, they had flush toilets.” “Even though we formed a co-op for housing, we didn’t have any utilidor on this side yet. Maybe 5, 10 years later, we finally had utilidor service, and one of the priests said to the little kids, come look here, look at what is going to happen to your poop! He flushed the new toilet, and it was so strange for the little kids to know that they don’t have to see their poop in the pot all the time,” she laughed. Humour was a way to deal with adversity. Aboriginal people in Inuvik began to agitate for their rights. The Indian Brotherhood was set up, and later, Inuvialuit and Gwich’in both pursued and won land claims. They also fought to preserve their culture and to build infrastructure for themselves.
Parade time in the early 60s...
The first spring carnivals, now called jamborees.
Colin Allen as a young construction worker, standing on Mackenzie Road in the early days.
A lady working with bear skulls.
Jamboree queen!
All historical photos courtesy of ICRC
The research center.
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Special Feature Nuitaniqsaq Quliaq Edward Lennie, a pioneer of bringing back Arctic Sports still remembers what it was like to hold practices in Ingamo Hall. He is proud of the Northern Games Boys that he nurtured, who are in turn training the next cohort of athletes. Aboriginal people in Inuvik wanted to celebrate their gatherings in a sound structure that belonged to them, instead of an old Hudson’s Bay building that was condemned. The ‘Ingamo’ in Ingamo Hall Friendship Center is a combination of the words ‘Indian’ and ‘Eskimo.’
Celebration
“We all live in harmony,” said Bertha. “We all belong to respective groups, but we’ve learned to live in harmony in small communities. Everybody works together. If there is going to be a big traditional dance, that’s just not for Inuvialuit or just for the Gwich’in, it’s for everybody. Everybody put their resources together, to put on a big celebration.” Nellie is proud of the people like Edward Lennie, who brought back Arctic Sports by volunteering and teaching youth what he could about the traditions. “Now we’ve got major drum dance groups, and certainly arctic sports, which really began here, and are promoted all over the Arctic now. It takes people who are determined, who find a way to get it done,” she said. She looks back at the recent Inuvialuit history in the region. “They’ve evolved since the early whaling days in the 1900s, there has been a lot of changes in a short period of time. The religious factors, the DEW Line situation, the building of the town of Inuvik. Every ten years there was something for people to adjust to, to try to get the most out of the new opportunities.” Inuvik also went through two oil and gas boom-and-busts in the seventies and eighties, and suffered economically when the Canadian Forces base in Inuvik was closed down in 1985. More recently, there is anticipation that a boom will come in the form of the pipeline that might be built in the Mackenzie Valley. “Inuvik has never been able to define what kind of community it is, because we are always
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anticipating some kind of economic base that we can rely on, over the long term,” she said. “Inuvik, as far as I can see, is thriving, wants to thrive, wants to be important and wants to take its place in society. There are a lot of people putting effort into it,” she said. Now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, the town of Inuvik boasts a diverse and harmonious population of about 3,500 people, and continues to be the regional The infamous utilidor. government and transportation hub of the Western Arctic. The Dempster Highway (built in 1979), as well as Northern-run air services, has brought tourists from all over the world to explore the unique culture and stunning nature in Inuvik and the surrounding area. The town is also host to some of the largest industry, arts, and entertainment events in the North. Aboriginal people such as the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in have greater control over their assets and voices with the establishment and successes of their respective land claims corporations. Southerners who want to do business in the area now have to first consult its native owners. Arctic sovereignty also means that Inuvik is now strategically poised to be important once more. “When Inuvik was first built, we would never see an aboriginal person who drove around in a truck, maybe a big gravel truck to build up the airport…and many years went by before you saw aboriginal people actually owning their own vehicles, and their own infrastructure. So that’s good, the challenges, I think, have made a lot of people move forward,” smiled Nellie.
Inuvik in construction.
Nurses giving children medication.
Paraders on a kayak pass by Slim Semmler’s store.
The old Mackenzie Hotel. The LIONS basketball team
Trucks were decorated back then too!
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