And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 08:23:07 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Lynne Moss-Sharman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: 50 yrs ago: RCMP shot Inuit sled dogs
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Tuesday 30 March 1999
When Mounties gunned down the sled dogs
The RCMP will apologize for a misguided policy that
deprived Inuit hunters of their
livelihood and spawned a half-century of resentment in
Canada's North.
Janice Tibbetts reports.
Janice Tibbetts
The Ottawa Citizen
IQALUIT, N.W.T. -
When Lucassie Nutaraluk thinks of the Canadian justice
system, one thing that
still comes to mind is how the Mounties shot bullets
through his four
sled dogs almost half a century ago.
"They just went up to them and it was 'bang, bang.'
They didn't
explain anything," the aging Inuit man said yesterday
through an
interpreter.
It was the early 1950s, and Mr. Nutaraluk's husky
hunting dogs were among the victims of an RCMP policy to rid fledgling
Arctic communities of canines, ostensibly to
control diseases such as rabies and distemper and prevent the animals
from running loose.
Since Mr. Nutaraluk speaks no English, and the RCMP
officer didn't
speak Inuktitut, there was only silence between the two
men after the
hunter watched his dead huskies collapse.
Today, the RCMP, hoping for a fresh start with the
creation this week
of a new justice system, one of the key components of
the Inuit
homeland of Nunavut, realize they have to make up for
the past if they
want to polish their image.
To that end, the new Nunavut detachment is crafting an
official
apology to people like Mr. Nutaraluk, now a 77-year-old
grandfather
whose dark eyes still flash with anger as he recalls
how the police took
away his "hunting tools," leaving him without a dog
team to drag his
sled across the snow-covered tundra.
"I couldn't get any of this," he said, pointing his
withered finger at a
feast of caribou spread out on his coffee table.
At a recent RCMP conference in Iqaluit on how to build
bridges with
the Inuit, elders spoke adamantly of the need for the
police to make up
for destroying an untold number of huskies in the 1950s
and 1960s.
"The whole idea is to say we've learned from mistakes
of the past and
we want to correct them to build a better
relationship," said Cpl. Glen
Siegersma, media relations officer with the Nunavut
detachment,
which will officially come into existence Thursday.
The RCMP, considered the front-line players in an
overhauled justice
system designed to put more decision-making in the
hands of the Inuit,
realize they have a lot of mending to do in communities
where police
have been traditionally perceived as the gatekeepers of
a white justice
system that hasn't worked for aboriginals.
Chris Bothe, commanding officer of the Nunavut
headquarters, plans
to have an apology ready in the next few months. RCMP
officers are
still trying to determine where and why so many dogs
were shot to
death.
What is known is that the mass destruction of dog teams
happened
around the same time the federal government launched school
construction and housing projects in an effort to pull
Inuit from their
nomadic lifestyle into modern communities.
The fallout from the canine destruction is not unique
to Nunavut, a
2.2-million-square-kilometre chunk of the eastern
Arctic that will
officially break away from the Northwest Territories
this week.
The Inuit of northern Quebec are planning to tour
communities trying
to find out more about why the massacre happened
throughout their
region.
"We want the people of Canada to know about this
because this
actually happened," said Pita Aatami, president of the
Makivik Corp.,
the organization representing northern Quebec Inuit.
"We're not going to give up until something is done,
because people's
livelihoods were taken away. Some dogs were shot when
they were
chained up and the bullets hit the houses. People would
run out and
see the police shooting their dogs."
Mr. Aatami, who learned recently that his late father's
dogs were also
shot, said reports have only started to surface in the
last year.
At Makivik Corp.'s annual general meeting last week,
older Inuit
vividly recalled how their lives abruptly changed when
their dog teams
were destroyed and sometimes left in a heap on the ice,
leaving their
owners to rely on government handouts to buy food.
In Nunavut, RCMP already fear that saying sorry won't
be enough,
since it appears elders in some communities are
starting to talk about
lobbying for financial compensation.
For Mr. Nutaraluk, the prospect of an apology after
almost 50 years is
little comfort.
"I would prefer money instead of words from the RCMP,
because my
dogs were very valuable to me," said Mr. Nutaraluk, who
struggled for
years before he started hunting by snowmobile.
Copyright 1999 Ottawa Citizen
"Let Us Consider The Human Brain As
A Very Complex Photographic Plate"
1957 G.H. Estabrooks, Creator
of the Manchurian Candidate
born New Brunswick
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