“Sailarjuarmiinginaaqitaa?”

The distinguished civil servant Gordon Robertson told the commission that it was “a travesty of justice to have [the civil servants’] motives misinterpreted, to have them held up to ridicule.” To read the summaries of the testimonies of officials and those who were relocated before the Commissioners is to read irreconcilable narratives from different galaxies. McGrath’s book, while occasionally overblown in its digressions and imagined journey into the Inuit life and psyche, makes of this complicated tale of hunters and bureaucrats a rich drama. She finds, in the Inuit telling of their story before the Commission, “nothing short of the rebirth of a people. . . . They had given the Arctic back its authentic voice.”

Josephie Flaherty and his family went to Grise Fiord in 1955 to join other members of his family. Once they were on the C. D. Howe, their two-year-old, Mary, was diagnosed with TB and sent south to a sanatorium. She came back to them, in Grise Fiord, three years later with no idea who her real family was, having been carelessly dumped for a year at a time at both Inukjuak and Resolute because no one bothered to find out where her parents actually were. Josephie’s son Peter was mentally impaired, his mother, Rynee, believes from starvation. Josephie became a despondent, violent man, and had a mental breakdown in 1968 from which he never recovered. He died in 1984 from lung cancer. He was one of the many who longed until his death to return home.

The Inuit called the C. D. Howe “the place where you take your clothes off” because they did, with dread, for annual medical examinations. It was not only the ship of inspection but the ship that carried people away, mostly children, to the tuberculosis sanatorium in The Pas, Manitoba. On occasion, it also unwittingly carried tuberculosis, flu, polio, and typhoid to Arctic ports where supplies were dropped off. Northern bureaucrats called the C. D. Howe the Shakespeare ship: TB or not TB.

Early in Kevin Patterson’s brilliant novel, Consumption, we find ourselves aboard the Shakespeare ship in 1962 with a consumptive Inuk girl named Victoria being carried south from Rankin Inlet, on the west side of Hudson Bay, to The Pas, where she lives for six years and is returned to her family, her Inuktitut awkward, her trauma of exile unacknowledged. Patterson, who has worked as a physician in the Arctic, has built a compelling fiction out of his own experiences. Tuberculosis used to be called consumption, but this novel is also about addiction, anorexia, and the merciless erosion of Inuit traditions by white interlopers, including Victoria’s laconic husband Robertson, a man seduced by diamonds, and an American doctor, Balthazar, who has good intentions with disastrous results. It is too late for a white artist to romanticize the Inuit; Patterson writes from a position of prolonged engagement as a clinician. But, like Flaherty and McGrath, he seeks a paradigm of nobility, a way of honouring the Inuit, setting them outside the grim realities of this modern, tainted life:

What the Inuit were was a miracle. They lived in a land without trees, in houses made of snow. When there was no driftwood to be had, they made sled runners out of frozen fish wrapped together. Their technologies — the qayak and the toggle-headed harpoon and the seal-fat lamps — were the most elegant solutions to the problems of living in this land, and the finest expression of their wit and sense of beauty. What the Inuit are is us. And what they achieved in the Arctic was the clearest expression of human ingenuity and tenacity. They — we — prospered in the hardest place there is, and achieved magnificence.

But no one lives there anymore.

To southern Canadians, the story of the High Arctic exiles may read like history, a terrible story indeed, but the wounds have surely closed by now. Some Inuit returned to Inuk-juak, but many stayed in the High Arctic. Resolute and Grise Fiord have survived their worst years. There has been compensation if not apology; there is Nunavut, and soon there will be Nunavik. There is no going back to Nanook’s north. And as Patterson’s doctor character writes, “The Inuit led harder, more painful lives when they lived on the land and this is why they have chosen not to return to it. . . . It was not a romantic life. It rewarded only a narrow set of attributes: focus, endurance, and distance vision.”

Artistically, Flaherty’s North has become that of Zacharias Kunuk, whose film about the High Arctic exiles, inspired by McGrath’s book, will be seen on History Television. Flaherty’s granddaughter, who fought for justice for decades, is featured. This documentary will be the true measure of lingering grievances and grief; it is not for the qalunaat to pronounce Tia Mak.

More than fifty years after the Inuit were borne to the High Arctic, there is once again talk from the politicians of sovereignty. And so, in August this year, when a Canadian Coast Guard ship visited Inuit communities to conduct the Nunavut Inuit Health Survey, people were concerned. Was this another exercise like the 1953 relocation? John Ayaruaq of Rankin Inlet, who works for the survey, told the Nunatsiaq News, “I’m always asked if the ship will be like the C. D. Howe, whether they will ship people out. The elders, especially, are very worried.”