Inuit elders and their escorts look at plaques for those buried at the Woodland Cemetery in Hamilton on July 24. Many Inuit were sent south to the TB sanatorium, with some never returning home.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Naudla Oshoweetok peered down from his wheelchair at a simple, flat marker in a Hamilton cemetery etched with two Inuit names, and realized he recognized one of them.
The late Mary Etushannuk was from Mr. Oshoweetok’s home community of Kinngait, a Baffin Island hamlet located 2,300 kilometres north of Ms. Etushannuk’s final resting place. She was buried here decades ago after dying at the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, a facility that treated more than 1,200 Inuit for tuberculosis in the 1950s and 1960s.
Mr. Oshoweetok’s 19-year-old grandson took a photo of the grave marker with his cellphone. “She never made it home,” Mr. Oshoweetok said. “I feel good that I’ll be able to tell the family she left behind” that he visited her grave.
Sending a picture of Ms. Etushannuk’s grave back to Kinngait was part of a healing journey that began on Monday for Mr. Oshoweetok, 75, and seven other Inuit elders who survived stints at various TB sanatoria in Southern Canada as children and teenagers.
They are part of a larger group of Inuit spending three days in Hamilton this week trying to come to terms with an episode that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called, “a shameful chapter in our history” when he apologized for it in 2019.
In the mid-20th century, the Canadian government decided to tackle the tuberculosis epidemic plaguing the Arctic by evacuating Inuit to southern sanatoria, rather than treating them in the North.
The journey south often began with a physical examination aboard the C.D. Howe, an arctic patrol vessel and medical ship. Inuit with TB symptoms were generally not allowed to leave the ship to say goodbye to their families or gather their belongings. They were often gone for years at a time with little or no contact with home. If they were evacuated as children and survived, they sometimes returned as near strangers to their traditional way of life.
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Not being permitted to leave the C.D. Howe to say goodbye to his pregnant wife was devastating for Ilkoo Angutikjuak, who was 19 when he was taken from the hamlet of Clyde River, on Baffin Island, to be treated at the Queen Mary Hospital for Tuberculous Children in Toronto.
Now 80, Mr. Angutikjuak said through a translator on Monday that when he returned home to Clyde River, his new daughter “was very timid to towards him, didn’t recognize him.” He was away at the sanatorium for about two years. “It was quite difficult for him,” Susie Muckpa, the translator, explained.
The Hamilton event is being led by Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI), the top Inuit organization in Nunavut, as well as the non-profit organizations SeeChange and the Ilisaqsivik Society. The program includes workshops, healing circles and an event at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, where sculptures and other artwork created by sanatorium patients form part of the permanent collection.
Members of the delegation – which also includes children of TB survivors and Inuit counsellors – hail from the Baffin Island communities of Arctic Bay, Clyde River, Qikiqtarjuaq, Pangnirtung and Kinngait.
On Monday, the group started their day with a visit to a giant cross not far from the site of the old Mountain Sanatorium, most of which has been demolished. The cross would have been visible from the patient pavilion where Inuit, including Mr. Oshoweetok, were confined to their beds as they recovered from tuberculosis. He was 10 when he arrived at the facility in 1958.
Memories flooded back for some members of the group as they milled about near the cross. Several women hugged each other and cried quietly. Members of the group prayed, chatted in Inuktitut and looked through archival photos of the sanatorium.
Later, they visited Hamilton’s Woodland Cemetery, where a monument stands to the 37 Inuit known to have died while at the Mountain sanatorium. The monument was erected in the mid-1990s.
Nearby is a line of simple markers on the ground, some bearing two or three names. Inuit were buried on top of one another at the Hamilton cemetery, Joanasie Akumalik explained. One of the square plates marks the final resting place of Mr. Akumalik’s grandfather, recorded with the single name, Akumalik.
Mr. Akumalik is the project manager for Nanilavut, a continuing effort to help Inuit find the graves of loved ones who died while being treated for TB in Southern Canada. Nanilavut means, “Let’s find them,” in Inuktitut.
It was while speaking to a workshop in Clyde River about the Nanilavut project that Mr. Akumalik began to realize how many survivors of sanatoria were keen to visit what remained of the sites in the south to make peace with their experiences.
“It’s healing and closure for them,” Mr. Akumalik said.