COLONIAL JUSTICE:
White Men in Black Robes
I will remember the look in Tootalik’s eyes forever.
His was a face weathered and leathered from a lifetime of travelling across the frozen reaches of Arctic tundra and sea ice. Anyone, even a northern novice from the south like me, could tell by his stained clothing and sealskin knee-high footwear that he was a seasoned hunter. Yet the situation he faced filled him with panic and confusion.
He had to be asking himself: Why am I here? What have I done? Why is this uniformed Mountie guarding me? I imagine what was most frightening to him was standing in front of these white men in long, flowing black robes in this room with so many flags.
Why are they looking at me that way? What are they saying?
The white men in front of him included a judge, two lawyers, another man who was writing down everything that anyone said, the Mountie who’d arrested him and one broadcast reporter—me.
What did we know of his life? None of us understood Inuktitut. He couldn’t speak to us. He couldn’t tell his story. What’s more, none of us had lived his life, venturing far out onto the sea ice by dog team, confronting and hunting polar bears, building iglus to survive Arctic blizzards, and then, following trail markers invisible to the southern eye, finding the way back home.
Tootalik’s crime? He was accused of hunting a female polar bear with young.
Bizarre when you think about it. He was charged with practising the ancient skill that had allowed Inuit to survive for thousands of years. In his own culture, what he and his three companions had done was the feat of great hunters. The statement of fact submitted by the prosecutor ignored all of that, concentrating instead on the white man’s laws and justice:
On or about 14th April 1969 the accused, an Eskimo (Tootalik E4-321) and his Eskimo companion, Argvik Anvil, both of whom live at Spence Bay, Northwest Territories, proceeded by dog sled northwest of Spence Bay to a point several miles off the coast of the Boothia Peninsula on the sea ice northwest of Pasley Bay, Northwest Territories, in search of polar bears to shoot for their hides. They sighted three polar bears together—two smaller bears, approximately the same size, and a larger bear. The statement appeared to recognize Inuit traditions only once, by acknowledging that rather than kill the bears themselves, Tootalik and Argvik waited for their friend Mathias Munga and his deaf son, Oomeemungnak Munga, to arrive. The prosecutor’s charge continued: “They wanted Oomeemungnak to have the first shot. If he were successful in killing a bear, he would gain the hide, which he could then trade with the local fur trader.”
Oomeemungnak did take the first shot, and it was a memorable one. That single bullet took down the larger bear and one of the smaller ones. To be clear, this second one was not a tiny cuddly cub but a medium-sized bear, measuring over five feet in length. The statement continued: “The other small bear ran away but was chased back to the area by the accused’s dog.” Tootalik then shot it.
In the Inuit world—then, still today and for a thousand years before—the hunters would have been praised for their skill. But in the 1960s, Spence Bay, now Taloyoak, and all other Arctic settlements were in a kind of legal twilight zone, where the white man’s rules had to be obeyed. Which meant that Tootalik wasn’t a great hunter; he was an accused criminal.
If Tootalik had questions in his mind, there were questions in mine as well. Foremost among them: Why is this guy even here?
A reporter as young and inexperienced as I was back then wasn’t usually inclined to question the courts or search for ulterior motives. Nothing in my background had prepared me for this.
It had been only two and half years since Ted Morris, the station manager at CBC Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit)—who had barely said hello after hiring me as an announcer-operator— verbally hit me between the eyes. “You’re going to be our news reporter. We have a newscast here every evening at 5:30, Monday to Friday.”
I wanted to protest that I was only there to read what was placed in front of me, play music and keep all the on-air switches in the right places. But less than forty-eight hours earlier, I had been discharged from the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), where I had been well trained to keep my mouth shut and take orders. So I made my way, obediently, to the “news desk,” which sat beside racks of old 78 rpm records. All that was on it was a telephone, an Underwood typewriter and a collection of unfiled albums and tapes.
My stomach was churning. Seven hours from now, I was supposed to deliver a newscast, five to seven minutes long. Had I known where the washroom was, I might have gone there to throw up.
Many times over the following years, in every kind of situation, I would tell my colleagues, “I might not have been a good reporter, but I was a lucky one.” Case in point: my panic and despair were soon interrupted by a voice. “Can I use the phone?”
I turned from staring at a typewriter with no paper in it to see the familiar face of Bob Evans, a television reporter for
CBC News Magazine, one of the corporation’s flagship network programs through the 1960s and ’70s.
After he finished his short call, I introduced myself and confessed my predicament, concluding with the simple admission, “I don’t know what to do.”
I’ll never forget his smile. “I know Morris,” he said, referring to my new boss. Bob didn’t elaborate, he simply proceeded to give me a crash course in journalism:
“Use your tape recorder. A few thirty-second clips of people speaking will fill your time faster than writing your own copy, and people will find it more interesting. Write the news simply, make it fair, and always make sure it’s the truth. Ask questions, talk to the police officers and the regional administrator, develop your list of contacts.”
He only spent ten or fifteen minutes with me, in which he also passed on one or two tips he’d picked up that he thought would make a good local story. But that night at 5:30, I was on the air. “Here is the CBC Eastern Arctic News . . .” I intoned as though I was Earl Cameron, then the anchor of the
National. Eventually, I was even able to appreciate Morris for throwing me in at the deep end of a very cold pool.
And now, here I was in Spence Bay, on the Boothia Peninsula in the central High Arctic, looking at Tootalik’s face, listening to the lawyers, and I knew just enough to realize this was a story with legs.
Copyright © 2023 by Whit Fraser. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
