In August 1953, seven or eight families from
Inukjuak,
Nunavik (northern
Quebec) (then known as Port Harrison) were transported to
Grise Fiord on the southern tip of
Ellesmere Island and to
Resolute on
Cornwallis Island. The group included the family of writer
Markoosie Patsauq. The families, who had been receiving welfare payments, were promised better living and hunting opportunities in new communities in the High Arctic. They were joined by three families recruited from the more northern community of
Pond Inlet (in the then
Northwest Territories, now part of
Nunavut) whose purpose was to teach the Inukjuak Inuit skills for survival in the High Arctic.
Motivations The
forced relocations are widely considered to have been motivated by a desire to reinforce
Canadian sovereignty in the
Arctic Archipelago by creating settlements in the area. In
Relocation to the High Arctic, Alan R. Marcus proposes that the relocation of the Inuit not only served as an experiment, but as an answer to "the
Eskimo problem." The federal government stressed that "the Eskimo problem" was linked to the Inuit's reluctance to give up their nomadic ways in areas that were supposedly overpopulated and went so far as to provide detailed accounts of poor hunting seasons and starvation within the Inukjuak area as a direct result of over-population. However, the federal government knew the area in question was in the midst of a low trapping season due to the end of a four-year fox cycle. The Canadian government has claimed that volunteer families had agreed to participate in a program to reduce areas of perceived
overpopulation and poor hunting in northern Quebec, to reduce their dependency on welfare, and to resume a
subsistence lifestyle.
New communities The families were left without sufficient supplies of food and
caribou skins and other materials for making appropriate clothing and tents, and suffered extreme
privation in the first years after the relocation. Eventually, the Inuit learned the local
beluga whale migration routes and were able to survive in the area, hunting over a range of each year. ==Re-evaluation==