
History
Throwback Thursday: Nunavut up and running
On April 1, 1999, Canada’s youngest population took control of its largest territory. Here’s how Canadian Geographic covered the story.
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Jarloo Kigutak remembers the first mosquito bite he ever had. He lives up above the Arctic Circle where there are no mosquitoes — except in a little inlet he once explored as a young archeological assistant. Halfway up Ellesmere Island, you’ll find that place: Alexandra Fiord, Nunavut. It’s an area known as a polar oasis; its sheltered topography and variety of water sources allows the location to support an abundance and diversity of flora and fauna not generally seen this far north.
Seen by just a few intrepid souls, Alexandra Fiord is also home to a derelict RCMP post. Built in the 1950s, it is linked to Canada’s infamous High Arctic relocations and was once known as the northernmost police station in the world.
Jarloo Kigutak, now an Elder, was just 15 in 1977 when he first journeyed north from his home community of Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island’s south coast to Alexandra Fiord, the site of the Alexandra Fiord detachment, established in 1953. “There were some archeologists going up there, and the community was looking for two people to help the archeologists,” he remembers. “I applied and went to help them.”
The young archeological assistant was intrigued by the abandoned RCMP post across the Nares Strait from Greenland. Decommissioned just 10 years after it was built, the detachment, which encompasses a cluster of six buildings, is today recognized as a federal heritage building. Parks Canada links the detachment’s history to the Inuit special constables recorded as being stationed there during that tumultuous time, including, according to federal records, “Abraham Pijamini, Killiktee, Panikpakuttuk, Arreak and their families,” as well as to Arctic explorer-turned-RCMP officer Henry Larsen.
Before he saw it for himself, Kigutak had heard people talk about the distant RCMP detachment in Alexandra Fiord. “I heard about it when my parents were still around. People who had been up there used to tell stories when they visited my parents, and I would listen to them,” says Kigutak.
The Alexandra Fiord detachment was one of four High Arctic detachments — Alexandra Fiord, Dundas Harbour, Bache Peninsula and Craig Harbour — known as the “Muskox patrol.”
A short history lesson is in order here. Grise Fiord, where Kigutak lives, is the northernmost community in Canada (if you don’t count the military presence in Alert, Nunavut, where Canadian Armed Forces run a signals intelligence radio station). It is not a natural Inuit settlement, but came to be inhabited in the 1950s when federal government transported eight families from Inukjuak, Nunavik, and Pond Inlet, Nunavut, to Grise Fiord and to Resolute on Cornwallis Island in what would later become known as the High Arctic relocations. These remote settlements were Canada’s way of asserting its sovereignty in the Arctic Archipelago.
Kigutak moved to Grise Fiord as a toddler some years after the original relocations because his mother wanted to be with her sister who lived there. For a young boy, the move was exciting, but most of the Inuit who experienced the original relocations described them as traumatic and isolating.
Today, monuments to the High Arctic relocations have been erected in Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord. Both statues face south, turned toward Inukjuak, where most of the first relocatees came from, and are a poignant reminder of the pain they suffered.
The late Shelagh D. Grant, an Arctic historian, wrote that Alexandra Fiord was originally slated to become a third community as part of the High Arctic relocations, but plans to move Inuit families there were delayed by bad weather and later cancelled. That is why today the station stands alone, comprising an isolated grouping of six simple buildings that served as the police detachment, housing and storage.
RCMP constable Quentin Vander Schaaf had a rare chance to explore the Alexandra Fiord RCMP station up close in August 2023 when he snagged a seat on a Twin Otter aircraft with Greg Henry, a tundra ecologist from the University of British Columbia who, beginning in the 1980s, headed to Alexandra Fiord each summer to document how Arctic tundra ecosystems are changing. The almost-forgotten station was given new life by Henry, who used the area as a research base, with the buildings providing logistics support for his tundra-warming experiments. After more than 40 summers, he recorded his final field season in 2023.
Vander Schaaf, who works in Resolute Bay, is an avid reader of RCMP history. He recalled reading “Red Serge and Polar Bear Pants,” the biography of RCMP officer Harry Stallworthy which detailed his experiences in the 1930s at the Bache Peninsula detachment just north of Alexandra Fiord so was eager to see the area for himself. “The trip was beautiful, pristine. There was sea ice that was not fully melted, so you could almost see through the middle of it. It was quite breathtaking,” said Vander Schaaf. “When the plane turned and I could see a bit more of the shoreline, there’s grass and it is quite green.”
The Arctic climate, and the bears, have caused some wear and tear, though he reported that the station still looks very much as it did in the 1950s. “There was damage to the main detachment — they had bears who would break in once in a while. You can see where the bear tried to crawl into the attic and the edges are all clawed up.”
Seventy-five years later, Arctic sovereignty may once again be top of mind for Canada, but now surveillance and enforcement is carried out by icebreakers, satellites and international diplomacy. It seems most likely that the small clapboard buildings at Alexandra Fiord are destined to become a footnote in history — a slowly fading museum that stands as a reminder of a time and a place and a relocation that that almost happened, but thankfully did not.
Danielle Paradis is an Indigenous, Edmonton-based writer, educator and podcaster. Her six-part podcast series “The Place that Thaws” highlights little-known stories of resilience in the High Arctic.
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On April 1, 1999, Canada’s youngest population took control of its largest territory. Here’s how Canadian Geographic covered the story.
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