Dangerous Passage by Gerard Kenney

Author:Gerard Kenney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781554881406
Publisher: Dundurn

CHAPTER NINE

Nechilli Inuit, The Sequel

AMUNDSEN CALLED THE INUIT WHO GATHERED around his ship at Gjøahavn “Nechilli Eskimo;” Henry Larsen called these same people “Nassilimmiut” in his book The Big Ship; today the accepted name for them in writing is “Nattilingmiut.” These three different names are the result of attempts by owners of different sets of European ears and brains to render Inuktitut sounds in writing. The first part of the three expressions, Nechilli, Nassili-, and Nattiling-, mean “seals,” whereas -miut means “people of the.” Hence all three expressions mean “people of the seals.”

In his book The North West Passage, Amundsen wrote, “My sincerest wish for our friends the Nechilli Eskimo is, that civilization may never reach them.” More than sixty years later in 1967, a Canadian of Norwegian birth, Henry Larsen, reporting on the same group of Inuit had the following to say about changes wrought by civilization on the Inuit in the region of King William Island:

More and more people followed in the footsteps of the early Arctic explorers and the lives of the Eskimos underwent a complete change. Some say that these children of Nature are better off today than in the olden days, others claim that civilization has brought them only misery. The Eskimos themselves make no comment. Fatalistic as they are, I suppose they say “Ajurnarmat” (it can’t be helped, that’s life).23

There is a problem that modern civilization has yet to come to terms with, but to which the Inuit of old had found an effective solution – that problem is how to exit this world when life has becomes so painful to live that one wishes to die. The custom of assisted suicide when requested was well entrenched in the culture of the Nattilingmiut. By Larsen’s time, the advance of the white man‘s culture in Inuit lives, however, had deprived them of access to this solution resulting in unnecessary pain and suffering. In 1937, Larsen became aware of a case of assisted suicide among the Nattilingmiut of King William Island, which he had to investigate. It is clear from what he wrote in The Big Ship that he fully sympathized with views on both sides of the divide on the issue of assisted suicide. He took a most humane position on this question.

While I fully believed in this story and understood the circumstances, our laws nevertheless said that nobody could assist another in committing suicide. On this point the Criminal Code was quite clear, but I had no intention of letting this get any further or to have any of these people appear in a court, at least not if it was up to me.

Twelve years later in 1949, however, another case of assisted suicide among the same people turned out quite differently. A young man was sentenced to one year in prison at Cambridge Bay, with parole to be applied after four or five months, for helping his aged mother, apparently dying of tuberculosis, exit this world when she asked her son for his assistance.

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