An Arctic Man by Ernie Lyall

Author:Ernie Lyall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Formac
Published: 2011-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

E5-1, an Eskimo

In the fall of 1940, after thirteen years with the Hudson’s Bay Company, I quit after the new manager Bill Heslop came in to Fort Ross and took over from Lorenz Learmonth.

It wasn’t because of either Heslop or Learmonth, though. What happened was that when the Nascopie came in, the Company wanted me to go back to Arctic Bay to work there. Well, I didn’t mind going back to Arctic Bay; I’d liked it when I was there before, and I said I’d go as long as my wife and our child could go with me. But the district manager, Jim Anderson, and I couldn’t see eye to eye about this. He said, “Well, why don’t you go on to Arctic Bay and then come back and get them again another year.”

I guess he didn’t think I was serious about my marriage, but I wouldn’t go alone, I wouldn’t go without Nipisha. We were about to have our second kid and I thought it was my duty to stick by my wife, so I said I’d resign. But there was this new manager, and a new clerk, Allan Thorburn, and Heslop asked me if I’d stay on until they had all the stuff stored away and marked and everything, and this I agreed to.

Now, I’m not going to add any more details about leaving the Company because it would involve too many people, and I’m not doing this book to criticize other people for what I think they did wrong years and years ago. That doesn’t do any good now, and anyway everything came out all right in time.

But what I was going to do was something I had to think about pretty carefully because I knew that if I wanted to stay in the north I was going to have to live entirely as an Eskimo. I knew it wouldn’t be hard for me really, because I loved the north and I could handle myself pretty well — I had the language and the skills, and I’d be with Kavavouk and other members of Nipisha’s family and other Eskimo friends. So this is what I’d made up my mind to do.

When I told the Bay that I was going to resign, they asked me what I was going to do, and I told them I was going to stay in near Fort Ross and trap. But they said, “There’s no white man allowed to make a living by trapping in this region.”

Major McKeand was on the Nascopie. He was a government man and I knew him, so I went and talked to him and told him the circumstances, and he said, “As long as you live as an Eskimo — do as Eskimos do, trap as Eskimos do, and consider yourself as an Eskimo — you can stay and trap and hunt in the Northwest Territories.” This is how my status became Eskimo. I was officially on the books as an Eskimo.

When the government began giving Eskimos

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