On the Side of the Angels

In On the Side of the Angels, Jose Amaujaq Kusugak (1950-2011) writes of his childhood at Repulse Bay (Naujaat) and at Chesterfield Inlet Residential School. He presents readers with fascinating pictures of his early boyhood and his family’s way of life. His home was a sod house near the Hudson Bay Company post at Repulse Bay where his father worked as a handyman; his mother as a fur cleaner. His mother decorated the walls of their home with pictures from magazines brought in from the south, glued on with flour and water paste. The family often heard lemmings behind the pictures, chewing the paste.

During Jose’s early years, his older brother, Michael, was away at residential school, and his closest companion was his younger brother, Cyril. According to Inuit custom, at age seven, Jose became the promised husband of a little girl his own age, and, though shy, he gave her gifts like soap and oranges. The only chores expected of Inuit children were getting water and training the puppies, but, at the same time, they learned by observation how to handle the practicalities of life in the far north. Children had to memorize certain rules of nature. “Anything to do with the necessities of life, we were taught to read through pictographs" writes Jose.

They were taught, first and foremost, to be truthful, because lying, a “deadly sin”, could lead to someone’s death. The children were brought up to trust the truthfulness of their parents, aunts and uncles, but to be aware that others could be lying. The second major rule was: “Respect the environment for you are a part of it.” To ensure that everyone followed these rules, Inuit society had a system of “ratting” where people reported on each other. At large gatherings, “ratters” would sing about those who cheated and stole, shaming them before the group. Kusugak says that the Inuit were “socialists” in that they shared everything, including the harvest of animals; the only exception was that they kept their own implements, like the ulu his mother used in cleaning furs.

Kusugak excels in evocative description, an example being when he writes that his mother cleaned furs using Sunlight soap, a brush, an ulu and flour. Unfortunately, his memoir is only 54 pages long and leaves one wanting more. Knowing that Kusugak passed on in 2011, one wonders if his reminiscences were preserved by an editor who composed the memoir from Kusugak’s answers to interview questions.

Looking back, Kusugak says that neither “the Bay” nor the church attacked Inuit culture. With the Bay, the relationship seemed like a partnership: “The Inuit wanted the goods and the Bay wanted furs.” As for the church, it wanted to save souls, not necessarily to change the Inuit culture. In return for attending church, Inuit got “biscuits, beans, prunes, hope and gifts of clothing from other Christians in the south.” The residential schools, however, were another story.

Young Jose was terrified when he was sent on an airplane to attend the Chesterfield Inlet Residential School. He clung to his elder brother, Michael, and was frightened when they were separated at the school. The staff were insensitive to the needs of little children plunged into a foreign language and separated from their families for the first time. Staff members were either unaware or turned a blind eye when Jose was bullied by a gang of older children. Finally an older boy offered to protect Jose if he would deliver messages for him to an older girl, arranging meetings. Then one night a nun dragged the girl downstairs by the hair and made her say she was sorry for “saying bad things” to a boy.

Jose and Michael never suffered sexual abuse at residential school as their mother warned them that they should never be touched on “certain parts” of their bodies, but other children were abused, and Jose describes what he heard about that.

In presenting his story, Jose Kusugak relies on understatement, wit and humour. Describing the books with which he learned to read, he says that they read of “Dick” (of the Dick and Jane series) who had a “funny looking dog (not a husky.) A highlight of the school year was the bishop’s visit, a spectacular event with the clergy in colourful robes. “The Gay Pride parade in Toronto would be jealous of this,” he writes. The language of instruction was French, a “total immersion” situation for the children, and the nuns were always telling them “Vite!” (Hurry.) At the end of the school year, which they all longed for, “we were vited to the airplane” and flown home,” writes Jose.

Jose Kusugak left Nunavut to attend high school in Saskatchewan, and after graduation, he returned to the far north to work at the University of Saskatchewan’s Eskimo Language School, at Rankin Inlet. Later he taught Inuktitut and Inuit history at Churchill Vocational Centre. He went on to become an assistant to the founder of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami in the matter of land claims. From 1980 to 1990, he was area manager of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the Kivalliq region. Continuing his involvement in the Inuit Tapiritt Kanatami, he was elected as its president in 2000.

For many years, Kusugak weighed the good and the harm done to him by the residential school. He enjoyed learning new things at school, but, at the same time, his knowledge of Inuit culture and language suffered. For years, he sided with the government and churches because he thought they were “on the side of the angels”. Then, in 2008, Prime Minister Harper officially apologized for the residential schools system, saying on television that it had been based on the assumption that aboriginal culture and religion were inferior and aimed to “kill the Indian in the child.” When Kusugak heard these words, he felt “numb, and had an uncontrollable urge to cry.

“[T]he residential school taught me to keep my cry underground. I cry when I am alone,” he writes. In his estimation, those who worked hard and persistently to make the apology happen are heroes like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

After reading On the Side of the Angels, most readers will feel that the children were the angels. The memoir is published by Qinuisaarnig (“residency”), “a program created to educate Nunavummiut and all Canadians about the history and impacts of residential schools, policies of assimilation, and other colonial acts that affected the Canadian Arctic”.