The Door Was Already Open

We were hauling our kayaks up through Gjoa Haven on their carry-wheels, after arriving into town at the end of our kayak journey, when two men began talking with us. That’s how you meet people up here. You just cross paths and you’re suddenly in conversation.

One of them was Mike Rarog, an ex-military mission specialist who now runs Arctic Response, a survival training company he built after his service career. The other was Sam Tutanuak.

Sam is the Community Safety Liaison Officer in Gjoa Haven, which means if something goes wrong on the land or the water around here, he’ll organize the team that’ll come looking for you.

Within a few minutes of meeting Sam, you discover why he’s good at that job, his natural charisma just pulls you in. He’s in his late fifties, looks ten years younger, and is completely unguarded in a way that caught me off guard.

By the end of the conversation, he has invited us to his home to clean up after weeks on the land and to have dinner. “Our doors open,” he says, “make yourself at home.” And he meant it.

Sam is originally from Baker Lake, out in the Kivalliq region, and spent most of his life in Rankin Inlet. From there the road took him to Iqaluit, where he spent a couple of years developing men’s mental wellness programming for the territorial government, and finally to Gjoa Haven, here on King William Island.

He told us it can jar you, leaving behind decades of familiar ground, and starting again somewhere new. But he’s worked throughout the central Arctic, and he’s clearly a person who adapts.

What struck me most wasn’t his background, though. It was how open he was about all of it. From the time he was twelve, Sam struggled with substance abuse that, by his own account, was a way of not having to feel his childhood trauma. He got sober in June 2020. He talked to us about all of that without a hint of shame, and without romanticizing the fact that he came through it. He’s a survivor, plainly. He’d tell you that himself.

He’s since turned that recovery outward. As Senior Advisor for Angutiit (men’s programs) with the Government of Nunavut’s Department of Health, he built and ran a project called Atii Angutiit, travelling to communities across the territory for two-day workshops on men’s wellbeing and suicide prevention. He’d bring a sign that read “Taima” (Inuktitut for “enough”) and invite people to hammer nails into it while speaking the names of those they’d lost. It’s the kind of work that asked him to share his own worst years to complete strangers, over and over, on the chance it helps even one of them. When he told his story it literally brought tears to my eyes.

Now, alongside that, he’s the Community Safety Liaison Officer for Gjoa Haven and is  still the person people turn to when things go wrong.

Sam didn’t shy away from the harder parts of his people’s story either. He talked about the RCMP dog slaughters, about residential schools, about the forced relocations that reshaped the Arctic in the last century. How nomadic families and hunting bands were moved off the land and into permanent settlements, often against their will, and told they could no longer travel the way their ancestors had for generations. It’s not ancient history to Sam. It’s family history. Most communities up here, if not all of them, trace their existence back to relocations like these, people settled into towns that didn’t exist a lifetime ago, disconnected from a way of life that had sustained them for thousands of years.

Sam turned that grief into music. He’s a songwriter as much as anything else. His 2009 album, Utiqpungaa (“I Have Returned”), blends folk, country-rock, and traditional Inuit rhythms, sung in both English and Inuktitut. One track, “The Three Musicians,” co-written with his daughter Karen, reached number one on the National Aboriginal Countdown. But it’s another song, “Back in 58,” that carries the weight of what he told us about relocation. It’s a simple, direct piece of music, plainspoken the way Sam talks, that carries more history in a few verses than most textbooks manage in a chapter. It climbed to number one on the Aboriginal music charts in its own right and there’s an incredibly powerful music video created around it on YouTube (https://youtu.be/gPj5y8dRMPU?si=WqKF2iUpJ6WCTz5Q)

Then Sam told us something most of us had never heard of before. He took out a small brown medallion the size of a twoonie with a number on the back. On the front it says “Eskimo Identification Canada” and on back “E.2-493”. It’s his E-number. (not his real one for privacy)

From the early 1940s until well into the 1970s, the Canadian government didn’t identify Inuit by their names. It issued each person a disc, stamped with a letter for their region, E for Eastern Arctic, W for Western, followed by a string of digits. That number, rather than the name their family gave them, was what you used for everything: hunting and trapping licences, medical care, signing artwork, family allowance payments, getting supplies. You were expected to wear it at all times. Sam was born into that system. For a stretch of his early life, his number was, officially, his name, and he wore that disc around his neck.

He didn’t say much more about it other than that. He didn’t need to. He has it tattooed onto his right shoulder, permanently placed, on his own terms this time. A simple act of defiance.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since he shared this with us. The government deciding a name was too inconvenient to bother learning, and replacing it with digits, is about as clean a definition of dehumanization as I can think of.

I think about how easily this kind of encounter could not have happened. We were just pulling kayaks up a road. Sam opened his door and in the space of an evening we got a window into the real life of the people up here.

On an expedition like this you plan for movement and miles but often the real journey happens in the pauses, when you stop long enough to listen and discover what’s around you.

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