Putman public school in the city’s west end. They stayed with the same family and attended the J.H. In Ottawa, the place of straight lines and paved roads, Tagoona and Ittinuar had access to everything. “I think my dad was actually working in the mine when I left, and I think it was my aunt took me to the airport … it was a day that changed my life.” “There was always a crowd at the airport when a DC-3 came in or the Northern Norseman single engine plane,” Ittinuar said. In late August 1962, the two 12-year-olds left from the airport in Rankin Inlet for their journey to join the Qallunaat (white people) in Ottawa. The program was administered by Gordon Devitt, the district superintendent of schools in the North.Īmong their peers, Ittinuar and Tagoona stood out. The question for the government was how are we going to educate all the Inuit up north en-masse? You know they’re isolated, they’re way up there do we bring them down south? Do we build schools up there?” “They were then starting to be herded into communities and you know small one room schools were being built. “In 1960 there were still many, many people still living pretty nomadic lives and living out on the land at that time,” he said. Peter Ittinuar was a 12-year-old growing up as a typical ‘Eskimo child,’ learning to fish and hunt in his small community that sits on the northwestern shores of Hudson Bay. “We must follow through with the natural consequences of that program.” “It can be argued that such a directed educational program will disrupt northern native family ties, and will rapidly destroy native culture,” said a departmental report. And it seemed the department wasn’t concerned about what that would do to Inuit culture in the future. The department sent a team across the North to administer Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests to find the brightest Inuit students. To start the experiment, Ottawa needed to find test subjects – students who excelled in existing Arctic schools. “And that experiment was to help them determine new policies up north, whether to bring kids down south and determine whether we were little savages or as good as well as white kids.” Nungak, from left, Tagoona, and Ittinuar in Ottawa in 1964. “One was to see how well these kids do in the classroom and obtaining grade certification and all that, and secondly how well would they do socially and how well would they adapt culturally. “The experiment was two-fold,” said Ittinuar, 67, who is a negotiator in the Negotiations and Reconciliation Division in the ministry of Relations and Reconciliation for the province of Ontario. Now, nearly 60 years later, they want recognition and a negotiated settlement from Canada because they said the experiments forever changed their lives. Peter Ittinuar from Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut, Eric Tagoona from Baker Lake, Nunavut, (then Northwest Territories) and Nungak from Puvirnituq, on the eastern shores of Hudson Bay, were taken from their homes for more than six years – and had little or no contact with their friends and families in the North. In the early 1960s, three men were part of a program the Canadian government called the “Eskimo Experiment.” It was run by the department of Northern Affairs and National Resources (now Indigenous and Northern Affairs) to determine if Inuit children were smart enough to be educated in the south, and eventually become future leaders. “The government called it a social experiment or an experiment to see or determine if Inuit children could withstand being ‘educated’ in among white children in suburbia,” said Nungak. 22 rifle in hand and dreams of being a great Inuit hunter.īut the federal government had a different plan for him.īy August of that year, Nungak would be on a plane bound for Ottawa. When not studying, Nungak was out on the land with his friends, a. Zebedee Nungak was 12 years old in 1963 and doing well in school in his home community of Puvirnituq in Northern Quebec.
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