John Amagoalik
Inuit leader preparing to celebrate new territory
By Annette Bourgeois
Windspeaker Contributor
John
Amagoalik was working as an information officer for the Government
of the Northwest Territories in 1975 when he was plucked away
to help negotiate the Nunavut Land Claim.
It was the beginning of his journey on the long road to Nunavut.
"He was hired then to be part of our team," recalls Meeka Kilabuk, who was treasurer of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada at the time and now works with Amagoalik on the Nunavut Implementation Commission (NIC), the organization charged with designing and planning the new government of Nunavut.
Amagoalik, chief commissioner of NIC, has played a pivotal role in the creation of Nunavut, the new territory that will be carved out of the eastern Arctic on April 1, 1999.
"We nominated him for his long service to the Inuit and the role he played in the creation of Nunavut," Rhoda Arreak, president of the Baffin Regional Chamber of Commerce, said. "He's never stalled. He's kept going."
Amagoalik's perseverance was recognized March 12 with a National Aboriginal Achievement Award for public service.
Kilabuk recalls Amagoalik's bumpy beginning after attending the first land claim debating conference in Pond Inlet in October 1975.
After leaving Pond Inlet, in northern Baffin Island, for Iqaluit, ice fog forced the small planeload of passengers to bypass Broughton Island and the community of Pangnirtung, nestled among Baffin's mountains. Unfortunately, the plane ran out of fuel and crashed about 65 km north of the Iqaluit airport.
"There's lots of stories," Kilabuk laughs many years after the fact.
Give Amagoalik an audience and he'll talk passionately about Nunavut and the creation of a territory where Inuit will have more control over how they're governed. But when the talk turns personal, Amagoalik falls silent.
Few people were even aware last October that Halifax's St Mary's University had awarded Amagoalik an honorary doctorate in civil law.
"He's very quiet in a personal way," describes Simon Awa, executive director of NIC and a friend of Amagoalik's since the 1970s.
Perhaps he is reluctant to discuss his personal life because of the storm cloud that has followed the gangly Amagoalik most of his life.
As a child, in August 1953, Amagoalik and his family, along with 17 other Inuit families from his home community of Inukjuak, in northern Quebec and Pond Inlet, in North Baffin, were uprooted and relocated to the desolate barren lands of Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord to extend Canadian sovereignty into the High Arctic.
It was an injustice Amagoalik fought for nearly a decade to have acknowledged by the federal government. Finally, in 1995, Ottawa gave the remaining High Arctic exiles a $10 million settlement but no apology - leaving a wound that can never heal.
In recent years, tragedy has come again into the home of the man known fondly as "Father" by the people of Nunavut.
In July 1995, a 17-year-old friend of Amagoalik's son was shot dead at point-blank range by a drunken friend in his home. Amagoalik has also been in and out of a Montreal hospital because of poor health. And this past summer, Amagoalik and his family lost their home to a fire.
Despite all this, however, Amagoalik has never wavered in his determination to see Nunavut become a reality.
From 1977 to 1979, he headed the NWT Inuit Land Claim Commission; in the 1980s, he was president of ITC, during which time Aboriginal peoples were recognized in the Canadian Constitution. In 1994, he received ITC's 20th anniversary award for his notable contribution to Inuit political rights in Canada.
"When he has a vision or a good idea of what he thinks is workable, he usually sticks to it," Awa said.
A case in point is last spring's debate on whether or not an equal number of men and women should represent Nunavut in the first legislative assembly. Gender parity was proposal Amagoalik believed in, took into his heart and campaigned for. But, to his disappointment, it was also an idea that the majority of Nunavummiut rejected in a plebiscite.
These days, Amagoalik and NIC are busy planning the celebrations for the 1999 inauguration of Nunavut.
"I like his direct approach to any issue," NIC's Kilabuk said of her work with Amagoalik. "We get right down to the point - what is good and what is not an advantage to ourselves as Inuit."
Amagoalik's efforts for the Inuit have benefited all Aboriginal people. The creation of Nunavut in 1999 will mean that a land mass one-third the size of Canada will be governed by Aboriginal people.
Amagoalik was a driving force in the creation of the Inukshuk Project, a precursor to the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation.
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