June 26, 2009

Taissumani

Missionary Names

KENN HARPER

The first missionary to spent a winter in Baffin Island was Brother Mathias Warmow of the Moravian Church in Greenland.

He spent the winter of 1857-58 with the whaling captain, William Penny, aboard his ship, Lady Franklin, near Kekerten in Cumberland Sound.

Unlike most of the white missionaries who would come to Baffin Island decades later, Warmow arrived with a distinct advantage. He could already speak an Inuit dialect, West Greenlandic.

Writing about the first Inuit that he met, he noted, "As they understood me, and I them, very well, we were able to converse with but little difficulty."

Many of the Inuit in Cumberland Sound understood a little English, having learned it from their interaction with Scottish and American whalers. From the whalers they had learned that a "minister" was coming to instruct them.

And so, instead of giving him a descriptive Inuktitut name, as they did with many newcomers, the Inuit simply called him "minister." This displeased Warmow, who noted that he would have preferred they call him by his Christian name, or its Greenlandic equivalent, Matiuse.

It would be three and a half decades before another missionary would come to Baffin Island. In 1894, Reverend Edmund James Peck arrived at Blacklead Island to build his mission there.

Peck arrived with the same advantage that Warmow had had - he already spoke Inuktitut, having learned the language during eight years on the Hudson Bay coast of Quebec.

The Inuit gave him a name - Uqammak. It means "the one who speaks well," and is derived from the verbal root "uqaq-" which signifies speaking. Stories of Uqammak have been passed down through the generations and the name is still remembered today.

In 1894 Peck brought with him a 22-year-old layman, Joseph Caldecott Parker. As preparation for his missionary work, Parker had taken a few months medical training. To travel to Blacklead Island, he signed on as doctor of the whaling ship Alert.

At the mission station, he threw himself into the task of learning Inuktitut, and made rapid progress. He ministered to the sick, and the Inuit gave him a name, Luktaakuluk - "the little doctor" or "the dear doctor."

Inuit words don't start with "d" and "luktaaq" was the closest they could come to pronouncing "doctor." The suffix "kuluk" is one signifying endearment or smallness. Unfortunately the little doctor drowned in a boating accident two years later.

That same year, another missionary arrived at Blacklead. He was Charles Sampson and he remained with the mission until 1900 when he returned to England and resigned. He subsequently returned as a trader.

I know of no Inuktitut name for him. They may have simply called him "ajuiqsuiji," perhaps with a descriptive suffix added. "Ajuiqsuiji" is the general term for a Protestant minister and can roughly be translated as "the teacher" or "the instructor."

In 1898, Julian William Bilby arrived from England to join Peck and Sampson. He endeared himself to the Inuit through his devotion to language study and his interest in the local way of life and customs.

He was rewarded with the Inuktitut name "ilataaq." "Ila" is a noun meaning "relative" or "friend;" "taaq" is a suffix showing acquisition. Perhaps his name should best be translated as "our new friend."

E. W. T. Greenshield arrived to join Peck in 1901, the summer that Bilby left for furlough in England. He too immersed himself in language study and was popular among the Inuit. They graced him with a name that simply added an additional suffix to Bilby's name, calling him "ilataaqauk" - "another new friend."

That completes the roster of white missionaries to Cumberland Sound prior to the movement of the mission station from Blacklead Island to Pangnirtung in the 1920s and the arrival of the disgraceful Reverend Jenkins.

The earliest missionary, Mathias Warmow, was simply called "minister," but all but one of the Blacklead missionaries are known to have been given Inuktitut names. The one exception - Sampson - may well have had a local name as well, but if so it has been lost to time.

(If any readers know an Inuktitut name for Charles Sampson, I would be pleased if they would let me know.)

Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

June 19, 2009

Taissumani

Missionary to the Inuit – Part 2

KENN HARPER

Continued from last week.

Edmund Peck spent four periods of two years each at Blacklead Island.

It was a spartan and disciplined life. Here was his schedule for most days: "Rise 6:45 a.m., light fires, prepare breakfast; breakfast 8 a.m.; prayers 8:30 a.m.; study of Eskimo language from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.; visiting and preparing Eskimo addresses from 10 a.m. to noon. Then came the preparation of dinner. Dinner 1 p.m.; private reading and study from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.; school for children from 3 p.m. to 4:15 p.m.; visiting and exercise from 4:15 to 5:30 p.m.; after tea, prepare for evening meeting, which is at 7:30 p.m.; after the meeting, study of the language with Eskimos; prayer at 10 p.m.; then private reading and devotion till 10:45 p.m."

The schedule for Sunday was different, calling for religious services in his small church. Other than that, this rigorous schedule was broken only by the occasional sled

trip to Kekerten, a whaling station across the sound from Blacklead Island.

On each of his one-year furloughs to England, he continued working to oversee the publication of church literature in syllabics, lecture publicly about the importance of his mission to the Inuit, and lobby the mission society for the mission's continuance.

Other missionaries, whose terms generally overlapped Peck's, maintained the mission during his absences. Their names are well-known in the history of northern missions: Charles Sampson, Julian Bilby and E.W.T. Greenshield.

Peck left Blacklead Island permanently in 1905. The following year, with the departure of Greenshield, the mission was left with no resident non-native minister.

But Peck and his colleagues had trained a number of Inuit catechists, the most well-known being Luke Kidlapik and Peter Tooloogakjuaq. When Greenshield returned on a summer voyage in 1909, on which he was shipwrecked and forced to spend the winter, he discovered that these native catechists had faithfully continued the work of the mission.

Peck moved his family to Ottawa, Canada, where he became Superintendent of Arctic Missions for the Diocese of Moosonee. Occasionally he traveled north on supply vessels in the summer, usually to Hudson Bay. His eyesight failed and, almost blind, he retired in 1919. He died in Ottawa in 1924.

Although Peck is often credited with adapting Evans's Cree syllabics to Inuktitut, that innovation had already been made by Horden and Watkins.

Peck's great accomplishment was proselytizing among the Inuit, promoting the use of the syllabic orthography, and translating and publishing scripture material in Inuktitut. He promoted literacy in syllabics.

Following his lead, all Anglicans who followed him in the eastern Arctic used the syllabic orthography, as did Roman Catholic missionaries.

The syllabic orthography is still used today in Arctic Quebec and all but a few western communities of Nunavut. Occasionally debate occurs about its continued efficacy in promoting Inuktitut literacy in an increasingly bilingual population, but such debates are usually short-lived - the syllabics that Peck promoted are viewed by now as being the traditional Inuit way of writing in the eastern Canadian Arctic.

Peck's contributions to the study of the Inuktitut language are contained in two works: his Eskimo Grammar, published by the Geographic Board of Canada in 1919, and subsequently reprinted four times, and his Eskimo-English Dictionary, published posthumously in 1925.

Inuit remember Peck, whose Inuktitut name, Uqammak, means "the one who speaks well," as a dogmatic and tenacious man, at once stubborn yet caring, stern yet friendly.

Non-native history remembers him as "The Apostle to the North". In 1877, one year after Peck's arrival in Canada, Bishop John Horden wrote to the Church Missionary Society about Peck, "I thank the Committee for a man; I thank them doubly for the man; a better selection could not have been made."

June 12, 2009

Taissumani

Missionary to the Inuit – Part 1

KENN HARPER

In 1875 Bishop John Horden wrote from Moose Factory to the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in England asking them to send a missionary to Canada to work with the Inuit of Hudson Bay.

Edmund James Peck, an unordained seaman, accepted the challenge, underwent brief training, and departed for Hudson Bay in June 1876.

Peck had been born in Rusholme, England on April 15, 1850, but was raised from the age of seven in Ireland, where he developed an antipathy towards Catholicism. By age 13, he was an orphan, and joined the British Navy soon after, serving for eight years.

Horden sent him to Little Whale River where he ministered to both Cree and Inuit. Peck set himself an arduous program for learning the languages of both, believing that "the first work of every missionary is to acquire the language of the people as well as gain their confidence."

He concentrated, however, on Inuktitut and claimed to have collected between 80 and 100 words per day. Modern-day language students might find it an outrageous claim, but it was possible in an isolated post with none of the distractions that plague today's learners.

Rev. Edmund James Peck with a group of Inuit.

Part of Peck's mandate from the CMS was to produce written religious material, and he approached this task eagerly, using the syllabic system of writing created by James Evans in 1840 for the Cree and modified for Inuktitut by CMS missionaries Horden and Rev. E. A. Watkins.

Peck was the first missionary in Hudson and James bays to work almost exclusively with Inuit. He promoted the use of syllabics, transcribed Moravian church material from the Labrador coast into the new script, and taught reading and writing skills to the Inuit.

His first Inuktitut publication, Portions of the Holy Scripture, for the use of the Esquimaux on the northern and eastern shores of Hudson's Bay, was printed in the Syllabic orthography by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1878.

Peck took furlough in England in 1884 after eight uninterrupted years in the field. He returned with a bride the following year, and the next year relocated his mission two hundred miles south to Fort George.

The Pecks had three children there, but Mrs. Peck was often sick and depressed, and in 1892 the family returned to England. In 1894 the SPCK published Peck's second major work in Inuktitut, Portions of the Book of Common Prayer, together with hymns, addresses, etc., for the use of the Eskimo of Hudson's Bay.

In England Peck immediately began making plans to establish a mission in Baffin Island. His wife's health was sufficiently poor, he reasoned, that she would never be able to accompany him again to the Arctic, and therefore he should leave already-established missions to other married men and go instead to isolated and undeveloped areas where he felt no woman should go.

So in 1894, with the assistance of Crawford Noble, the Scottish owner of whaling stations in Cumberland Sound, Peck established a mission at Blacklead Island. The whalers provided Peck and his assistant, J.C. Parker, spartan living quarters in a two-room shack, each room 10 feet square.

The Inuit to whom Peck would minister lived nearby in a camp of skin tents and ramshackle wooden huts. Their population numbered 171.

Peck found little difference between the dialect that he had mastered in Hudson Bay and that of Cumberland Sound, and he began immediately to preach the gospel and teach the children. He maintained a disciplined routine of teaching, studying and preaching. He faced opposition to his ministry from the Inuit shamans, whom he regarded as sly tricksters against whom he spoke out openly and strongly. The missionary persevered and eventually all the Inuit of Cumberland Sound were converted to at least a nominal acceptance of Christianity. His first Inuk convert, a woman named Atanngaujaq, was baptized on May 7, 1901.

June 5, 2009

Taissumani

Orulo’s Story: “To Think I Had Been So Happy”

KENN HARPER

Orulo continued telling the story of her life to the explorer Knud Rasmussen:

"Next spring, we left there and went to Admiralty Inlet. We reached there just at the time when folk were laying up their sledges and belongings before going up country to hunt caribou. There was a man named Kipumeen; his wife Kunualuk had given birth to a stillborn child a little while before, and was not allowed to go with the hunting party. So my mother went instead, and I went with her. We stayed inland all that summer. The men were successful in their hunting, and we helped them to drag the meat and store it in depots or cut off thin slices and laid them on stones to dry. It was a pleasant time. We lived in abundance, with all manner of dainties besides, and the day passed as in play.

"Then one day, I remember, we were startled to hear a woman from one of the tents calling out: "Here, come and look, quick, come and see". We all ran to the spot, and there we saw a spider letting itself down to the ground. We could not make out where it came from; it looked as if it were letting itself down from the sky. We all saw it, and there was silence among the tents. For when a spider comes down from the sky, it means someone is going to die. And true it was; when people came up from the coast, we learned that four men had perished in their kayaks. And among them was my stepfather. And thus we were left alone and homeless once again.

"But it was not long before my mother was married again, this time with a young man, much younger than she was. They lived together until he took another wife, a young one about his own age. Then my mother was cast off, and we were alone again. Then my mother was married to a man named Augpila ("the red one") and we had someone to look after us once more. This Augpila wanted to go down to Ponds Inlet to look for white men. He had heard that whalers often came there in the summer. So he went off with my mother, and I was left alone in the care of Amarualik and his wife Tutuk. But I did not stay with them long, for Amarualik thought he had too many mouths to feed, so I went to live with Kanajoq.

"I was there when Uvitaara, ("my new husband.") - that is my pet name for Aua - came and fetched me, and that is the end of all my adventures. For one who lives happily has no adventures, and in truth, I have lived happily and had seven children."

Rasmussen asked the woman, "What is the bitterest memory of all you can remember?"

Without hesitation, she answered, "The bitterest I have ever known was a time of famine shortly after my eldest son was born. And to make matters worse, all our stores of meat from the previous hunting had been destroyed by wolverines. During the two coldest months of the winter, Uvitaara hardly slept indoors a single night, but was out all the time hunting seal, and made do with a snatch of sleep now and then in the little snow shelters he built by the blow holes. We nearly starved to death, for in all that time he got only two seals. To see him go out, cold and hungry day after day to his hunting, in all manner of cruel weather, to see him grow thinner and weaker all the time - oh, it was terrible. But then at last he got a walrus, and we were saved."

Rasmussen then asked the obvious question, "And the happiest thing you can remember?"

The old woman broke into a broad smile and put down her sewing, as she recalled a time long ago. "It was the first time I came back to Baffin Land after I was married," she began.

"I had always been a poor fatherless creature, passed from hand to hand; but now I was welcomed with great festivity by all in the village. My husband had come to challenge one of the others to a song contest, and there were many feasts on that occasion, feasts such I had only heard about, but never taken part in myself."

When she had finished her reverie, Orulo suddenly burst into tears. But they were tears of joy. She explained to Rasmussen, "I have today been a child once more. While I was telling you all about my life, I lived it over again, and saw and felt everything in the same way as when it really happened. There are so many things we do not think of until the memories are upon us. And now you have learned the life of an old woman from the very beginning to this day. And I could not help crying for joy to think I had been so happy."