1950s

The 1950s are remembered as a period when pressures on Inuit life in the Canadian Arctic deepened into displacement, poverty, and acute hardship. The decade sits within a longer history: white trappers arrived in the 1920s, animal populations declined, and disease contributed to people leaving the land for settlements. By the end of the 1950s, Inuit communities were facing starvation and infectious disease, while the government did nothing to address their suffering.

Cold War relocation

The decade’s displacement is linked to the Cold War and Ottawa’s concern that the Arctic might be claimed by the Soviet Union or the United States. The government relocated nomadic Inuit from their traditional territory in the southern Arctic to Resolute Bay and Grise Fjord, claiming that the new hunting grounds were better. In the account passed to Leon Anawak, they were not: relocation removed people from familiar territories and hunting grounds rather than securing a better livelihood.

The pressure intensified when the military established secret radar stations on traditional Inuit hunting grounds in the Northwest Territories. Inuit living in the way of those installations were transported hundreds of kilometres farther north, without tents, kayaks, canoes, or sleds. The move is described not as a voluntary change of residence but as an expulsion given the more acceptable official name of relocation. The human cost extended beyond distance: the new settlements were far from caribou trails and summer breeding grounds.

A decade within a longer rupture

The hardships of the 1950s were part of a cumulative loss, not a single crisis with a clean boundary. Earlier changes had weakened the basis of subsistence, while disease and settlement further separated people from the land. Forced relocation added another break between communities and the places that sustained their way of life. Anawak’s uncle also recounts that Anawak’s parents were relocated, bringing this public history directly into the family’s experience.

The effects outlasted the decade. Inuit communities campaigned for compensation and rights for thirty years, and Anawak’s father took part in that effort. The creation of Nunavut in 1999 brought political self-government, but, as the account stresses, it could not restore the nomadic way of life that had been lost. The 1950s therefore occupy a central place in a longer story of dispossession and attempted recovery.

Memory, land, and what follows

The decade’s significance emerges through an elder’s history lesson to Anawak, rather than through a detached chronology. Its details—the relocation, the absence of essential belongings, the distance from hunting grounds, and the failure to respond to starvation and disease—give concrete form to the lasting effects of government decisions. They also explain why historical memory matters to a later generation seeking to understand belonging and the loss of an inherited way of life.

The account does not leave the past as the only available frame. Inuit people are described as reviving traditions, teaching young people to build igloos and light fires with flints, while also moving through modern networks of information and communication. That contrast does not erase the damage associated with the 1950s; it places recovery alongside loss, and treats the future as something to be made without sacrificing the hopes of the living.