Anawak’s Return to Nunavut

Leon Anawak’s return to Nunavut is both a homecoming and a disclosure. Traveling with his uncle, Ijitsoq Akesuk, across the frozen sea, he confronts the painful history that shaped his estrangement from his family and community. The journey gives him a setting in which to hear Inuit history from an elder, acknowledge his own childhood anger, and finally share the investigation’s secret with the relative he believes he has left.

A return to the Arctic

Anawak’s uncle has brought him home. In Pond Inlet, Ijitsoq Akesuk introduces him to a community where tradition still carries considerable weight. After staying overnight at a hotel, they rise early and walk to the shore. Akesuk reads the mild weather as a sign that the spring hunt can proceed; its timing, he explains, depends on conditions along the route to the floe edge. The excursion is not simply a visit to a settlement but a journey into a landscape whose rhythms will govern what they can do.

The party travels by snowmobile over the frozen sea, with Anawak, Akesuk, and Mary-Ann sharing a sled. Puddles mark places where the ice is melting. Behind them, Baffin Island recedes; across the sound, Bylot Island rises above icebergs, with a glacier descending from its mountains to the shore. Anawak reminds himself that the surface beneath the sled is only the ocean’s frozen crust, with fish moving below. When the sleds reach a wide crack in the ice, the Inuit guides change course and the others follow. The dark water in the fissure makes the terrain’s limits plain: the journey requires attention to a living, changing environment, not mastery over it.

That dependence on the land brings Anawak close to a perspective he had once rejected. He recalls that survival there required seeing oneself as part of a living world made up of animals, plants, ice, and people. He extends the thought to the unknown intelligence in the sea: whatever the beings are or wherever they live, they too belong within the relationships shaping that world. The return therefore links his personal reorientation to the larger problem he and his colleagues are investigating.

A family history spoken aloud

The landscape also becomes the setting for a conversation Anawak has avoided. When Akesuk asks whether he had missed this place, Anawak says that he hated it. He recalls being twelve and unable to separate his father’s failures from his judgment of his people. His father was frequently drunk and unable to support the family; Anawak’s mother died by suicide, and the community was marked by bereavement and other losses. As a child, he pleaded with his father to stop drinking and offered to work, but his father did not change. Anawak remembers wanting to stay with him, and the bitterness of having been given up for adoption remains vivid.

Akesuk does not deny what Anawak experienced. He tells him that his father had not been himself, a response that helps distinguish the man from the circumstances that overwhelmed him without erasing the harm Anawak remembers. Anawak’s account makes the family rupture specific: it was not an abstract rejection of Inuit identity but a child’s response to bereavement, instability, and a father who could not give him the security he asked for.

The return also prompts Anawak to ask what his father did for his people. Akesuk answers that the family had participated in a wider struggle. His father campaigned alongside others for compensation and rights after the community’s displacement; the struggle lasted decades and passed through the courts. This knowledge complicates Anawak’s inherited image of his father. The man he remembers as powerless had also taken part in collective resistance, even though that effort did not restore the life that had been lost.

Displacement and its consequences

Akesuk describes the political history behind the family’s dislocation. During the Cold War, Canadian authorities moved Inuit communities from their traditional southern Arctic territories to Resolute Bay and Grise Fjord, claiming the northern hunting grounds would be better. Akesuk presents the move instead as an expulsion, tied to strategic concerns about the Arctic and the establishment of military radar stations. Families were transported hundreds of kilometres north without the tents, kayaks, canoes, or sleds they depended on. Their former hunting grounds were subsequently bulldozed to discourage their return, while the new settlements lay far from important caribou routes and summer breeding grounds.

The relocation followed earlier disruption. White trappers arriving in the 1920s brought guns, and seal and caribou populations declined; Inuit hunters also changed their practices after adopting firearms. Poverty and outbreaks of infectious diseases followed, and people moved from the land into settlements. Akesuk connects these changes to the erosion of a way of life: the community’s means of finding food and clothing had been damaged, and dependence on welfare grew. The houses later built by the government represented another imposition. Akesuk contrasts the enclosed, property-centered structures of industrial society with a culture whose earlier social organization had centered on family and mobility.

The damage was not only material. Akesuk describes alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, and the continuing effects of profound communal trauma. He also explains that the Indian Act of 1885 helped sever the transmission of knowledge by encouraging people to leave their homelands and sending children to residential schools for integration into white society. Government reparations could not restore the culture or return what had been broken in the chain of oral tradition. The account makes clear why Anawak could grow up separated not only from a place but from the stories through which a people might understand its history.

A changing form of belonging

Akesuk does not describe Inuit life as frozen in the past. Since 1999, Nunavut has had its own government, and, he says, no one can simply force its people to move again. Traditions are being revived: people use dog sleds, and young people learn to build igloos and make fire with flint. These practices matter, but they cannot reverse history or recreate the former way of life in its entirety. Akesuk accepts that the world changes while refusing to treat cultural loss as inconsequential.

He also describes a new form of mobility. Inuit people who were once nomads on the land now travel through the Internet, exchange information across borders, and tell young people elsewhere about Nunavut. The comparison does not imply that digital movement repairs displacement. Rather, it shows a community adapting its means of connection while continuing to negotiate what has been taken from it. Akesuk remains concerned that too many people still die by suicide, and insists that the living need time to face the trauma without having their hopes surrendered to the dead.

The scene gives Anawak a different inheritance from the one he had carried as a child. His uncle’s account neither excuses his father nor asks him to abandon his anger; it places private suffering within a longer history of political coercion, cultural disruption, and resistance. As the sun hangs over the horizon, Anawak agrees with Akesuk. He then tells his uncle what the team has been discussing at Chateau Whistler: their work and their suspicions about intelligent beings in the sea. He knows that revealing this information breaks Judith Li’s instructions, but chooses to speak because he has spent his life in silence and Akesuk is the only family he believes he has left. Akesuk listens and offers to share a shaman’s advice, although Anawak says he does not believe in shamans. The return ends not with a complete reconciliation or a recovered past, but with Anawak entrusting a guarded truth to family and allowing a conversation to continue.