Foreword

Not long after our first book, Northern Nurses: True Nursing Adventures from Canada’s North, was published, Joan Kieser and I heard from Kathleen Mary (Jo) Lutley CM, who lives in Thompson, Manitoba. For over forty years, Jo had saved documents from the time she was the nurse in charge in Great Whale River. These were copies of the originals which she had sent to the zone office of northern health services, as is required at the end of each month. They reminded Jo of the wonderful experiences she had while working in Great Whale River and on the Belcher Islands, and she hoped to have them published some day. We had already begun Northern Nurses II: More Nursing Adventures from Canada’s North and could include only one of her month-end reports. Once that book was published, we then, at Jo’s request, started working on Northern Nurses III: Belcher Islands and Great Whale River – the 1960s.

Another nurse-midwife whose name appears several times in Jo Lutley’s reports is Heather Duncan Clayton. Through my northern nurse contacts, I was able to find Heather who now lives in Edmonton, Alberta and who also has fond memories of her time in the same area of the north. She had kept her original daybook that included maps she had sketched of the different camps that she visited across the Belcher Islands in the 1960s. She had identified the locations of the various family dwellings in these camps and had listed each individual family member’s name and E9 number which was the personal identification number used by the government at the time. Heather’s accounts of her experiences are an excellent introduction to Jo’s month-end reports, providing details that would not have been required for a government document.

Both Jo Lutley and Heather Clayton worked in isolated places on their own. They often had to face problems with no outside medical support because of poor radio communications frequently caused by weather, distance, or equipment. They had at their disposal only basic medications and a limited physical plant. The nursing station in Great Whale River was just being completed and most of the station’s furnishings did not arrive until the sea-lift came in the summer after it opened. There was also the usual federal, and sometimes provincial, bureaucracy administered mostly from afar, often without an understanding of the limitations of the local situation. Because both Jo and Heather were—and are to this day—fiercely independent women, they were able to cope with these challenges as well as with the lack of amenities which today’s northern nurses take for granted

Through Connie Suite, a nurse who followed Jo Lutley in Great Whale River, I was put in touch with Rev. Caleb Lawrence, an Anglican priest, and his wife Maureen who knew both Jo and Heather. They had lived among the people in Great Whale River and on the Belchers. Their children attended local schools and, at that time, spoke more Cree and Inuktitut than English. Maureen and Caleb have elaborated on some aspects of village life that add colour to Jo’s reports, as has Rev. Roger Briggs, another Anglican priest who came to the area later and whose wife was a good friend of Heather’s.

When we began this book, we knew no-one on the Belcher Islands. I happened to hear Lisi Kavik, co-principal of the Nuiyak School on the Islands, interviewed by Sheilagh Rogers on CBC Radio. Lisi was being honoured as one of Canada’s outstanding principals. When I saw Lisi’s picture in The Globe and Mail and discovered that she was coming to Toronto to accept the award, Joan Kieser and I arranged to meet with her. It turned out that Ida Watt, Lisi’s aunt who was travelling with her, had researched and written a book in Inuktitut about the Belcher Islands.

After meeting these two dynamic women, Joan and I began to think that we should see for ourselves the places that the pioneer nurse-midwives Jo Lutley and Heather Clayton wrote about and learn firsthand more about the people they had lived with, worked with, and served in northwestern Quebec and the Belcher Islands during the 1960s.

 

Introduction

Heather Clayton’s great desire to return to these communities finally inspired Joan Kieser and me to accompany her north in 2007 on her first trip back in forty years to see again the people and the places she had loved. I had never been to the Belchers Islands. In 1978, I had overnighted at the nursing station in Great Whale River on my way to Povungnituk, but it was during a blizzard and so I saw nothing of the village. Joan had never been that far north. Neither of us had met Heather until she strode into the boarding area at Pearson Airport in Toronto in her hiking boots looking for two women also wearing hiking boots on a hot day in August.

Before we left, Maureen and Caleb Lawrence had given us three albums of photos taken while they lived in Great Whale River and the Belcher Islands. We had packed photocopies of these to share, and Heather brought her daybook from the 1960s, as well as her home movies of the communities along the coast. These were of great interest to the people we met on our trip. For some elders, they were the first photographs and home movies of that era they had seen. Other than the nursing station, the government buildings, the school and the teacher’s house, there were no houses on the Islands in those days. Heather’s camp maps of the Belchers intrigued their children and grandchildren who were able to see where their families had lived over forty years ago.

Heather was warmly received by the many people who remembered Jo Lutley and her after all these years, and she was delighted to see them. In Sanikiluaq on the Belchers Islands, we were privileged to visit Charlie Crow, a former member of the territorial legislative assembly, and his wife Bessie, an accomplished soapstone carver. Charlie talked about working with Heather on the x-ray surveys on the Islands and how, because of his fluency in English, she employed him as an interpreter. She helped him realize he had valuable skills. He told us that this gave him confidence and changed his life. Seeing Allie Appaqaq again also brought back many memories for Heather. As a teenager, Allie had guided her and Jeannie Weetaltuk on the long trek from the north camp to the nursing station in the south camp of Eskimo Harbour on the Belcher Islands when the weather was too wild to return by canoe.

In Great Whale River, we had the pleasure of meeting people like John Masty, who was for many years the right hand man at the nursing station, and Maggie (Mamianskum) Rupert who took care of Heather’s children while she worked. Very poignant was Heather’s chance meeting with Mary Tuckatuck whose late sister had been named after Heather and whose young daughter is also named ‘Heather’. And there was Mary’s sister, Mina Tuckatuck, for whom Heather had been a Sanaria’koq, a relationship similar to that of a godparent. We also met some of the ‘babies’ whom Heather or Jo Lutley had delivered in the nursing station in Great Whale River in the sixties.

The affection and respect Heather had for both the Cree and the Inuit, and they had for her, was very evident. This warmth extended to Joan and to me on our trip north in 2007. Wherever we went, people made the three of us feel welcome.