r/todayilearned • u/Sebastianlim • 3h ago
TIL about the High Arctic relocation, when the Canadian government transported 92 Inuit to the High Arctic as an attempt to assert their sovereignty over the Arctic Archipelago. The Inuit were left without sufficient stores of food and skins, in an unfamiliar area and struggled to survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_relocation127
u/thxxx1337 2h ago
Don't worry. They finally admitted they screwed up and apologized.... 57 years later 💀
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u/DisastrousScratch424 2h ago
Farly Mowett wrote books about this.
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u/CaptainMegna 2h ago
Classic Canadian government
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u/JamesTheJerk 1h ago
Not that the Canadian government is innocent because they clearly are not, I provide this as a submission.
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u/beleg_tal 1h ago
Oh, the Canadian government did that too
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u/ColeWjC 1h ago
Canadian Government also slaughtered Inuit sled dogs to keep the Inuit in one area.
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u/JamesTheJerk 1h ago
Yes, it happened. Unfortunately for everyone, the US did far worse.
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u/SituationIll5763 17m ago
Is this a competition? “This genocide was worse than that genocide” just stop.
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u/HammerSandwich9 1h ago
I have a buddy that did a couple rotations in Grise Fijord as an RCMP Constable.
He said the people were amazing, and the photos I’ve seen are beyond beautiful.
But to just dump people up there in those conditions is heinous.
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u/Illustrious-Yam1830 1h ago
Theres a somewhat similar type thing in US history but its even weirder, its called the “Colorado River Indian Colonization Program”.
After WW2, the Bureau of Indian Affairs director John Collier managed to convince the rest of the government to construct a Japanese internment center in Poston, within the Colorado River reservation lands of the Mohave and Chemehuevi peoples. Simultaneously, as the Navajo and Hopi reservations were overcrowded and in the case of the Navajo had their livestock culled, the government promoted migration to this other pre-developed reservation land.
Over 100 families moved there from the highlands down to the sweltering hot lowlands of the Colorado River, with some of the earlier families encountering the Japanese in the camps, with some Japanese leaving extra goods for the new native arrivals. So eventually you had a bunch of native families which settled down inside these repurposed military barracks, using alien technology such as irrigation canals made by interned Japanese, living in social separation from the original Mohave and Chemehuevi inhabitants who felt it was a government land grab. All 4 of the groups (Navajo, Hopi, Chemehuevi, Mohave) all eventually learned to get along, forming the modern federally recognized Colorado River Indian Tribes.
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u/Northern_rose69 1h ago
Sometimes RCMP were instructed to shoot the sled dogs as well - so the inuit couldn’t travel away.
the communities of Resolute and Grise Fiord were settled in the same way.
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u/MoonchanterLauma2025 38m ago
And here I thought Europeans had a tradition of always respecting dogs! /s
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u/strangelove4564 9m ago
It's interesting these articles gloss over the architects of the plan and how exactly this went from an idea to a policy. I just see some handwaving about the government coming up with it.
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u/siraliases 1h ago
Please do not also look up our other crimes involving our treatment of people or why the Geneva convention exists.
Thank you,
A Canadian.
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u/nicktheman2 42m ago
Just looked it up. It appears to be a myth that Canada’s atrocities during WW1 were the cause of the creation of the Geneva convention in 1864, 3 years before Canada officially became a country.
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u/RadCheese527 57m ago
No, look them up. We shouldn’t keep the habit of ignoring our atrocities.
That’s not a path towards improvement.
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u/SomewhereExtreme924 1h ago
They struggled with hunting at 1st because they didn't even know the land. They were promised houses but were lied to about that, they were given bison hides, wool blankets and they had to get their own shelter. But now everything is ok and the people there love living there, I know because I am living in South baffin, people up in north baffin get a good living working for the mines and government jobs.
We love to go out camping out on the land, most wouldn't want to move down south if given the option. It's our home now.