Читать книгу Sisters of the Ice - R. Bruce Macdonald - Страница 9

For thus the Great White Chief hath said, “In all my lands be peace,” And to maintain his word he gave his West the Scarlet Police.

—Robert W. Service, “Clancy of the Mounted Police”

The Canadian government was slow to respond but in 1903 it deployed two North-West Mounted Police to the island.²³ There had been reluctance to assign police resources to Herschel Island since many, including some at the police headquarters, felt that the problem was being overstated. In 1903 North-West Mounted Police officer William F. White wrote a report to Amédée E. Forget, lieutenant-governor of the Northwest Territories, saying, “There were those in government who believed that reports of harm done to the Natives were exaggerated. The Comptroller of the Mounted Police expressed the opinion that what was occurring at Herschel Island was only natural: ‘It is so difficult,’ he complained, ‘to convince the goody-goody people that in the development and settlement of a new country allowances must be made for the excesses of human nature.’”²⁴

The deployment of the police at Herschel Island was initially to investigate reports of the whalers taking advantage of the Inuvialuit women and to put an end to the trade of liquor. Word had drifted south about what was happening in the western Arctic, and these stories were occasionally reported in local newspapers. As an anonymous submission to Winnipeg Tribune magazine described it, “There were no police on the island and every man became a law unto himself. Liquor flowed freely! Eskimo women were traded like fox-skins, often accompanying the captain on his voyage while the husband worked on deck. It would only have been a matter of time before the entire native population was wiped out.”²⁵ When Sergeant Francis Joseph Fitzgerald went to Herschel Island in the summer of 1903 to establish a police detachment, he was ordered to take the advice of the Hudson’s Bay Company man at Fort McPherson on how to deal with the Inuvialuit men and women on the island. He was not to meddle with their customs; they were to be respected as long as they were “consistent with the general laws of Canada.”²⁶

Members of the North-West Mounted Police.

The practice of whalers taking on “country wives” was one area that the police force under the command of Sergeant Fitzgerald were there to look into. Fitzgerald himself moved into what would now be called a common-law marriage with an Inuit woman named Unalina. He wrote to his superiors in Ottawa asking for permission to legally marry her, which was the practice at the time for all RCMP members. The missionary who had taken over from Bishop Stringer, Charles Edward Whittaker, also wrote them a letter in support of the union. The reply from the RCMP’s Inspector William D. Jarvis, who had been the first officer appointed upon the establishment of the North-West Mounted Police, was that, “he would prefer reporting to Ottawa that Fitzgerald had blown his brains out rather than he had married a native woman, though he did not at all protest the current relationship.”²⁷