existence. They had no need of permanent settlements, and establishing fixed communities would have simply added to the hardships they already faced. Unless large areas were continually hunted, and unless a combination of luck and experience put them in the path of migrating animals, there was little chance of survival. It was the white-man, lacking the skills and knowledge to follow the Inuit around, who required the establishment of permanent outposts in an effort to initiate occasional interaction with the nomadic Inuit.
Although an American, Captain Joseph Bernard, in his small gasoline-powered schooner Teddy Bear was the first white-person to trade in the area from around 1910 to 1915, and a Dane named Charles Klengenberg set up a seasonal fishing hut at the mouth of the Coppermine River around 1916, the site of present-day Kugluktuk was not permanently inhabited until the Hudson’s Bay Company and Church of England arrived in 1928, followed by the Roman Catholic mission and the RCMP in 1929 and 1930 respectively. Around 1930, a rudimentary radio/weather station was set up, in 1932 the community’s first doctor arrived and in 1934 a Post Office was established. During the years of the Great Depression, the Government of Canada could not afford to add to this meager infrastructure, and the doctor was lost to government cut-backs, never to return. During and after the Second World War, investment by the government of Canada started anew, with the establishment of a Nursing Station in 1948 and a Federal Day-School in 1950. A new Nursing Station, improved government housing and a diesel power-plant were all established in 1967, and a proper air-strip was completed in 1969.
There were, of course, a few native people in the early years who acted as guides and interpreters for the RCMP, the missions and the Hudson’s Bay Company, fished for and tended the dogs and did other odd-jobs. Those people and their families, however, still did not live in the community year-round, preferring to spend much of their time hunting, fishing and trapping at traditional locations. It was not until the early 1950’s that people began to adapt to life in the permanent settlement of Coppermine, and that trend continued until the last outposts were gradually abandoned in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, despite government subsidies that attempted to maintain that traditional life-style.
It is important to note that the Hudson’s Bay Company actively discouraged Inuit people from moving into communities. The HBC was in the fur-trade business – they wanted people out on the land, engaged in trapping. When the government of Canada, through their agents (primarily the RCMP), started to provide welfare to those Inuit people who came to them in need, and when that policy became entrenched and morphed into what we now call social assistance, income-support, family allowance, child-tax credit, subsidized housing, etc., many people decided to give up their nomadic life in favour of a less precarious existence in the community, where schooling and medical care was available and where dependable wage-employment later became the norm.
So there was a time, from 1928 to about 1945, when the permanent residents of Coppermine (later Kugluktuk after 1996) consisted almost entirely of white people. Indeed, if white people and their institutions had never come to this land, there would be no community of Kugluktuk today, and the population of nomadic Inuit would have remained stable at a small fraction of the current numbers, which was about all that the land (and primitive hunting methods) could support. Whether contact has been a good thing or a bad thing is, nevertheless, certainly open to debate.
Somehow, there has developed an erroneous perception that Inuit people were forced off the land and into communities. There was never any such government policy or action. There was no advantage to white people in having Inuit confined to communities - quite the contrary. Inuit themselves saw the advantages, weighed the disadvantages, and (wisely, I think) chose to give up a li