All events · The War's Long Shadow
Canada's High Arctic Relocation and Inuit Settlement Centralisation
c. 1953–1975 · Americas
Displacement
Displaced
92
The High Arctic relocation itself moved 92 people in 22 families — 19 from Inukjuak in northern Quebec and 3 from Pond Inlet — to Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord in 1953 and 1955, figures established by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples from federal records and confirmed in the government's 2010 apology. The wider centralisation of Inuit from camps into administered settlements across the eastern Arctic in the 1950s and 1960s affected several thousand people, and the Qikiqtani Truth Commission additionally documented the killing of large numbers of sled dogs, which removed the means of living on the land.
Share of the population affected
0.84%
of the Inuit population of Canada in the early 1950s, 1953
Open on the interactive map →
What happened
In 1953 and 1955 the Canadian government moved 92 Inuit from Inukjuak in northern Quebec and Pond Inlet on Baffin Island some 1,200-2,000 km north to Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, sites with no prior permanent population, darker winters and unfamiliar game. Families were separated on arrival, promised returns after two years did not materialise, and the first years brought hunger and hardship. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples examined the episode in a 1994 report and concluded the relocation was not the humanitarian measure the government had described; a $10 million settlement followed in 1996 and a formal apology by the Minister of Indian Affairs in August 2010. Contemporary scholarship and the relocatees themselves have argued that a principal purpose was to assert Canadian sovereignty in the High Arctic, a motive the government long denied. The wider movement of Inuit off the land into administered settlements in the same decades was examined by the Qikiqtani Truth Commission, which reported in 2010. Canada's residential schools and reserve system were in the atlas; the Arctic relocations were not.
Parties
The Government of Canada moved Inuit families from northern Quebec and Baffin Island to uninhabited High Arctic sites and, more broadly, concentrated Inuit into administered settlements
Disputed
Whether sovereignty assertion was a purpose of the relocation, argued by the Royal Commission and by the relocatees and long denied by the federal government; and how far the moves were voluntary, which federal officials maintained at the time and which the Commission rejected.
The denominator
The 1951 census enumerated 9,493 Inuit in Canada and departmental estimates for the mid-1950s run to about 11,000-12,000, spread across the Northwest Territories, northern Quebec and Labrador. The High Arctic relocation itself moved 92 people from Inukjuak and Pond Inlet to Resolute and Grise Fiord in 1953 and 1955.
The affected figure counts only the 92 people moved to the High Arctic; the wider centralisation into settlements between the 1950s and 1970s touched most of the Inuit population and is not captured by that number.
Where the baseline comes from
On the death toll
There was no mass death toll. Relocatees and the Royal Commission documented hunger, illness and deaths in the first years at the new sites, but these were individual cases rather than a countable toll.
Documented forms of violence
Destruction of Property
The Qikiqtani Truth Commission documented the killing of Inuit sled dogs during the settlement period, which removed families' means of travel and hunting.
Formal findings
- Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Canada) (1994) — 1994 report on the 1953-55 High Arctic relocation concluding that the government's stated rehabilitative purpose was not borne out, that relocatees were not adequately informed or provisioned, and that the promise of return was not honoured — source
- Government of Canada (2010) — Formal apology of 18 August 2010 by the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development for the relocation of Inuit families to the High Arctic and the hardship and suffering it caused — source
Movements mapped
- Inuit families moved from Inukjuak to Resolute Bay
- Inuit families moved from Pond Inlet to Grise Fiord
Countries touched, on present-day borders
Canada
Sources