The scene was set. Five extended families, a band of about 60 people, following the older men, Kupluguk and Ullikattaq, as their leaders, were about to set off for Gjoa Haven on the journey of their lives. From their perspective, it was a flight for survival. Before leaving (vanishing, as the Inuit saw it at the time) the HBC manager left a box of basic supplies for each family group. “There were a few cans of milk, though I don’t recall how many, and we had a child,” is Annie Magaknak’s first thought. “There wasn’t much of anything,” interjects her husband, Don, thinking back nearly 40 years. “There was some flour, some tea, sugar. There was ten gallons of outboard motor gas. There was a bit of gas [naptha] for the stove. There was no ammunition, no fish nets, nothing for hunting supplies.”
Suddenly, and without warning, these Inuit families found themselves entirely dependent – as their grandparents had once been – on their own resources, their own ability to survive on the land.
