When he was a boy, Jack Anawak’s mother was diagnosed on the C.D. Howe. He and I first met after his election as MP for Nunatsiaq; our House of Commons offices were close and we became friends. The only news Anawak ever got about his mother, he told me, came two years after her removal from Repulse Bay. A visiting priest simply said she was dead. He never knew where she’d been taken, or where she was buried. His was a common story.
The “Let’s Find Them!” data base will have some 9,000 names of TB patients removed from the Arctic during those decades. “They were taken south to city sanatoriums,” the PM said, citing Hamilton as an example.
CBC Television reported in 1989 how Hamilton’s Sanatorium on the Mountain housed some 1,200 Inuit patients for TB treatment. Adults who died were buried without their family’s knowledge, in unmarked graves; children were sent from one hospital to the next, without records. The era coincided with tuberculosis sanatoriums operating at Gravenhurst, and with several non-Indigenous families in Muskoka adopting native children from the far north.
Ottawa had already been sending soldiers suffering tuberculosis or lung damage from poison gas to Gravenhurst, home of Canada’s first-ever TB sanatorium. Andrea Baston’s definitive book Curing Tuberculosis in Muskoka tells how, in 1917, a dozen soldiers arrived at the Calydor Sanatorium, with more to Gravenhurst’s Cottage Sanatorium and Free Hospital. The number expanded by 1918 to some 80 privates and NCOs at the Free Hospital and 50 officers in the Cottage Sanatorium.
Thus it was in the normal course that Muskoka Hospital received 13 Indigenous adult TB patients in 1948, with 10 to 20 more being admitted each year, boosted in 1955 with some 40 aboriginal children from the Arctic. Facilities were expanded to include a school and recreation room, and the novelty of television.
Then, as TB in Canada’s southern non-Indigenous population declined dramatically, sanatorium facilities wound down. Victory over TB had been declared, despite persisting at high rates in Canada’s indigenous communities. In 1959, the last of Muskoka Hospital’s Inuit patients returned north, to Moose Factory.
Detective work on “cold cases” is hard. Patient info from Muskoka sanatoriums is not readily available, privacy governs medical records, and some government records about this program became conveniently “lost.” Yet information about Inuit patients’ at Gravenhurst is newly important.
“We must all take ownership of our history,” the PM said. This fresh “Let’s Find Them!” initiative introduces both imperative and funding for tracing missing Inuit, a prelude to honouring them with grave markers and plaques. Gravenhurst benefits from citizens close to their heritage, including Andrea Baston and town archivist Judy Humphries. Gravenhurst’s cemetery staff might trace information about Inuit burials in town cemeteries. Opening Muskoka’s role in a tragic Canadian saga, locally, is needed for national reconciliation, and to advance the healing.
Maybe the unmarked grave of Philippa Piova, Jack Anawak’s mother, is nearby.
