While you may not find Snafu on a map of Nunavut, Inuk Elder Manitok Thompson remembers the tiny settlement as the home where she spent part of her childhood.
“I’m from Coral Harbour and there is a little place called Snafu, about 3.5 miles away from town,” Thompson said of the area she described as having an interesting history.
During the Second World War, she said a large airstrip had been built in Coral Harbour because the Americans had a hospital in the area for wounded soldiers arriving from Europe.
Later on, when she was a child, she recalled seeing empty oil barrels everywhere on the beach near an old ship used as a barge.
“And on that big ship there was a SNAFU sign on it. So the little placed I grew up in is called Snafu,” Thompson said.
She recalls growing up in a large home with a few other families around Snafu, and that her father, Mikitok Bruce, would head out to work at the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line site in one direction while she walked into town to attend residential day school in the other direction, and then stayed with her auntie through the school week.
“There were not many people there. When they did the relocation, we were the last family to move into town,” Thompson said of their eventual move to Coral Harbour.
She said the DEW line site was “quite an establishment.”
“That place where my dad worked, they had a movie theatre, they had a bar, they had all these rooms, and it was a whole station. I think they were able to host probably 90 men or so,” she said of the structure built to detect potential air attacks from the Soviets during the Cold War.
“Sometimes we would go up there if they had a movie night by dog team.”
Thompson said she grew up with sled dogs around.
“My father always had dog teams. He worked, but he took his dogs up there. Sometimes we would go by dog team into town to go to school.”
As an Inuit child not exposed to Western culture in her environment, she said attending the one-room residential federal day school was surprising to her in many ways.
“When we were children, we did not have birthday parties. We did not have Christmas presents, and Santa Claus certainly wasn't on the horizon either. I mean that's a different culture altogether. It wasn't part of our culture,” Thompson said.
When the teacher started reading to them, she said it was another strange experience for her.
“I couldn't figure out when the teacher started reading books on three pigs or a big bad wolf. Did somebody imagine that type of an animal?” she said.
“And what was a pig or a cow or chicken? We used to even draw pictures of trees with apples on them because we thought every tree had an apple on it. We'd never seen a tree,” Thompson said of the bewilderment she felt.
Hollywood's influence
At around age eight, she said the school held a movie night and her family packed up their dog sled and attended.
“And it was the first time in my life, in the entire life of us children, of the adults, I think, where somebody was shooting another person. It was cowboys and Indians. And it was always the Indians were the bad people and the cowboys were the good people.
“And the first thing we learned was ‘hands up.’ So, we were going around saying ‘hands up’ to each other because that was something we heard so much from the movie, but it's against Inuit traditional law. You never point a weapon at another human being. It's one of the serious laws in Inuit culture.
“And that introduction to shooting another human was a shock to the community,” Thompson recalled.
She admired her parents, Mikitok and Tweenaq Bruce, and the values they taught her growing up.
“They wanted their children to be successful,” she said.
“My dad would say, “Your brain is the same size as a white person’s. An Inuit brain is not smaller than the white person's brain.”
“He told us to always work for our money,” she said.
Her mother was a very spiritual person who knew the Bible better than the priest did.
“She had a few debates with him and I know he would be lost sometimes,” she said.
“So my mom and dad are always going to be my role models and are always going to be the people that had a very big impact on my life.”
Thompson now lives in Carleton Place, outside of Ottawa. She has been married to her husband Tom for 45 years. He is also named Qinuittuq, or ‘a person with patience.’
“Because my mom thought he needed a lot of patience with me,” she laughed.
As executive director of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC), she works tirelessly to preserve the Inuit culture and traditional knowledge. She has taught her staff how to light the traditional qulliq, or stone lamp, before meetings and she often speaks Inuktitut to immerse them into the Inuit culture.
“I'm very happy to be working for IBC because what I try to do is to make sure that we are following the Inuit principles and Inuit traditional knowledge because that's what I bring into the company.”
