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Inuit Grave Database Released

Tuesday, 26 September 2017 12:52

A team of researchers have been pouring over records from federal departments, provincial and territorial archives, church files, records from cemeteries, sanatoria and hospitals as well as from individual informants.

The federal government is preparing to release a database holding everything that is known about what happened to Inuit people who were taken from their communities in the Arctic for tuberculosis treatment.

Since 2008, a team of researchers have been pouring over records from federal departments, provincial and territorial archives, church files, records from cemeteries, sanatoria and hospitals as well as from individual informants.

They now have a database of records on about 45-hundred Inuit who were taken south.

Some detail treatment and return, while some only describe treatment, without any information on whether the patient survived.

Some record a death, but no burial, and some files are complete.

Elizabeth Logue -- who runs the Nanilavut program, Inuktitut for “Let's Find Them” -- says her team is working with land claim groups to ensure that once database available, the context is there to tell the story.

Between 1953 and 1961, more than 52-hundred Inuit were sent south, sometimes leaving children stranded without their parents.

(Canadian Press)

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