Nadim Roberts

The project:

In 1972, three Inuit boys ran away from a residential school in the Canadian Arctic, vanishing into the tundra. Weeks later, only one of the boys reappeared in his hometown, near death after a 150-kilometer journey through the wilderness. Half a century later, the story of the three boys resurfaced when a long-awaited highway to the Arctic Ocean, following the same route the surviving boy took to get home, was nearing completion. The Highway tells the tale of these three boys and their families, the legacy of Arctic colonization, and how a road to the end of the continent continues to affect their communities today.

From The Highway:

On the day Annie Neglek was taken she saw a small speck of a plane in the sky. It grew bigger and bigger till it flew right over her family’s summer camp on the shores of Bathurst Inlet in the Central Arctic. The plane seemed to be looking for them, and once spotted, it landed on its pontoons in the nearby bay. It was the summer of 1959, and Annie was thirteen years old.

Two men got out of the plane and walked towards their canvas tent pitched on the tundra. Annie didn’t recognize either of them. The pilot was a white man and his co-pilot an Inuk. The white man spoke while the Inuk translated into Inuinnaqtun so her parents could understand. Annie couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but her parents kept glancing over at the children.

Annie was the second oldest of her twelve siblings, eleven girls and one boy. She often looked after her siblings while her parents fished and hunted, prepared the dry meat or sewed their caribou and sealskin-lined clothing for winter. Their big family was close, a village unto themselves. In summer, they all slept together in their tent side by side on a long roll of caribou skin. In winter, it was the same, but in an igloo built by her father. The tundra was their home, their playground, and their classroom.
 
After the men finished speaking to her parents, they called Annie and her older sister over. Her parents explained they would need to go with these men on their plane. There wasn’t time to explain where they were going or why. They had to leave now.

On arrival, there were cars waiting for all the children. On the bumpy ride along a dirt road, Annie looked out the window at this new place. She felt suffocated almost to the point of fainting. It felt as if the surroundings were closing in on her. Later, she would learn that these tall obstacles to her vision were called trees. On the tundra, the land had extended as far as the eye could see.

The car stopped in front of what looked like the biggest canvas tent Annie had ever seen. There were many white people here who spoke to them in English, but Annie couldn’t understand what they were saying. Once inside, they were made to line up and take off the clothing sewn by their mothers. They were inspected for lice and then covered in a smelly powder. Nuns with electric clippers shaved the boys’ hair right down to their scalps. By the time they reached the boys at the end of the line, the clippers were red hot and the smell of burning hair filled the air.

Finally, they were taken to their dormitories where there were rows upon rows of beds a meter apart from each other. Alone in her new bed—in a new world—Annie finally allowed herself to cry. She was afraid the other kids would tease her, so she covered her head with a pillow. But she wasn’t alone. All around her children were crying. The next day, they would be woken up early. It was their first day of school.