In the late 1940s, an X-ray technician from Toronto travelled North and photographed the Inuit of Canada's Arctic. Several thousand photos depict a time in Inuit history marked by two dreadful realities: starvation and racism. But they also reveal the strength and courage of the people and the striking beauty of the land.
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Jan 29/01) - A record of a terrible time in the Eastern Arctic has finally been published.
Padlei Diaries, 1950, a book of black and white photographs and diary excerpts by Richard Harrington, was released to the public late last year by the New York-based Rock Foundation.
The book tells a troubling story of starvation, death and courage.
"People ask me what it was like," said publisher Edmund Carpenter, who met Harrington in the Eastern Arctic a half century ago.
"I was there in 1950. And then I wintered in '51 and '52. And then I went back in '55. Nearly everyone I'd lived with before was dead.
"I had just come out of four-and-half-years in the (Second World) War and I remember thinking at the time that nothing is ever going to touch me again. I believed that I had seen hell. Well ... this was worse. This wasn't young men. This was babies, this was mothers ... anyway ... it was a grim story. But I don't want to exaggerate. People did survive.
"Richard conveys that."
Carpenter said it's about time the truth about those years was told.
"Canada has forgotten what life was like up there in the North. Racism wasn't limited to Mississippi.
"Those were some rough times, believe me, and Canadians could be just as... Nobody talks about it any more... but... rough. And finally, finally, someone's told the truth."
In editing Harrington's journals, Carpenter felt that the heart of the book belonged to the Padlei people and their untold story.
"There are many transgressions and asides that Richard has in his diary -- anti-missionary, and anti-government official and a few other things -- all of which are relevant, but the story was primary."
Arctic reality
Harrington spoke quietly about his work.
"Yes, when you take the photographs out, you get that reaction of distress, of sympathy..." he said about the Padlei photos.
"But life like that existed for thousands of years in the Arctic. Only the best and the strongest survived. Up to the High Arctic, up to Ellesmere Island, all the way through to Greenland, they survived, wherever there was food, caribou or muskox or narwhal or seal.
"But the inland Eskimo really had the tough life, because they lived entirely off the caribou."
Harrington, who turns 90 in February, refused to sensationalize his Northern travels and the world he photographed.
"There are starving people everywhere. Even today, you see starving people on television every day," he said.
He expressed tremendous respect for the Inuit people he photographed, respect for their stamina, stoicism, and courage.
"The landscape, for you and me, is bleak and desolate. But to them it's home, for thousands of years."
Harrington lived with his Inuit hosts as he travelled through the Arctic by dog team with his guide Kumok.
Occasionally, he visited a Hudson Bay Company outpost and observed the relations between the white men and the Inuit.
He kept notes in a diary and took pictures. Racism was rampant and regular, and though he recorded incidents in his diary, he was a photographer first, and that's what he talks about.
"My camera would freeze. You're outside. There is no inside."
He remembered the cold visually, recalling the vapour trail that marked the passage of sled dogs and humans.
"To photograph that, you have to run ahead of the dogs. It takes it all out of you. Eventually, you spit blood. The dogs were the same too, blood in their spittle. The first word I learned is ikkee, ikkee is cold."
Harrington remembered much more than the difficult life pictured in the book.
"There were glorious days too. There was no better life than being out there travelling with the dogs. Especially in March and April when the days get long. It's so beautiful and the air is so clear and so sharp. And breathing is really a pleasure."
Why only now?
Lorraine Monk, a Toronto-based freelance writer and photography advocate, has included Harrington's work in many of her photographic publications. In 1987, she produced an exhibit of his work, The Incredible Journeys: Photographs from the Canadian Far North 1947-1952 that included many of the Padlei photos.
Monk called Harrington one of the greatest documentary photographers in the world and she does not understand why it took 50 years for Harrington's Northern work, and the story it told, to be acknowledged.
"People have suddenly discovered Richard Harrington at 90 years old because somebody in New York published a book called Padlei Diaries, which Richard Harrington wrote in 1950," she said.
"It took 50 years. And it hasn't even been published in Canada. "I'm just very saddened that we're a country that would wait half a century to tell a story."
