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Return to Jenny Lind Island
Cambridge Bay woman places identifying markers on grandmother's grave
Jeanne Gagnon Northern News Services Published Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Jenny Lind Island in the Queen Maud Gulf is the former home of CAM-1, a distant early warning line station from the mid 1950s to the early '90s. Kitnuna Projects Inc. cleaned the site between 2007 and 2009. But for Joy, it's where she was born in the fall of 1955 and where her grandmother, who died before she was born, is buried. "Ever since I got back to Cambridge (Bay) in '96, I've always wanted to go back to Jenny Lind and what made it more (special) for me to go was my grandmother was buried there but I never knew my grandmother," she said. Invited to join a charter flight, Joy, her husband and others travelled there on Aug. 31, a 35-minute flight to the island, 120 kilometres southeast of Cambridge Bay. Knowing her family used to camp, hunt and raised their children there, it was very emotional for Joy to return to the island after a more than 50-year absence. After her parents died when she was six years old, she moved to Cambridge Bay to be with her sister Annie Atighioyak, who raised her. She eventually left the Kitikmeot community to attend residential school in Inuvik and then high school in Yellowknife, where she stayed for a few years. Cambridge Bay has been her home since 1996. "My parents used to camp and hunt there so I was born there. I have never remembered going back," she said. Her grandmother's grave, which she saw for the first time, looked "weathered and tattered but very noticeable," she wrote in an e-mail. Knowing the two crosses marking the grave would otherwise remain unidentified, Joy brought a picture of her grandmother, Kitty Kanoyatiak, wearing a caribou parka in 1949. She also put her grandmother's name on the grave so people visiting would know who was buried there. "I had mixed emotions having my first hello and goodbye to my grandmother," she wrote. "I wished that I had known her."
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