The priest who chronicled the North

Joe O'Connor Sep 24, 2011 – 8:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Sep 23, 2011 8:05 PM ET

Image by Father Mary-Rousseliere

Eulalie Angugasak with Bernard in her amauti Repulse Bay September 1953

Strangers who met him, for the first time, often described Father Guy Mary-Rousseliere as being aloof, detached and a little bit lost in his own inner-self.
A gangly limbed Roman Catholic priest, with a lean and upright bearing, Father Mary’s quiet reserve, like the priest’s collar he wore, was partly a disguise. The outer costume of a devoutly religious, yet also profoundly progressive man, who was living elbow to elbow with an Inuit culture dynamically different from the Western one in which the good Father, from Le Mans, France, was raised.

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Father Mary fishing at the stone weir Repulse Bay August 1951

Father Mary lived and worked in Pond Inlet, and parts thereabout in the Central and Eastern Canadian Arctic, from the 1940s until his death, at age 81, in 1994.

During that time he was an artist, an anthropologist, an archeologist, plus a preacher and a missionary. He was a complicated man and, above all, a witness — with a camera, tape recorder, sketchpad and a pen.

Largely unknown outside of his beloved North and beyond the office walls of the odd academic, Father Mary’s body of work — writings, recordings, drawings and the photographs seen here — are poignant snapshots depicting the Inuit people at a moment of transition.

“In his drawings and photographs you can see the proximity he had with the Inuit, the scenes he depicts, perhaps inside an igloo — these are quiet moments and they show how intimate he was with them and he was appreciated by them because of the man he was,” says Frederic Laugrand, an anthropologist at Laval University.

“But also what he showed in his work was a time period where Inuit were starting to live in settlements, and starting a new life. And he showed the tension between this life and the more traditional camp life that was away from the settlements. His work is extremely important.”

Father Mary’s photos, for example, of an Inuit family sitting on a bed in a shack with newspaper wallpaper, convey a story. There are tin cups on the table beside the bed. But the family members wear handmade sealskin boots on their feet.

Image by Father Mary-Rousseliere

Alain Maktar with his family (Leo, wife Therese, Rene and Joanie) in a qarmaq shelter

Here then was a culture with a foot in the past and a foot on the treadmill of what we, and what many of Father Mary’s contemporaries, called progress.

Father Mary understood exactly what was taking place, and while he spoke from the pulpit, and sought converts, he also spoke to the Inuit in their own language. Far from a colonizing priest, he went North in the 1940s and spent the next 50 years listening.

“I don’t see any contradiction between the study of God, in theology, and the study of man, created by God,” the priest said in 1952.

“Moreover, I think that anything that helps me to better understand the culture of the people among whom I live is justified.”

Father Mary’s photographs and sketches, or “cartoons” as he deprecatingly described them, are currently being showcased in the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut in an exhibition marking the 100th anniversary (in 2012) of the Catholic presence in the central and eastern Canadian Arctic.

Impressive as the photos are, of even greater importance were the voices that he documented. Father Mary would sit with Inuit elders for hours, traveling to their homes, their hunting camps, to listen to their stories. Oral tales, passed down from generation to generation, about the initiation rituals of a young shaman (think: no water for five days, no food for 10).

Or the origins of “white people,” a race, according to Inuit legend, that were cast out to sea by the Sea Woman in the soft sole of a mukluk with the simplest instructions: “Fend for yourselves without getting wet.”

Father Mary wrote everything down. Without him, many of these stories would have been lost. And he took his photographs, some of which appeared in long ago issues of National Geographic.

“Father Mary really took the Inuit culture seriously. He respected them, and in his day, that was not something that was easy to do,” prof. Laugrand says.

In the 1970s, he locked collars with Brigitte Bardot, the French movie siren who was campaigning against the seal hunt. The priest argued that hunting was integral to Inuit life, as was the Inuktitut language, an idiom that was under duress from government administrators during the 1950s and 1960s who believed the Inuit people would ultimately be assimilated into Western culture.

“In his own way, Father Mary was very conservative,” says prof. Laugrand. “For instance, he enjoyed doing the Mass in Latin and not adopting the [modernizing] ways of the Vatican II council.

“So there is a tension within the man. On the Inuit side he went very far, but on the other side he was very attached to traditional values. And I guess he applied those values to himself — but also to preserving Inuit traditional values.

“In many respects, he was a man ahead of his time.”

Father Mary died in a fire at the Catholic mission in Pond Inlet on April 23, 1994. He was an old man by then, a wise and somewhat eccentric elder of the church.

The deadly fire consumed countless artifacts, words and photographs of a complicated man with a sharp eye, a keen ear — and a largely forgotten legacy.

National Post
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Father Mary with the Dene people at Caribou Lake, MB 1940

Posted in: Canada, News Tags: Father Guy, Inuit