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It would be rather unfair, after everything that went down, to blame it all on Matilda. She arrived so late in the game, after all. And it wasn’t her fault that she was barren.

But of all the odd twists in this ill-fated saga, Matilda’s is perhaps the easiest to understand. So it makes sense to start with her. If nothing else, she makes a decent scapegoat—or scapeyak if you prefer.

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Matilda was one of three domestic yaks purchased by the Canadian government in the later stages of a wild, doomed scheme to import Indian yaks into Canada’s far north.

The plan, as detailed in a new academic paper by University of Montreal historian David Meren, published in the journal Histoire Sociale/Social History, was to introduce the yaks to the Inuit people of Ungava Bay, in northern Quebec, in a late-colonial effort to wean them from their traditional ways of life.

As an added twist, Canada hoped to use the plot to cultivate a special relationship with a newly-independent India. Jean Lesage, then the minister of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, went so far as to ask Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent to raise the issue at a bilateral meeting with his Indian counterpart, Jawaharlal Nehru.