GJOA HAVEN, NUNAVUT—Pride in the flag doesn’t come easily to all Canadians, especially in the Arctic, where Canada sometimes seems a distant, threatening place to Inuit.

That makes the national honour Louie Kamookak received Sunday all the more sweet. He earned it the hard way.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the nation’s flag Sunday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper awarded the Maple Leaf to 50 Canadians and organizations “who have contributed significantly to the well-being of our citizens.”

Kamookak, a historian and teacher in Gjoa Haven, was honoured for devoting more than 30 years to interviewing Inuit elders in Nunavut, collecting oral histories that contain key clues to the mystery of what happened to the lost Franklin Expedition.

Sir John Franklin and his 128 men all perished in a failed attempt to complete the Northwest Passage bridging the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Their ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were abandoned to heavy sea ice in 1848, northwest of King William Island.

When a search team led by Parks Canada marine archeologists discovered Erebus, Franklin’s flagship, far to the south in shallow waters off Queen Maud Gulf last September, the historic find vindicated Kamookak’s work and the elders whose stories he collected.

He got news of the honour from Leona Aglukkaq, federal environment minister, who is also responsible for northern economic development. The first Inuk to sit in federal cabinet, she grew up in Gjoa Haven.

Kamookak, not the excitable type anyway, was very happy, but had to be extra careful not to get too worked up by the latest honour. He’s recovering from heart surgery.

“I don’t know how to jump three feet in the air,” he said, straight-faced.

Others honoured on the list of 50 Canadians included Marga van den Hogen, a Thornhill resident, who founded Flag Flyers, a group dedicated to making sure all flagpoles in the Greater Toronto Area are flying the Maple Leaf.

Jagjeet Singh Hans, better known as professional wrestler Tiger Jeet Singh, was also on the list, along with Elsie Dandy, a 97-year-old Second World War vet, who still visits hospitals and schools to share her war experiences, and Inuit leader Nellie Cournoyea.

Kamookak’s work has gone far beyond researching the fate of the Franklin Expedition through Inuit eyes.

He has also gathered the original, Inuktitut place names for many of the hundreds of islands and landmarks around Gjoa Haven, the only settlement on King William Island, and the legends linked to them.

He’s lived an extraordinary life, born on the tundra, to a malnourished mother, in 1959. Like many Inuit, he was separated from his parents by government order to attend school.

He was with his extended family in the wilderness, on a caribou hunt, on a late summer day in 1969 when a float plane landed with a teacher, nurse and translator.

Kamookak was caring for his ill great-grandmother while his parents and older brother headed further inland in search of caribou. The group from the plane approached their tent and told Kamookak and his younger sister Rosie to come with them.

They weren’t allowed to wait for their parents to return and at least say goodbye. Kamookak and his sister ended up staying with relatives to attend a nearby school. Their elder brother was sent to a residential school far to the west in Inuvik.

The government’s goal was to westernize aboriginal people. Many suffered abuses, psychological and physical, that still traumatize them, their families and communities today.

Kamookak makes light of the odder moments, like struggling to learn the required words to get to a toilet before it was too late. Teachers wouldn’t let their Inuit pupils relieve themselves unless they asked permission in English, a foreign language.

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“We had to ask, ‘Please, may I go to the washroom?’ ” he recalled.

Kids who didn’t catch on quickly either had to hold it or let it flow at their seats.

As their English improved, the teacher taught them songs with a record player. Decades later, Kamookak can’t get one ditty that wormed its way into his mind out of his head.

“What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?” he sings, with a smile, as if it were yesterday. “I learned that our government must be strong. They’re always right and never wrong.”

Kamookak also can’t forget the number on his Eskimo Identification Canada, or E-tag, issued so that medical workers and other officials visiting from the south didn’t have to trouble themselves with Inuit names.

Each year, for the annual doctor’s visit, Kamookak’s mother pulled the dog tags out and hung one around each of her kids’ necks. He was E4826.

Inuit have a lot more reasons to resent the way they’ve been treated for generations. Suspicions of the south still run deep up here.

As a support teacher at the local school, Kamookak helps slow learners and kids with disabilities. He’s also trying to get more of the Inuit view of history into Nunavut school books.

He talks to a lot of young people who find it harder to be patriots, to love the flag that inspires so many fellow Canadians, as they grow older and lose faith in the future.

In a hamlet of some 1,200 people, most of those who have jobs work for the government, as teachers, health workers or as municipal workers that include truckers hauling water to homes, or sewage out, because there are no pipes.

With so few job opportunities in Gjoa Haven, most families depend on social assistance. And since most wages come from governments, people who don’t get a chance to earn a paycheque feel mistreated by governments that write them.

“They want a job,” Kamookak said. “They want to work. But there doesn’t seem to be any jobs. Maybe it’s their own fault that they didn’t further their education.

“But they see other people coming up (from the south) and working on construction, building schools or houses. Some people see that and feel they’re being left out.”

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