[RonPrice]

I used to live on Baffin Island in 1967. I'll add a little piece about my Canadian experience before I came to Australia at the age of 27.-Ron
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BAFFIN ISLAND: Part of a Diaspora

In late August of 1967 my first wife and I flew to Baffin Island where I took up my first teaching position; it was with the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. My wife, Judy, and I were the only Baha’is in what was then called the District of Franklin, the eastern section of the Canadian Arctic. This Faith, the Baha’i Faith, is the second most widespread religion on the planet and this has been due to people like my wife and I moving to remote regions on earth. My life and that of my wife, my first and my second wife, have been part of one immense and silent diaspora since the 19th century.

All of this region of Canada to which we moved in 1967 is now known as Nunavut. It is the largest and newest federal territory of Canada; it was separated officially from the Northwest Territories on April 1, 1999. In that first week of April 1999 I retired after 32 years in classrooms as a teacher and another 18 as a student. By then I was living in another remote region: Western Australia, a city which was arguably the most remote city on the planet.

That position on Baffin Island back in the 1960s was as a grade 3 teacher of 15 Inuit children in the town of Iqaluit at the edge of Frobisher Bay, a relatively large inlet of the Labrador Sea in Nunavut Canada. Iqaluit is located in the south-eastern corner of Baffin Island. My wife and I remained there for ten months until mid-June 1968. Then we returned to our home region in southern Ontario in the Golden Horseshoe.

This week I saw a 2008 film entitled The Necessities of Life.(1) The film was set in a hospital in Quebec City in 1952. The film utilized the then tuberculosis epidemic in the Canadian Arctic as its starting point. I won’t outline here the narrative of the film because readers here at this mobileread site can easily find that out if they are interested. This prose-poem, though, deals with my thoughts and feelings as I watched this film about Baffin Island, the first I’d seen--that was not a travelogue--since living there over forty years ago. -Ron Price with thanks to SBSTWO TV, 27 February 2012.

Frobisher Bay, due to the outlet glacier
during the Pleistocene glaciation which(1)
gouged the Bay's basin, now flooded by
the sea….And that English navigator Sir
Martin Frobisher, the Northwest Passage
in 1576, the first of the Europeans to visit
until Hall’s voyage in 1861…Then I came
100 years later for 10 months when I was
so young and just starting out in life…my
career and my marriage just beginning!!!!

Watching this film was like revisiting the
days gone by, my youth, a lifetime ago, so
much water under life’s bridge since then &
here I am now living at the other end of the
earth about as far away from the Inuit, & the
great freeze and whatever problems that those
Inuit cultures had & have in this 21st century.

(1) The last glacial period was the most recent within the current ice age. It occurred during the last years of the Pleistocene, from approximately 110,000 to 15,000 years ago. During this period there were several changes between glacier advance and retreat. The maximum extent of glaciation was approximately 18,000 years ago. While the general pattern of global cooling and glacier advance was similar, local differences in the development of glacier advance and retreat make it difficult to compare the details from continent to continent. Readers can google this subject if they are interested in glaciation and geology in general and how it applies to the Canadian Arctic in particular.

Ron Price
11/3/'12 to 9/1/'15.