Peter Ittinuar often feels like a man caught between two worlds.
Born in Chesterfield Inlet in 1950, he was brought up doing all the things that Inuit kids do: learning to tend fishing nets and how to hunt. He got his first seal at age six and his first caribou a year later.
"I was a boy of the country," says the Brantford resident. "I was being taught to be an Eskimo."
There was great social change in the Arctic in the 1950s and 1960s. The Canadian government was unsure what to do with the Inuit, but needed to start developing policies on housing, infrastructure, transportation and education for its northern-most citizens.
At odds about whether to build schools in the north or bring Inuit children into the southern education system, Ittinuar says the government decided to conduct an "experiment" that would change his life.
Around 1960, Ittinuar says the federal government began performing IQ tests on Inuit children. Only the best and the brightest would be plucked from their home communities and sent to live with families in southern Ontario where they would get a public education and all the trappings of a middle-class life.
By that time, Ittinuar and his family had moved to Rankin Inlet where his father had found work as a miner. Unlike many Inuit children at the time, Ittinuar - and his best friend Eric Tagoona, whose father was the first Inuit Anglican minister in Canada - had plenty of books in their homes and were encouraged to read and write.
The boys scored high on their intelligence tests and were selected to be part of a "social engineering experiment by the Canadian government, designed to assimilate them into mainstream white society," says Barry Greenwald, the director of the documentary, The Experimental Eskimos.
The story of Ittinuar, Tagoona and Zebedee Nungak, another Inuit boy who joined them in Ottawa, is the topic of Greenwald's film which was shown at this year's Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto and, more recently, at DocFest Stratford.
"It was a different time," said Greenwald in a telephone interview from his Toronto home. "I think the government had good intentions that went sort of wrong."
Ittinuar says his was not a residential school experience. He was
not abused or mistreated, but says he and the other Inuit children who were part of this government "pilot project" did pay a price.
"When I left in '62 at the age of 12, I had no trepidation. I had seen a lot of movies where there were trampolines, people eating ice cream -- a Dick and Jane life. Naively, I was looking forward to it."
Ittinuar and Tagoona were picked up in a four-engine plane in Rankin Inlet in August 1962 and taken to Ottawa. In Teach an Eskimo How to Read, a book of conversations with Ittinuar published last year, he says "our parents were not really asked about this. They were just told."
Ittinuar and Tagoona lived with a foster family in the Ottawa suburbs. Ittinuar says the family was told to teach the boys manners and etiquette and to enrol them in sports and other extracurricular activities. Ittinuar became a judo champion and outstanding student.
But it wasn't long before the boys began to miss their families and friends in their alien environment. There was no radio or telephone service in the Far North at the time, so their only contact with their families was through the occasional letter.
The boys spent their summers back in Rankin Inlet, but weren't prepared for the reception they'd receive at home. Ittinuar describes it in a passage from Teach an Eskimo How to Read:
"When you reached 14, 15, and 16 and you went back up North, that's when the real marginalization and alienation started. You were not really white, and you were not really Inuit. You were either in between or you were both. We felt both, but neither side accepted us as both."
While the boys received a good education and opportunities they might not otherwise have had, they eventually lost their own language and culture.
Ittinuar, sitting in the Brantford office of the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs where he is stationed once a week, taking a break from his daily commute to Toronto, says it "became more uncomfortable to be home than to be in Ottawa with my foster family."
The "Experimental Eskimos" went on to successful careers. "Ittinuar, Nungak and Tagoona were all instrumental in the establishment of aboriginal rights and the creation of Nunavut, the world's largest self-governed aboriginal territory," said Greenwald. "Their role in the fight for aboriginal self-determination took place during the great period of constitutional reform that defined Canada."
Ittinuar, who graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa with a political-science degree, became, at 29, the first Inuit MP.
But with the public success, says Ittinuar, came personal pain for himself, Nungak and Tagoona: failed marriages and relationships, substance abuse, run-ins with the law, anger. Tagoona is now a recluse who hasn't left his home community in more than a decade.
How much of a role the childhood "experiment" played in their personal problems Ittinuar isn't sure.
"Zebedee has said that he never regretted the experience, but he's never gotten over it, either."
Ittinuar is one of a group of Inuit taking the federal government to court in a lawsuit that seeks acknowledgement and redress for their unwitting participation in the federal government's little-known educational plan. He says that they may get a hearing early next year.