An Apology Written In Stone

On Easter Monday in 1959, at the end of the community Easter church service in Hebron, Labrador's northernmost settlement, it was announced by the head of the Moravian church in Labrador and government officials in attendance that day, that the government, the church, and the International Grenfell Association, would all be withdrawing their services from the community.

The school would be closed, there would be no health care available, doctors would no longer come to the community, the government store would be closed and the church too.

The mountains, they said, were too high for planes to fly over, and Hebron was too far for ships to bring supplies. Boats would soon arrive to take people to their new homes.

In all, fifty-eight families compromising some 300 Inuit were taken from their homes in Hebron and relocated to Nain, Hopedale, Makkovik, and North West River.

When the government decided who was going where, family members were separated. And when the people arrived at their destinations, they found themselves living with unfamiliar cultures whose customs they didn’t know, in unfamiliar lands where they didn’t know the best places to hunt or fish.

Like so many Inuit before them who had been uprooted from their homes by government decree and relocated somewhere more convenient for the government, they were lost.

In January 2005, Danny Williams, the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, apologized for the way in which the decision to relocate people was made, and for the hardship and difficulties experienced by the Inuit who were forced from their land and their homes.

Andrea Webb, on behalf of the Hebron Committee, accepted the provincial apology.

Today, 50 years after the relocation, on the site where the Hebron school once stood, a stone monument inscribed with Williams’ apology was unveiled. This unveiling will, I hope, mark another step on the journey of healing, closure and reconciliation that the survivors and families of this sad chapter in Canadian history have been working toward since 1959.

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