Step by Step

My grandpa gave one of the Stewarts some trade goods and sent him up to where Aklavik is now. He sent a tent. By selling fur, that tent became Aklavik.

He had another place along the Arctic Coast near Tuktoyaktuk, called Kittigazuit. My dad was only a teenager when he was put in charge of Kittigazuit. He didn't stay the winter. That was too much for him, so he hitched up his dog team at Christmas time and came back to MacPherson. Grandpa said, "I'm not surprised. I thought you might have come back a little earlier.

This was a time when tuberculosis was rampant, and we lost a lot of people. My brother Frank had to stay in hospital for a year because he had tuberculosis. I had to spend almost a year in bed at home because the doctor didn't know if I had tuberculosis or not. They had just started doing x-ray work amongst the people. The doctor said, "Put the boy to bed and I'll see him when I get back." He never came back.

My dad was a strict old man, but after a few months, he gave in. I put my clothes on and I joined my buddies. I never did know whether I had tuberculosis or not.

I have a very homemade education. I never saw the inside of a school until I was 12 years old. I was only there for about a year and a half and then I left and went and tried to learn how to be a trapper. I had to teach myself.

Then I joined the Hudson's Bay and went into an apprenticeship. I had to learn all the trades of the Bay: fur bailing, merchandising, accounting and Morse code. We did the telegraph using Morse code. They taught me a lot. I became the manager of the Hudson's Bay at Arctic Red River, now Tsiigehtchic.

When I started with the Hudson's Bay Company, one of my first jobs was to make fur bales. I remember bailing thousands of muskrats. I did the bale up the way it's supposed to be, and I wrote in black pen to the Hudson Bay Company, Fur Sales Department, 465 Dorchester Street, Montreal, Quebec. I wrote that address on one bale after another.

One year, fur prices were going up. The Hudson Bay Company hired a big airplane, went up, picked up the fur bales, took them back to Montreal, make lots of money. So when the fur business was good for the Hudson Bay, it was good for the people.

The Department of Education from Alberta had a correspondence school. I did my correspondence classes at night, after work. I think I went to Grade 10 or 11. I would do my lessons and put it in the mail and send it back.

But I couldn't follow all the rules. Like you had to have an exam before a certain date and there were times in the early winter and in the spring when there was no mail service. There was no telephone. So I couldn't go by the rules.

I flew for almost 20 years in the Arctic. I fell out of the sky once. And two minutes earlier I would have been dead. The plane had just reached the Mackenzie River and the engine quit. I sent out a call: Mayday, mayday. That plane went down and I put it on the water. Within an hour there was somebody there to help me.

After I became a pilot, I spent much of my time flying Dene and Metis leaders to communities along the Mackenzie Valley. They would hold meetings and discuss how they should pursue their land claims.

In the 1960s, Indigenous leaders in the north received a lot of support from the Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada. After I had spent a couple of years flying the leaders to meetings in the communities, the Indian-Eskimo Association asked me to open their office in Yellowknife.

I rented a small office. I bought a desk, a chair, a typewriter - and a brand new Cessna 185 aircraft. That was the important thing - to build a movement in the communities of the north.

One day I got a call from Ottawa, asking if I would be interested in running for the New Democratic Party in the riding in the Northwest Territories. I didn't want to leave my life as a bush pilot, so I said: 'No thank you.'

But I couldn't stop thinking about that invitation. Maybe we would reach our goals faster if we had a voice in Ottawa. So the next day I called them back and said: "Sure, I'll toss my name in the hat."