Sam often said Mother loved him better than she loved her, Sharon mused, as she watched the officers working behind the glass in the waiting area.
Marge Gully, 92, was Sharon’s mom, Sam’s adopted mother and Grandma to everyone else.
Grandma gave Sam two things he needed — a safe place to stay in the big white house, and a special place in her wise old heart. Sam thrived, got back to his carving.
Sharon shifted in her seat, trying to push aside the growing fear that time was running out. What was taking so long behind the steel doors?
In her heart, Sharon knew she could not abandon Sam. He was her mother’s legacy to her.
Besides, she had spent most of her professional life bringing people like Sam back to productive, happier lives. An occupational therapist with a specialty in mental health, a professor at the University of Alberta, internationally respected in her field, Sharon knew what was possible — and what could hold people back.
She knew that Samwillie Amarualik and his troubles were also a Canadian legacy, the fallout of this country’s misguided policy to forcibly relocate a handful of Inuit families from Quebec into the High Arctic to assert Canadian sovereignty near the North Pole.
Sam’s parents were relocated with their older children. The youngest in the family, Sam was born 10 years later in Resolute (then in the Northwest Territories, now Nunavut) into a family struggling to survive, still trying to find its place. That became Sam’s journey too, and he ended up in Edmonton searching for place to put down his own roots.
A talented artist, smart and engaging, Sam could make it, Sharon figured, and white society owed him a chance.
It took the federal government more than 50 years to apologize for the “relocation” of the families, on Aug. 19, 2010. Sam didn’t think much of the apology.
Relocation might better be called dislocation. People lost their bearings, physically and psychologically.
Finally, Sam came through the two sets of locked, steel doors into the waiting area, anxious, a little agitated, with one question. “When’s the service for Mother?”
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Sam always called himself an Eskimo, a point of pride. That’s what his people were called in 1953, when the Canadian government took 19 families from their homes in northern Quebec and dropped them off 1,200 kilometres farther north at Resolute Bay and Grise Fjord. A second group was moved in 1955. Promises of a better life, more game for hunters, turned out to be false. Sam’s parents and older siblings were left in tents in a land of 24-hour darkness they’d never before experienced — at temperatures 20 degrees colder than they were used to. They almost starved the first winter.
A couple of years later, the government moved Sam’s family to Resolute, site of an RCMP station. In doing so, it broke a promise to the families that they could go back to their homes in Quebec if they wished.
Like many Inuit families in Resolute in the 1950s and 60s, Sam’s was hungry and destitute. Sam often described how his mother would go to the white man’s dump — as other families did — in search of for food but always were turned away by the RCMP.
Sam was born in 1965, into a complicated life.
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Marge Gully lived in a gracious old white house with magnificent gardens in an old Edmonton neighbourhood. The matriarch of the block, Grandma always had a warm hug, a firm opinion and plenty of treats for the kids next door.
After her husband retired in the 1970s, the couple took in handicapped children. When the old Michener Centre in Red Deer finally emptied out — ending an era of institutionalization — dozens of disabled kids needed homes and Grandma took some in.
Her special talent with these children was soon widely known. She knew how to bring out the best, love without judgment and advocate for their services.
For her work fostering special needs children, Grandma was nominated for Edmonton’s Women of Distinction awards.
When she got older, in her 80s, Grandma needed help with the big old house. Sam fit the bill. The two met in August 2007 at Heritage Days. Grandma’s longtime friend Dean Brown, who also stayed at the big old house, introduced the two of them.
Dean ran Edmonton’s Native Friendship Centre and took Grandma to sweats and powwows, and made her a special guest at the native pavilion at Heritage Days. Dean called her “Mother” too — a maternal spirit for himself and also because she had fostered one of Dean’s brothers, a handicapped boy from the Michener Centre.
When Dean moved out to his own place in 2007, he recommended Sam as a handyman.
Sam, short, stocky and strong, was living on the street at the time, mostly in a hidden spot near the High Level Bridge, and helping out at Heritage Days. He and Grandma struck up a conversation there on a summer afternoon.
Marge Gully sensed a special connection with Sam, a damaged soul looking for a better path.
“You’re coming home with me,” she said.
“My mother makes up her own mind,” says Sharon, who watched as this intriguing friendship unfolded between the feisty, 89-year-old matriarch and fortysomething Inuit man.
The two became devoted to each other. Grandma called him “Sammy” and he called her “Mother” or “ Mom.”
Sam began to get his bearings in the big old house. He painted, did repairs, shovelled snow. He got a job stocking shelves at a wine store nearby that lasted almost three years.
He started carving again, a skill he learned from his uncle years before in the North, an activity that grounded him. He and Grandma would sit in the sun in the backyard while he carved chunks of soapstone into northern creature, musk ox, seals, hunters.
The man from the frozen tundra also learned new skills, like growing vegetables and helping with Grandma’s award winning flower gardens.
Grandma and he also spent hours playing cribbage. Sam was a whiz at crossword puzzles and especially loved the New York Times crosswords.
Sam soon became part of the Brintnell extended family.
When Grandma became gravely ill, as she did in 2009, Sam would sleep on the floor near her in case she needed anything in the night.
“Sam was devoted to Mother,” says Sharon. “He and my mother shared some special things.”
Both felt abandoned by their mothers. Grandma’s mother left her as a small girl with grandparents in Europe and came to Canada to start a new life. “The resentment never left my mother,” says Sharon.
As the baby of the family, Sam was particularly close to his mother who protected him from troubles close to home. When she died of cancer, he was bereft.
Sharon travelled a lot, as her international responsibilities in occupational therapy grew. While on the road, she kept in touch with Sam and her mother through e-mail.
Sharon was in Chile in April 2010 when Sam wrote an e-mail that captured his special relationship with Grandma. She had recently passed away; Sam was feeling the loss and opened his heart to Sharon.
“Words are hard to say what I feel about you and gratitude cannot be written in words, I was so fortunate to meet you people and for that I will always have fond memories of you and Mom,” Sam wrote.
“I have one favour to ask that you take me, when Mom is in the ground, so that I might put some flowers on her grave, whenever that happens. I have never known love that you and Mom have shown me, probably did not deserve it. I tried to give it back but it seems to always come out the wrong way.”
Love,
Samwillie Thomasie Amarualik.
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Things weren’t always smooth in the big white house. When things came out “the wrong way,” as Sam put it, there was usually a bottle involved. Sam all his life struggled with alcohol addiction. For months, he’d be clean, productive and busy. Then he’d go on a binge, drink himself into a dark space. He was an angry, loud drunk, railing against injustice, the white man and at the people close to him. He had his own deep prejudices, a hatred of gays (he mistakenly believed they were responsible for sex abuse he saw happen to his friends).
Once, in an agitated state, he destroyed some of his carvings in the backyard. A couple of times police were called to the big white house.
Sam knew full well when he had stepped over the line with his drunken behaviour. On those occasions, he’d sometimes take himself back onto the street, away from those he loved. In the frigid dead of winter, he’d go back to the High Level bridge. He didn’t stay long, though. He found it much more dangerous on the street than it used to be.
In summer of 2008, Sharon thought things got worse for Sam after he suffered two serious head injuries. He was hit by a taxi late at night and was left with a deep gash on his head. A few weeks later, he was mugged on 124th Street near home. Two people ganged up on him, hit him with a metal pipe and split his head open badly.
After that, Sam had terrible headaches and had more trouble controlling his emotions when he was drunk, Sharon noted. She got him into a psychiatrist who prescribed medication to control his mood swings.
“He had so many emotional black holes,” thought Sharon, who often bore the brunt of Sam’s anger over the telephone.
Still, Grandma always took Sam back home. In her day, she had handled lots of people with anti-social behaviours and had brought them around, improved their lives.
But one night, Sam made Grandma very angry and afraid.
It was July 29, 2008, about supper time when Marge Gully came across the yard and over to the neighbours.
Sam was drunk, she said, waving around a knife, yelling, damaged a TV, broke a window. Grandma was also terribly afraid Sam was going to kill himself.
Sharon was out of town, but she sent her son over to pick up Grandma.
“I knew Sam would never harm her,” Sharon recalled later.
But she also knew Sam had to get serious about dealing with his demons and his addiction to alcohol.
Sam agreed. He didn’t want to lose his new found family.
A month later, Sam got into Henwood residential treatment program in Edmonton and made good progress. A year later, October, 2009, a determined Sam went into Poundmaker Lodge, a native treatment centre, for a second effort to fight his addiction.
In his work books, Sam wrote with great insight about the demons that followed him from Resolute, to Edmonton — abuse by a violent, drunken family member, the early loss of his father, fights and shootings in the community, drugs and alcohol (he sniffed gasoline as a kid), sexual abuse that happened to his friends, death of a sibling, not fitting in wherever he went.
“The things I remember the most is alcohol and violence,” he wrote at Poundmaker, describing his early childhood.
“I know and believe that these were the years that have stayed with me over the last 35 years, and weigh heavy on me. I remember this was about the time my brother started coming home drunk.
“What is amazing to me is that I am doing exactly the same behaviour (to Grandma and family) and I am afraid of this.
“ (Grandma’s) family are a family that I never had and I regret that they saw and experienced and felt my anger and resentments for they most certainly did not deserve it.”
Dean Brown, who still visited Sam and Grandma, saw in Sam the shadows of his own struggle with alcohol.
What put Dean on a straight path was getting in touch with his aboriginal culture. He thought Sam needed to do the same.
But Sam wasn’t sure. There are few Inuit in Edmonton and the community was very divided. Sam was incensed that they still carried destructive tribal differences with them down south.
Still, Dean didn’t give up on his friend. “I figured if I could make it, Sam could make it.”
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To understand where Sam’s troubles began, you have to go to Resolute. It just so happens that someone from Edmonton met Sam there when he was 20 years old.
In 1986, Shannon Gadowksy was a University of Alberta student looking for adventure. She found a job in Resolute, NWT, a village of 110 people. Shannon worked for an outfitter who also ran a bed and breakfast and catered to North Pole expeditions and adventurers. Sam worked there too.
In the small village, almost entirely Inuit with less than a dozen white people, two cultures clashed. Sam’s generation still went out on the land hunting for weeks. When they returned, they would find pop and chips at the local Hudson Bay and frozen chickens at the co-op food store.
The RCMP was a constant presence, a force for stability and order but also to be feared when things got out of hand. Boredom was a big problem for young people, recalls Shannon, and boredom and booze were a bad mix.
She was also surprised to learn the depth of tribal divisions that plagued the community.
Sam grew up speaking and writing Inuktitut and later learned to read and write English. After a stint in residential high school, he returned to Resolute and did a variety of jobs. He ran the co-op store, worked at the weather station, took courses, took care of kids.
Sam loved going out on the land, and he filled his freezer with seal meat. He ate one meal a day and hacked off a piece of frozen fish in his freezer.
Shannon, training to be a dietitian, wanted to know how Sam navigated two worlds, to know everything about traditional diet and way of life. Sam was happy to explain.
Resolute was Canada’s most northerly international airport, so it was a key supply base and communications centre for polar expeditions. That year, there were three, including a French man, Jean-Louse Etienne who successfully completed a solo trip to the North Pole on skis. Media arrived in big numbers too.
Shannon, upset at one rather insensitive newspaper reporter, declared that her friend Sam would challenge this reporter to a game of Scrabble. “This won’t take long,” the reporter muttered, she recalled.
The Inuit handily beat the highly paid wordsmith, she recalled, and gracefully declined a rematch.
But the worst of western culture had quickly made its way north too. Drugs and alcohol took a terrible toll on village life, caused fights.
“We’d talk about the relocation a lot, it was the crux of so much in his life, the tribal warfare, the broken promises, the broken hearts of his parents,” she recalls.
At the end of the summer season, Shannon came back to Edmonton to finish her degree. But the two stayed in close touch for years through letters and phone calls.
Then, about ten years later, Sam had another drastic relocation — this time to Kingston penitentiary.
Shannon, (then Rutherford, her married name) was working in Ontario, when Sam called and asked her to come visit him in jail. The story of the crime is bit murky. It started when someone stole Sam’s beer in Resolute, he would later explain. It ended with the police surrounding him in the family home, Sam sitting inside with a rifle. When the police moved in, Sam fired and hit an officer in the leg. He went to jail for six years.
“I don’t know how he survived time in the penitentiary,” said Shannon.
When he got out of prison, Sam asked to be released in Edmonton. He knew he could not go back to Resolute. That would only mean more trouble.
He was let out of jail with a few dollars, no family, no support, no help to make a new life in a strange city. He got jobs as a roofer, framed houses, did carpentry, all sorts of odd jobs. He made money and lost it, had apartments, girlfriends, lost them.
During this time, Sam lived long periods of time on the street. He was stuck in that cycle — until he connected with Dean Brown at the Native Friendship Centre — and Grandma in 2007.
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In late 2009, Grandma’s health was quickly deteriorating. Sam was away in Poundmaker lodge getting treatment for alcoholism. A new person came to the big white house to help take care of Grandma. Sam was jealous and didn’t like being replaced as her caretaker and especially didn’t like this new person (who was gay).
Sam came home Dec. 29 from Poundmaker and the helper was slated to move out the next day. But Sam couldn’t leave it alone. He yelled at the man and shoved him. Terrified, the man called police and wanted to lay charges. Six officers came to the big old house and took Sam off to jail, no bail granted.
That’s how Sharon ended up going to Ft. Saskatchewan that January night, waiting to get Sam out of jail.
Sam knew he’d messed up at the house. He knew Grandma was fading fast and worried about her.
“When Mum goes, what’s the point,” he told Sharon in an early January jailhouse visit.
On Jan. 11, 2010, Grandma died peacefully at home, not having seen her Sammy again.
Sharon waited three days to tell Sam, worried about how he’d cope.
“I finally told him Jan. 15,” she recalled. “He just cried and cried.”
She hired a lawyer and managed to spring Sam for the memorial service. Years before, he had missed saying goodbye to his own mother. He couldn’t miss a second goodbye.
The memorial service at Robertson-Wesley United Church was packed. Sam sat with the Brintnell family, sombre and composed. Later, he helped at the reception at the big old house.
That night he stayed alone at Grandma’s empty house and drank. “He knew he was alone now, no more Grandma,” recalls Sharon.
So Sharon took Sam under her wing. For much of 2010, they spent a lot of time together. Sam worked for Sharon at the family cottage, finishing furniture, helping to build a coach house, and carving.
“He became another son to me,” Sharon recalls, noting that her own two forty-something boys were just a few years older than Sam.
“I always wanted to preserve a place for him, where he could call home. There was always a room at the cottage called Sam’s room.”
While Sam loved Sharon too, the tension between them at times was acute. Sam would leave angry phone calls for his “university professor friend ” that he would later regret.
Other times, he was full of gratitude and fun to be with.
Then it came time to sell Grandma’s big white house. Sam would need a new place to stay, she knew. “I knew it was all about getting him a place of his own.”
Thanks to the federal relocation settlement, Sam had some cash and they put it toward setting up an apartment. Sam got his resume ready and soon had job offers.
“Things were looking up,” said Sharon.
Dean Brown heard that Edmonton Inuit Friendship Centre was looking for someone to teach drumming and carving. Dean urged Sam to apply. Sam got the job and was ready to start in April.
He almost made it.
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Late March, things unexpectedly took a bad turn. Strong-as-an-ox Sam suddenly got sick. Sitting in his apartment, Sam felt a heaviness creep into his chest, settle deep inside and pull him down.
On Wednesday March 23, just past midnight, he knew he needed help and called an ambulance. At the University Hospital emergency ward, doctors diagnosed pneumonia. They gave Sam heavy pain killers, oxycotin, and antibiotics, and sent him home in the early morning.
Back at the apartment, Sam felt terrible and knew he had to talk to Sharon. He called several times and finally they connected. On Thursday, she took him to breakfast, fill his prescriptions and spend some time. She saw him Friday and Saturday too.
On Sunday, Sam called several times to talk to his brother in Resolute. But the brother, who had at times supported Sam in his tough days, refused to take the call. He thought Sam had been drinking because he slurred his words.
Monday, Sharon went to the apartment and knocked on the door. No answer. “The apartment superintendent would not let me in,” she recalled. But maybe Sam was out, busy or just not answering for some reason. She left a note.
She went back Tuesday. On Wednesday, with dread in her heart, she insisted the superintendent open the door.
The shock was terrible. Sam lay on the floor, facing the television, the phone by his side, a pillow nearby. He was stone cold.
“I said, ‘Call the police.’ ”
They came later with a medical examiner, who commented as he was leaving: “So, when did he come to this country?”
A bolt of anger shot through Sharon. “This is his community, he is an Eskimo,” she replied, curtly.
That comment, that insult, is partly why he is lying on the floor, she thought, displaced, unrecognized in his own country.
Dean Brown was shocked too at Sam’s death.
“He was winning and I think the job would have saved him. It was just what he needed to be a success.”
Then after a few moments, Dean added.
“I hope he’s found a good place and settled in.”
That is Sharon’s hope too. She got in touch with Sam’s brother in Resolute and organized to have the body shipped back north. Fifteen months after Grandma died, Sam was gone too.
Sam made the last leg of his journey alone. But his remarkable strength and spirit reside in the hearts of those he touched here.
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