The Experimental Eskimos

In the early 1960s the Canadian government conducted an experiment in social engineering. Three 12-year-old Inuit boys, Peter Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak and Eric Tagoona, were sent to live with White families in Ottawa, to be educated in White schools. The consequences for the boys, their families, their identity, and their culture were brushed aside. The bureaucrats who brought the boys South did not anticipate the outcome of their experiment. The boys grew up to become leaders of their people, and lifelong thorns in the side of the government. The battles they fought and won were instrumental in the establishment of aboriginal rights in Canada, and led to the creation of Nunavut, the world’s largest self-governing aboriginal territory. But it all came at enormous personal cost.