Artifact #3: A.G. Mackinnon's Letter Advocating for the 'Eskimo Disc System'

Citation: Found in [Social Development Division, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. Eskimo Identification and Disc Numbers: A Brief History. By A. Barry Roberts. Catalogue no. R5-303/1975E-PDF. Ottawa, ON: Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, 1975, pg. 5-6. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.839051/publication.html]

Label:

To the left is a transcribed letter from May 1935 made out to the Department of the Interior by Dr. A. G. Mackinnon, the medical officer of Pangnirtung, NWT. In the letter, Mackinnon advocates strongly for a mandatory Inuit identification disk in replacement of traditional Inuit names.  As Mackinnon put it, the phonetic translation of Inuit names to English would be impractical as, “The native cannot get his sounding mechanism around the letter R at the first of the word.” while conversely the, “… novelty of [the identity disk] would appeal to the natives.”  The ironies of these statements coming from someone who himself could not understand the phonetics of a separate culture are not lost, but instead a blatant example of an ethnocentric mindset which was, at the time, still rampant in the minds of many Canadians towards Indigenous cultures.  Indeed, this sense of cultural superiority was crucial for government officials to view Inuit people more as chess pieces on a board than human individuals, and while it is true that Mackinnon likely represents some of the worst from his time, the prevalence of Indigenous racism in Canada remains important to the context of the High Arctic Relocation.

Bibliography:

Social Development Division, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. Eskimo Identification and Disc Numbers: A Brief History. By A. Barry Roberts. Catalogue no. R5-303/1975E-PDF. Ottawa, ON: Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, 1975. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.839051/publication.html]