NATIVE MINERS

It is 1960 and the federal government is wringing its hands over what to do with the Inuit it had moved to Rankin Inlet, on the west coast of Hudson Bay, from the central Arctic. Suddenly, the bureaucrats have a brainstorm. North Rankin Nickel Mines at Rankin needs workers. The displaced Inuit from Back’s River need work. Ergo, make miners out of them!

Never mind that the Back’s River people are the last truly primitive Inuit left in the Canadian Arctic. Never mind that their contact with the rest of the world, until now, has been an annual dogsled trip to Gjoa Haven, 160 km north, to trade furs for a bit of flour, tea, tobacco and cloth, plus annual visits by air from the rcmp, the Anglican bishop of the Arctic and a Health and Welfare medical team. Everyone (except the Inuit themselves) knows the Inuk to be a natural mechanical genius. Another problem solved.

The disaster of North Rankin Nickel — thrusting people unfamiliar with the wheel, much less the internal combustion engine, into a high-tech industry and expecting them to succeed overnight — has colored government and industry thinking about mining and northern native employment ever since. Yet, ironically, mining today is starting to be recognized as one of the North’s few answers to the horrendous problem of unemployment among its Dene and Inuit people. There has been considerable pressure from the government to persuade northern employers to hire natives of the region. But it has been the mining industry — for decades considered the rapers, pillagers and polluters of the pristine north — that has made that effort work.

Today, the showplace of successful native employment in northern mining is Echo Bay Mines’ Lupin gold operation. Situated 375 km northeast of Yellowknife. Lupin has two 16-person, rotating shifts of Inuit employees from Coppermine and is considering adding a third.

John Arvaluk of Coppermine is lead hand on the night shift surface crew and the mine’s longest-serving employee. He arrived at Lupin in 1979 as a carpenter, when work on the mine began, joined the company later that year and has been there ever since. The Lupin Inuit crews aren’t just laborers, either. They include the mine’s payroll clerk, a journeyman electrician, millwrights, mechanics and heavy equipment operators, as well as apprentices. And turnover has been so low that two of Arvaluk’s sons have been waiting two years for Lupin jobs to open up. (A third son is working in the mill there now.)

Lupin is a fly-in mine with a 2-week rotation. A chartered Twin Otter from Yellowknife flies one crew home to Coppermine and picks up the incoming crew every second Tuesday. “We never have to worry about one of our Coppermine guys missing the plane,” says Personnel Manager, Doug Willy. “They’re among the most conscientious workers we have and they’re first-rate employees.”

Like every major company operating in the Northwest Territories today, Lupin has had to offer a so-called northern benefits package as a condition of its operating licence. That package covers such things as compensation to trappers for damage done on traplines, but its basic requirement is a company guarantee to give qualified northerners preference in hiring.

But Lupin, remembering the example of Rankin Inlet, did not commit itself to hiring a specific percentage of northerners. Instead, it launched a selective recruiting program, seeking out native people who were already familiar with the wage economy. That strategy has worked. Lupin’s payroll clerk, for example, is Coppermine’s former secretary-treasurer. Many of its other Inuit employees, John Arvaluk included, have worked previously in oil and gas exploration.

Lupin’s 2-week rotation has paid off, too. Workers such as electrician Paul Elgok of Coppermine have the best of two worlds: the good pay offered by mining and the chance to retain their own skills and traditional ways by hunting and trapping on their two weeks off.

Where Lupin mastered the treacherous waters of native employment, the Nanisivik lead/zinc mine on the northwestern tip of Baffin Island foundered early. The federal government was a partner in the operation and was determined to show that Rankin Inlet had been just an unfortunate accident. The government insisted that Nanisivik be planned as a long-term operation with annual production limited to ensure a mine life of up to 20 years and that, within three years, 60% of its employees be Inuit. The Inuit settlement of Arctic Bay, 18 km north and with a population of 500, was assured that it would share in the benefits of the operation when construction began in 1974. That, as it turned out, was a case of terrible semantics.

“The only benefits with which the people of Arctic Bay were familiar were government benefits,” says Jim Marshall, vice-president of Strathcona Mineral Services, the consulting company to Mineral Resources International which operates the Nanisivik mine. “So they expected the whole community would benefit, since government benefits are universal. Unfortunately, the word “benefits” means something else in private enterprise; it means opportunities for those who are willing to take advantage of them.

“There are people in Arctic Bay who’ve grasped the opportunity the mine offers and done very well. And there have been many others who have done nothing and have received nothing.”

That initial misunderstanding was compounded when residents of Arctic Bay who weren’t working at the mine complained to welfare officers that their neighbors could afford new snowmobiles, stereos and furniture. Welfare officials didn’t want Arctic Bay divided into “have” and “have-not” factions. So welfare rates were raised to the point where a man working at the mine was earning perhaps only $50 per week more than his neighbor on welfare, who trapped and hunted at his leisure.

That was the end of the 60% employment dream. “There hardly can be an able-bodied man in Arctic Bay who hasn’t worked for Nanisivik at one time or another, but now we’re hiring Inuit from all over the eastern and central Arctic,” Marshall says.

But, he insists, Nanisivik isn’t the employment failure its detractors make it out to be. “We’ve maintained 25% to 30% of our workforce as northerners since production began. We have 35 people from the immediate area on the payroll now, half of them living in Nanisivik, and we’re using people from Clyde, Pond Inlet and Igloolik, too.”

Joshua Kango is Nanisivik’s outstanding success story. Kango had worked as a roughneck with Panarctic Oils before he went to Nanisivik in 1974. He became a heavy equipment operator there and stayed with the mine for seven years. Joshua was industrious and his wife Natsiq Alainga knew how to handle money. So when Joshua’s brother, who ran a small canteen in Arctic Bay, wanted to sell the business and work at the mine, Joshua had had enough saved to buy the business.

The original canteen is now a mini-department store and part of a Far Northern commercial empire known as the Enokseot (“for Inuit”) Company. Enokseot owns and operates Arctic Bay’s only hotel, the 9-room Enokseot Hotel, Enokseot Taxi (a contract commuter service for Arctic Bay miners and regular cab company), a snowmobile sales and service outlet, video rental agencies and a Cape Island boat for tourist and commercial charters. The company also holds the community pol (petroleum, oil and lubricants) distribution contract and acts as agent for First Air, the regional carrier. Understandably, Joshua Kango is one Inuk who thinks mining is a good thing.

Both Arvaluk and Kango had worked in other industries before entering mining. By contrast, George Chocolate of Rae-Edzo, 100 km northwest of Yellowknife, and Benny Jeremickca of Lac la Martre, 160 km northwest, had been trapping and hunting most of their lives when they applied for work at Neptune Resources’ Colomac mine construction project. As required by government, Neptune has agreed to hire native workers when its gold property on Steeves Lake, northeast of Rae-Edzo, goes into production next March. But it has taken Lupin’s approach one step further.

Pcl Constructors (Northern) of Yellowknife has the construction contract for Colomac. It agreed to hire, wherever possible, northern workers and to insist sub-contractors do the same. Neither Chocolate, 26, nor Jeremickca, 45, has had much schooling; like many young Dene of their era, they grew up on the trapline with their parents. But there were plenty of jobs available with pcl, which required more muscle than formal education, and both were signed on — Chocolate to work on the gravel-crusher and Jeremickca as a pipe-fitter’s helper.

Chocolate started work last fall and, proving reliable, was subsequently promoted to the pipe-fitting crew, which will be on-site until next February. And Neptune, which has kept track of people like Chocolate and Jeremickca, will offer both men production jobs a month later.

Chocolate was collecting unemployment insurance benefits when he first was hired. Determined that his two young children would get the education he had missed, Chocolate moved into the community so they could attend school. He had found odd jobs there, but his future was bleak until Colomac came along. If everything works out as planned, Chocolate will buy a house which, to most unskilled northerners living in low-rent government housing, is only a dream. And thanks to the 2-week rotation, he still will enjoy trapping and hunting.

Jeremickca, on the other hand, isn’t so sure he wants to work for Neptune when the construction is finished. He likes pipe-fitting and, like Chocolate, trapping. He figures he can earn $20,000 per year trapping, enough for a comfortable life in Lac la Martre. Nearly twice the age of Chocolate, he is cautious about changing his way of life.

Polaris, the lead/zinc producer on Little Cornwallis Island, is Canada’s most northerly metal mine. In the early going, it was plagued with native staff turnover as well. A longer rotation (10 weeks in, three out; now nine and three) didn’t help, but it costs Polaris a fortune to fly its crews in and out by commercial airlines. The company pays crew-members’ fares to the Canadian airport nearest to their homes ($1,560 to Montreal, $1,170 to Edmonton). A shorter rotation would send costs skyrocketing.

Northern mines do not hire native workers out of altruism or because governments insist they do; hiring northerners makes economic sense. For Polaris, successful native recruitment meant lower transportation costs and a workforce inured to Arctic isolation and bitter, 8-month winters.

But Polaris had a problem experienced by neither Nanisivik nor Rankin Inlet: with no convenient pool of labor nearby, the mine turned to the rest of the Northwest Territories for workers. There were plenty of applicants, but far too many worked just one rotation and just never returned. Polaris tried to solve the problem by allowing Inuit and Dene workers a shorter rotation (six in, four out) than that offered to non-natives. But few natives took advantage of that scheme because they quickly discovered it meant less pay. As far as government and the public were concerned, Polaris was quickly added to the list of failures as a native employer.

Yet it wasn’t and isn’t. “We’ve had as many as 75 native northerners on the payroll at a given time,” says Rick Luciani, now with Cominco Ltd. (the mine’s owners) in Montreal, but until last year personnel manager at Polaris. “And some of those people have been with us for six years. I thought it would be difficult for us ever to get into an apprenticeship program at Polaris. But our success rate was 80% and some of those people are still working with us as journeymen tradesmen.”

James Beaulieu of Yellowknife is one of them. Besides being a fully qualified mill operator, Beaulieu is 18 months into a new apprenticeship as a heavy equipment mechanic. Once he has his mechanic’s papers, Beaulieu says, he’ll probably try to move back to Yellowknife and find work at either the Nerco Con or Giant Yellowknife gold operations. Both Yellowknife mines have long-term native employees, but neither has succeeded on the scale of other northern mines.

The reason for that, says Nerco Con’s personnel manager Grant Horseman, is simple: Native people in Yellowknife have job opportunities that just aren’t available in smaller communities. Fortunately, in those smaller centres as in Yellowknife, mining is there to offer jobs.