Louie Kamookak, an Inuit historian who played a pivotal role in locating the 19th century wrecks of the ill-fated Franklin expedition, died on March 22 at the age of 58.
“I called Louie the last great Franklin searcher,” John Geiger, president of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS), told CTV’s Todd Battis.
Kamookak, who was also a school teacher and a respected Inuit elder, spent three decades documenting Inuit oral history. He was particularly fascinated with the Franklin expedition: a doomed 1845 British attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage. The expedition’s two ships -- the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror -- would eventually become icebound near Nunavut’s King William Island, where Kamookak lived in the hamlet of Gjoa Haven.
"I first started hearing (Franklin) stories as far as I start remembering, maybe age six or seven,” Kamookak, who would later cross-reference those tales with explores’ journals and logbooks, told The Canadian Press in 2017. “When I started going to school, maybe at the age of 12, that's when the teacher started talking about the Franklin Expedition. How it happened on King William Island. How all of them died. They didn't get back. The ships were never found.”
That was the case, at least, until Sept. 2014.
Based on the oral histories he had compiled, Kamookak developed a theory about where the expedition had been shipwrecked. When a team of researchers led by Parks Canada headed to Nunavut that year, they followed Kamookak’s advice to find the remarkably preserved Erebus in the frigid, murky waters off King William Island. Just two years later, a second expedition would find its sister ship nearby.
Geiger of the RCGS says centuries of expeditions to locate the crews and wrecks all failed because they never took the region’s rich oral history into account.
“(Kamookak) brought a particular perspective and that perspective was to listen to the elders, to listen to the oral tradition,” Geiger said.
One of Kamkook’s most recent endeavours, moreover, was to locate the grave of the expedition’s leader, Sir John Franklin.
“One group of Inuit said they saw a burial of a great chief under the ground, under stone,” he told The Canadian Press in 2017. “I believe that Franklin is in a vault on King William Island.”
After the discovery of the Erebus, Kamookak was named an honorary vice-president of the RCGS. He was also a recipient of Canada’s inaugural Polar Medal in 2015, the Order of Nunavut in 2016 and was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2017. The RCGS even recently established an award in Kamookak’s name. Following his death, the first Louie Kamookak Medal will be awarded posthumously to the self-taught historian.
But Kamookak’s celebrated role in the discoveries of the Erebus and Terror was just part of his life’s work to record his people’s oral history for posterity.
"Today's younger generations have gotten away from the Inuit oral history," he told The Canadian Press in February. “Preserving Inuit oral history in today's technology would be the only way to pass the stories, knowledge, and culture in any aspect of our amazing ancestors that once lived where no other people chose to live."
With a report from CTV’s Atlantic Bureau Chief Todd Battis and files from The Canadian Press
