On freedom.

1886 CMAJ, November 8, 2011, 183(16) © 2011 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors Jusie (Yoo-sie) had many stories to tell and I only had an hour before I had to catch my flight back to Montréal. “I could tell you stories for two days,” he said, gesturing from the chair beside my desk. Jusie was 82 years old and had been referred to me for quite another matter. A small compact man with a shock of white hair above his smooth brown face, he was clad in jeans and a plaid shirt, and moved slowly but confidently about the room. He had agreed to come back for a second appointment, this time as a favour to me. To tell me some stories. I asked him to tell me about the trip he took south to be treated for tuberculosis back in the 1950s, a tale that he had hinted at during our first meeting. It seemed that Jusie was as happy to tell the story as I was to hear it. His speech took on the measured tempo of a practised storyteller as he circled deliberately around the beginning of the great journey. He spoke now in Inuktitut, now in English, leaning forward and back, and pausing from time to time to emphasize a point. Our young interpreter, Gaetan, was soon hooting with delight as Jusie laid down the initial words in the tale of his young self and how he had come into contact with absurdities of southern life for the first time. Jusie had been born in Aculivik, Nunavik in 1933, when the village was called Cape Smith and was a trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company. At 21, he had been a strong hunter, travelling by kayak in the summer and dogsled in the winter. The village had been a tranquil place, he said, where families lived in harmony with each other, building tents or igloos with the change of the seasons. “When I was a child, we were well taken care of by our parents, and no one was ever angry; always happy.” That year, 1955, the CD Howe made its way around the Hudson Bay coast, and Jusie was taken aboard and x-rayed along with his fellow villagers. After the x-ray, he was loaded aboard a float plane filled with other Inuit, bound for Moosonee, Ontario on James Bay. “I had no symptoms, and they never gave me a diagnosis.” From Moosonee, Jusie was transferred by canoe to neighbouring Moose Factory. “I was terrified!” he said. “Imagine, I’d never been in an open boat before. I felt sure I was going to die!” This appealed deeply to Gaetan’s sense of humour, and he was now giggling steadily as the story unfolded. Jusie then told us how he was brought from the canoe up to the hospital in Moose Factory, where he would spend the next four months, and how monstrous the brick hospital seemed after the tents and igloos that he had known back home. But the most striking thing for Jusie was all the smells. Strange food. Antiseptic. Smells of sickness. All tightly contained by that strange brick building with its locked windows and doors. When his first meal was brought to him, Jusie thought it must be for someone else. Why was the food all mixed together? Why was it on a plate like that? He waited politely for his own meal to come: some frozen fish or fresh meat that he could cut slices from with his sharp hunter’s knife. (Gaetan was now doubled over in laughter.) Essay