Culture shock seen as factor in traffic death of Inuk woman
Aliqa Illauq remembers her cousin Neeve Oqqallak as a caring, selfless person.
Growing up in Clyde River, a hamlet on the northern shore of Baffin Island in Nunavut, Oqqallak was a senior member of their family and she took care of everyone.
“She was very loving,” Illauq said. “She was one of the older cousins that I have. She looked after her siblings. Her younger siblings viewed her as a mother, more or less.”
“She helped a lot and she was known to do a lot of things for people completely out of love without expecting anything in return.”
Oqqallak, 54, died last week after she was struck by a car in Ottawa. Her death has devastated her family, and systemic barriers have compounded their grief, Illauq said.
Like many Inuit living in Nunavut, Oqqallak travelled to Ottawa for medical treatment unavailable in the North. She travelled with her daughter, who is pregnant, and stayed at Larga Baffin, a medical boarding home built to house people travelling to Ottawa from the Baffin region of Nunavut.
But the capital is overwhelming for some who grew up far from big cities.
“I think a lot of Inuit that are coming down, they're culture-shocked,” Illauq said. “They don't know how it works down here because they grew up in isolated communities. They don't know how the system works because it's not the same world.”
Illauq suspects that the feeling of culture shock, the speed and bustle of Ottawa, likely contributed to the accident that caused Oqqallak's death. Oqqallak had gone shopping on Friday and was hit by a passing vehicle when she crossed the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway near the Richmond Road overpass around 4 p.m., said the RCMP, whose National Capital Region Traffic Services detachment is investigating the incident. She was transported to The Ottawa Hospital's Civic campus, where she died on Saturday.
“I think a lot of people don't understand when you come from a small, isolated community in Nunavut. We don't have roads like there are in the south,” Illauq said. “There are no street signs or stoplights. People just cross.”
The driver of the vehicle who hit Oqqallak had to be treated for shock, the RCMP said, and though an investigation is continuing, speed does not seem to be a factor and preliminary findings suggest her death was the result of an accidental collision, a spokesperson for the force said in a statement. “Investigators are taking this matter seriously and are also working with witnesses and the victim's family to clarify the circumstances surrounding this incident,” the statement said.
But that wasn't the information Oqqallak's family received from officers who visited them, Illauq said. A language barrier prevented Oqqallak's family from understanding what had happened. They understood that the driver had fled and that Oqqallak had died because of a hit-and-run, which didn't happen.
“This is all they understood because everything was conducted in English. My family, they speak Inuktituk. They do not speak English very well and they don't know the system down here,” Illauq said. “I guess they were telling my family members what was happening only in English, and the only thing my family had picked up was, number one, that she got hit and she was in the hospital and that they were still looking for the driver.”
An RCMP spokesperson said in a statement that, although officers have access to language interpreters to provide assistance, in this case, “officers and family members effectively communicated in English, in person and during telephone conversations.”
But Illauq said her family remained confused about the nature of the accident for four days. It took an intervention on Tuesday by Illauq, who is an advocate for Inuit in Canada, to clear up details of what actually happened, she said, and she was able to gain clarity only because of her grasp of English and knowledge of how southern institutions function, many Inuit arriving from Nunavut lack, she said.
The misunderstanding added to her family's grief.
“My family that is down here, staying at Larga, they are down here for an extreme medical issue, right? So they're already in distress, so imagine having this language barrier and misinterpretation of what's happening,” Illauq said.
But Oqqallak's death is also a symptom of a wider issue, Illauq said: a lack of medical care in Nunavut. “When Inuit started getting relocated into settlements in the '50s, they were promised to be treated just like all Canadians,” she said.
“How awful is it that Inuit have to come all the way down to Ottawa to deal with all the craziness that happens down here just to get the basic needs met, like for teeth or just to get a CT scan or an eye surgery? This is ongoing.
“I think this a great example of the ongoing oppression that is happening with Indigenous communities across Canada: the lack of understanding and the lack of proper resources.”