Martha of the North

In the High Arctic relocation of the 1950s, the Canadian government took Inuit families away from their traditional hunting grounds and put them two thousand miles to the north, in part to strengthen its claims to sovereignty there. Misery, famine, tuberculosis and family breakdown resulted (part of the government solution to those problems would be residential schools). Forty years later, the Inuit were offered financial compensation. Martha is the granddaughter of Robert Flaherty, who filmed Nanook of the North (1922) in one of the communities that was displaced; she was five when her family was moved. Using first-hand accounts by family members, archival film and stills, Marquise Lepage has meticulously reconstructed a little known chapter in the history of Canada's North.