cuartgallery:Here is Ovilu Tunnillie’s stone carving Ovilu in Bed (TB Patient). There a

cuartgallery: Here is Ovilu Tunnillie’s stone carving Ovilu in Bed (TB Patient). There are few more tragic consequences of contact between Inuit and outsiders than the epidemic of tuberculosis that spread throughout the North in the 1950s and early 1960s. No community was spared. This work deals with Ovilu’s personal experience, as she recalls being strapped to her bed in the hospital ward, poignantly conveying the confusion and terror that many Inuit patients experienced. In 1955, Ovilu was taken south for treatment on the federal government’s supply ship, the C.D. Howe, for the first time. She spent the next four years in sanatoria in southern Canada. When she finally returned home she had a hard time adjusting because she couldn’t understand the Inuit ways or language. She said: “It was like I had just met my family for the first time.” Many Inuit of the eastern Arctic were sent to Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, Ontario; in 1956 there were 332 Inuit patients there. Many never returned home, and in 1995 a memorial was erected in the Woodland Cemetery in Hamilton to commemorate the Inuit who died at the sanatorium and were buried anonymously there. -- source link

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