'We are survivors': Elders' tell stories of Nunavik dog slaughter after federal apology decades later
CBC
WARNING: This story contains distressing details.
Louisa Cookie-Brown was a young girl when she saw police officers shoot her qimmiit (sled dogs) in Kuujjuarapik, Que. in 1964.
"We had dogs that were fearless, that used to go after any animals that were big, like polar bears or wolves," she recalled.
Even as a child, she played a big role in taking care of them, whether it be feeding or making harnesses for them.
To this day, she still vividly remembers trying to shield her family's lead dog, when a police officer pointed a gun at them and threw Cookie-Brown out of the way — twice.
"I panicked. I didn't know what to do … I did not want him to kill our lead dog. So I went in front of the dog and [the police officer] almost shot me. He was so angry with me, he picked me up and threw me," she said.
The police officer then killed her lead dog in front of her, she said. All of her family's 14 dogs were slaughtered by police, and they lost their ability to go out to hunt, trap and fish.
Their dogs were among more than 1,000 qimmiit slaughtered by police and other authorities across Nunavik, the Inuit region of northern Quebec, in the 1950s and 1960s.
A 2010 report from Jean-Jacques Croteau, a retired Superior Court of Quebec judge, found Quebec provincial police officers killed more than 1,000 dogs "without any consideration for their importance to Inuit families."
The federal government's role in it, Croteau found, was failing to intervene or condemn the actions.
Cookie-Brown said her father turned violent after the incident.
"He became a gambler, a womanizer and started to beat up my mom at times when he was really angry. And we had absolutely nobody to talk to … to explain why we were the way we were," she said.
"Of course, all our neighbours changed as well. They all went through the same things and at the same time the residential schools were happening, the religion was happening."
Over time, she said she started to come to terms with what happened, guided by her grandfather's mantra to not hold grudges and to "let God do the work".
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