Night Spirits: The Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene

Bill Waiser is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan,
and the author of Saskatchewan’s Playground: A History of Prince
Albert National Park and Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of Western
Canada’s National Parks, 1915–1946.  His

Thanks to the recent Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, many
Canadians learned for the first time about the government relocation of
Inuit families to the far north in the 1950s and the suffering and
hardship that they endured in their new setting. The Inuit, however,
were not the only Native group to be relocated after World War II. So
too were the Sayisi Dene of northern Manitoba. This is their
story—rescued from obscurity by one of the survivors of the misguided
exercise, Ila Bussidor, and by journalist Ьstьn Bilgen-Reinart, who
was inspired by Sayisi efforts to rebuild their shattered lives.

Night Spirits can best be described as an oral history of the Sayisi
Dene, a Chipewyan group, which traditionally occupied the subarctic
region immediately west of Hudson Bay and hunted the great caribou herds
as far west as Great Slave Lake. Drawing heavily on interviews with
Sayisi elders, many of whom were relocated, the text combines narration
with first-person accounts. Events, such as the signing of Treaty 5 in
1910, are described and then accompanied by one or more stories. The
result is a history from the Sayisi perspective.

The better part of Night Spirits is devoted to the Sayisi relocation,
when families were airlifted without prior warning in August 1956 to a
barren patch of land on Hudson Bay just outside Churchill, Manitoba.
Federal scientists had concluded that the dramatic decline in caribou
numbers in the 1950s was largely attributable to Native hunting and that
the only solution was relocation of the Sayisi. The consequences were
predictable. Over the next two decades, a once self-sufficient people
eked out a miserable existence, punctuated by abuse, alcoholism, and
violent death. By the time the Sayisi move backed inland in 1973 to
start a new community at Tadoule Lake, one-third had died.

Night Spirits recounts this sad episode with harrowing simplicity. It
is a testament to the Sayisi who never survived the relocation.