It’s a quiet afternoon in September and Gregory Rich’s boat is cutting clean through an ocean that is as flat as glass. A flock of Canada geese take formation overhead as the beauty of northern Labrador unfolds before him.
Rich guides his motorboat into an abandoned community that in the 1990s became synonymous with Canada’s shameful history of its treatment of Indigenous people.
With familiar ease, Rich, 54, is navigating his way from the dock in Natuashish — one of two Innu communities in Labrador, and the only one on the northern coast — to his old home.
“This is Davis Inlet. This is my birthplace,” Rich says, as the boat slows and the last remaining houses begin to come into focus.
Straight ahead: the place where he started a family, then lost it.
“A lot of good and bad memories here,” he says. “We had no running water, we had no heat, we had to haul the wood in the winter time.”
Rich was born in Davis Inlet in 1968, just one year after the Mushuau Innu were enticed to the remote island by provincial government promises of a better life. The promises proved to be false; substandard housing, elimination of traditional hunting routes and abject poverty awaited the new inhabitants.
Rich grew up on the island community, married and started a family.
And then came an unfathomable tragedy.
“The house fire … it’s on the hills there,” he says, pointing to an area of the former community that is now overgrown.
On Valentine’s Day in 1992, Rich’s five children and another child died in a house fire. Rich and his wife were not home.
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