"Others have laboured, and we have entered into their labours."

In our last post, entitled "Apostle to the Inuit," we noted how that the work of the first Anglican missionary in the Baffin Island region was done by Edmund James Peck who opened up a mission on the Black Island Whaling Station in the Cumberland Sound area of south-eastern Baffin Island in 1894.
Edmond Peck would also visit the whaling station at the nearby Kekerten Island, which is just south of present-day Pangnirtung, Nunavut, where many of the present-day descendants live who were impacted by the ministry of Edmund Peck in this region between 1894 and 1905.

Just after he arrived on Blacklead Island in 1894, Peck explained to Mr. Higgins, the secretary of the Anglican Church Missionary Society the strategic nature of such a mission in the Cumberland Sound. He wrote, "There are facilities here of reaching the Eskimos both in a westerly and northerly direction, and this place occupies almost a central position."

Over the next number of years, this became true as Blacklead Island became the centre of the Anglican mission, and from there, Inuit all over Baffin Island and in Kivalliq (the central Arctic) received the Gospel, reaching eventually to Pond Inlet in the north of Baffin Island.

Missionaries such as John Turner from England, who is featured on the Transformations II video, started the Anglican Mission in Pond Inlet, the "jewel of Baffin."

This is Pond Inlet seen from the opposite direction to the picture above as it was seen in the 1920s, and must have been what it looked like when John Turner ministered here starting in 1929.

So in 1894, Edmund James Peck had established a mission at Blacklead Island in Cumberland Sound, and another station was later built at Lake Harbour (Kimmirut). But in 1915, the Anglican Church Missionary Society had withdrawn from Arctic work, and the mission stations were left in the hands of partially-trained catechists.

Ten years later, in 1925, the Bishop of Moosonee appealed to the new Bible Churchmen's Missionary Society to reopen the Arctic work. It was this call that brothers John and Arthur Turner answered in March of 1926. Both men felt called to the Canadian Arctic.

Arthur Turner left for Pangnirtung in 1928, and the next year, in 1929, when John was 24 years of age, he set out for Pond Inlet.

The picture above is of a group just outside the Anglican Mission in Pond Inlet, and it was taken in late 1929 or in the early 1930's by Canon John Turner.

The photo above is also credited to Canon John Turner. It was also taken in Pond Inlet, and it is special to my family, because it is a picture of the grandmother to one of our special friends--Gela Pitsiulak. The grandmother's name is Mary, and the baby's name is Irralik.

Gela (pictured above playing the Inuit drum in Israel) has travelled with Canada Awakening Ministries several times to Israel, and is presently a valued member of the Canada Awakening Healing the Land Team.

Significantly, the Canada Awakening Healing the Land vision started in Pangnirtung, in the Cumberland Sound, in July of 2006, the very region where the first Anglican missionary came to Blacklead Island in the Baffin region in 1894.

Like Pond Inlet, Pangnirtung is another picturesque community, famous for its U-shaped glacial valley. From Pangnirtung in July of 2006, the healing the land vision has spread northward to Clyde River in 2007, and in 2008 and 2009 it is expected to spread further north into Pond Inlet and Arctic Bay as well.

It is interesting to see how both the gospel and the healing the land vision were introduced to Baffin in the Cumberland Sound area, and both spread further north from there to cover the other communities in Baffin Island.

Pictured in the middle here between my wife Marge and myself is Inusiq Nashalik, the oldest resident of Pangnirtung, who is now 90-years-old. So he was born in 1918, ten years before Art Turner came to Pangnirtung, or John Turner came to Pond Inlet.

Many, many years ago, the Lord showed him when he was reading the old translation of the Inuktitut Bible that the day would come when some people would come from a far away land, and from a very hot climate. They would come to his community of Pangnirtung, and help the people with the process of the healing of their ancestral land.

So when the Fiji Healing the Land Team first came to Pangnirtung in July of 2006, he was the first to welcome them at the protocol welcoming event, and again on Thursday, May 15, 2008, he welcomed two Fijians to his community--Aminiasi Waqanivalu and Semisi Naqica--who came to his community just a couple of days earlier to help strengthen the healing process over the next few months.

The expectation is that the healing the land process will spread from Pangnirtung to many other communities in Nunavut, just as the gospel initially spread from this region all over the Baffin and Kiviliq regions.

In our previous post, Apostle to the Inuit, it was noticed how that Edmund Peck, the first Anglican missionary, used to regularly visit the Kekerten Whaling Station not far from Blacklead Island. In 1905, Peck's colleague Bilby complained about the traders, and said that "the traders themselves are no help to the mission but quite the reserve, they do not believe in the work of the Mission and use it as a convenience...They have concubines with them continually, some of our converts being taken for this purpose and even young girls, scholars of the mission and scarcely more than children have been taken also."

In the picture above, you see Inuit from Pangnirtung on Kekerten Island, on the site of the very station where the whalers lived, and where Peck used to visit, and you will see the men kneeling down to repent to the women on behalf of their fathers for allowing their mothers and grandmothers to be used sexually by the whalers in exchange for tobacco.

Many of the residents of Pangnirtung today have had an identity crisis, as they have Scottish whalers as grandfathers who abandoned them, but Inuit mothers who were left to fend for themselves.

In the picture above, you see one of the grandmothers from Pangnirtung, who knew the stories of what had gone on here at the Kekerten Station, and she is now releasing forgiveness to the descendants of the men on behalf of the women.

Why was this necessary? Because the Inuit are still suffering today from the affects of the sins of past generations. These historic wrongs have impacted future generations greatly, and it is only the power of forgiveness that can release that healing needed to free a people from their painful past, and empower them to move into a future destiny that will be different from the past. It will be a future that will reconnect them to everything that is good in their heritage, but free them only from the hurts, the pains, and the bondages of the past.