The Canadian Conversation

Toby Obed was born in Hopedale, a coastal town in northern Labrador. Like many places in Canada, Hopedale has more than one name; an old one, Agvituk, means “place of the whales.” Today, it is the legislative capital of Nunatsiavut, the self-governing homeland of the Labrador Inuit. When Obed thinks of his birthplace, he remembers a red uniform with evenly placed gold buttons. Its wearer, an RCMP officer, had just pounded on the door, then barged in, accompanied by some women. The strangers had come to take four-year-old Toby and his older brother and sister away. He doesn’t remember if his family resisted, but he knows everyone cried. There, on the threshold of his childhood home, Toby died for the first time. He and his siblings were put on a float plane that took them to the Yale School, in North West River, some two hundred kilometres south. The year was 1975.

Toby’s story is his own, but its broad outlines resemble those of countless others. The young boy was...