Simonie Michael
Simonie Michael (; first name also spelled Simonee, alternative surnames Michel or E7-551; 1933 – November 2008) was a Canadian politician from the Eastern Northwest Territories (later Nunavut) who became the first elected Inuit legislator in Canada. Before becoming involved in politics, Michael worked as a carpenter and business owner, as well as one of very few translators between Inuktitut and English. He became a prominent member of the Inuit co-operative housing movement and a community activist in Iqaluit, and was appointed to a series of governing bodies, including the precursor to the Iqaluit City Council. After becoming  the first elected Inuit member of the Northwest Territories Legislative Council in 1966, Michael worked on infrastructural and public health initiatives. He is credited with bringing public attention to the failings of the disc number system that was used in place of surnames for Inuit people, and with prompting the government to authorise Project Surname to replace the numbers with names. Early life. Michael was born between Kimmirut and Iqaluit, and was described as being from Apex, Iqaluit. His adoptive father, Tigullagaq, worked for the Hudson's Bay Company. While Michael was a child during World War II, the United  States Air Force constructed several air bases around Iqaluit, and employed him in a series of jobs: as a dish washer, cook, stock boy, quartermaster, and later a heavy equipment operator. Michael would later note that the American military did not provide compensation for much of the labour that Inuit workers performed including three months of work transporting wood. To make space for the military construction projects, Inuit residents were relocated to a nearby island, and Michael later described that no housing was provided for them and no means of transportation were given for them to travel between the island  and the mainland. Despite the policy of segregation enforced by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Iqaluit during the 1940s and into the 1950s, Michael was one of the residents who worked in various jobs for the American military, and he was able to learn English at a time when nobody in Iqaluit could translate between English and Inuktitut. By the time he was 15 or 16 he had become noted for his skill as a translator. By the mid-1950s, he was the only Inuk in Iqaluit who could translate between Inuktitut and English. Employees of the Canadian government working  in and near Iqaluit sought out Michael over the following years because he could understand and translate English, so Michael had numerous early interactions with the Canadian government. Employment and activism. Before his election to the Northwest Territories Legislative Council at the age of 33, Michael worked as a carpenter, later also running a taxi and bus service and a cleaning service with 50 employees. He was also a prominent activist in Iqaluit. Michael founded a housing co-operative that built 15 new houses in Iqaluit, at a time when the co-operative housing movement was a major focus of  Inuit activism and would quickly become the largest private sector employer of Indigenous people. In 1956, Michael and his wife became the first residents of Iqaluit to have an insulated house constructed. Michael also was a sculptor, producing numerous sculptures of animals. Several of his sculptures have been sold at auction, and his sculptures have been housed in the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. Before Michael's candidacy for territory-wide office, Ronald Duffy writes that he already "had been named to just about every Iqaluit council and board in which Inuit [had] a voice". This includes the municipal council  that preceded the Iqaluit City Council. Michael was one of two Inuit people chosen in 1953 to attend the Coronation of Elizabeth II as representatives of Canada. Campaign and election. Michael was encouraged to run in the 1966 by-election to the Northwest Territories Legislative Council by Stuart Milton Hodgson, later the Commissioner of the Northwest Territories. The creation of several new districts, increasing the legislative body up to 13 members, had left three openings for one-year terms to the council without any incumbents. Michael contested the election in the Eastern Arctic district against two non-Inuit candidates — Waldy  Phipps, the president of an aviation company, and Gordon Rennie, the manager of a Hudson's Bay Company store — and Michael won a place in the 5th Northwest Territories Legislative Council. Michael's election made him the first elected Inuit legislator in a Canadian province or territory, preceding Peter Ittinuar's election as the first Inuit member of the federal government. Some sources have identified Michael as the first elected aboriginal Canadian, but others had been elected before. Though Michael was Canada's first elected Inuit legislator, he was its second Inuit legislator overall, since Abe Okpik had been appointed  to the Northwest Territories Legislative Council in 1965. Legislative career. First speech. As a signal of his advocacy for Inuit issues, Michael's inaugural speech to the Legislative Assembly after his election lasted 90 minutes and was given in Inuktitut. In this inaugural speech in the chamber, he argued that discriminatory practices remained common in the Northwest Territories, despite the council having passed legislation outlawing discrimination. As an example he mentioned the Arctic Circle Club lounge, in which Inuit people were not permitted to drink, and the lounge ended that policy shortly after Michael's speech. However, in response to  Michael speaking in Inuktitut, the legislature adopted a rule that all subsequent comments to the assembly would have to be in English. Project surname. The issue that Michael is most closely identified with is the first legislative action on the question of Inuit disc numbers. In the 1940s, the Government of Canada had determined that it was unable to track Inuit using their traditional names, and it assigned numbers to individual Inuit using a type of dog tag system. Michael spoke out against this system in the Legislative Assembly, explaining that his mail was sent to Simonie E7-551 rather  than Simonie Michael, and protesting to the Commissioner of the Northwest Territories that his mail should be sent to his full name. Although this issue had been raised previously by Abe Okpik in the Legislative Assembly and was becoming increasingly salient, Michael is widely credited with attracting the attention of the press and prompting the government to pass a motion authorising Project Surname, in which Okpik spent the years between 1968 and 1971 traveling throughout the Eastern Northwest Territories and recording the preferred surnames of Inuit to replace their disc numbers. Michael's speech about the disc number system to  the territorial council has been identified as the trigger that led to the system's end. Health and infrastructure. Michael was involved in several motions pertaining to infrastructure and health in the legislature. In response to a rise in alcoholism, he prompted a referendum that restricted the availability of liquor in Iqaluit in the late 1960s. He also pushed for the creation of infrastructure that would make health care more available in Iqaluit, since the prevailing practice was to take those in need of major medical care away from Iqaluit to medical centres elsewhere, which caused sick people to undergo  travel and to remain separate from their family and community during their treatment. Housing. Michael, who had worked in housing construction and the co-operative housing movement, made housing a major legislative focus. In 1969, he was involved in legislation to improve living conditions at Clyde River, Nunavut. The Clyde River settlement was home to 210 people but was built on top of a layer of muskeg that covered permafrost, which made building a major challenge and water drainage a perennial concern. There was also poor health care availability, and an overcrowded school that housed 88 students, more than it  had the resources to accommodate. Michael was active in legislative discussions on how to address these challenges through a large-scale building program. Michael also toured the Belcher Islands in 1969 with the Commissioner of the Northwest Territories. Finding the housing situation there to be one of the worst in the Northwest Territories, he wrote to the federal government and advocated for 20 new permanent houses to be built there. These efforts, and those of the Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, prompted the federal government to study the situation and ultimately provide materials for emergency housing. Political legacy. Michael served  for four years in the legislature, and was succeeded by Bryan Pearson as the representative for the Eastern Arctic district in 1970. Michael was elected only 16 years after Inuit people gained the right to vote in 1950, and only 6 years after the franchise was truly expanded in 1960 by making ballot boxes widely available in Inuit communities. This expansion of voting rights remained controversial; for example, in 1962, then-Senator Thomas Crerar called it an "error" and advocated revoking the right for Inuit in the Eastern Arctic to vote. The year 1967, when Michael began to serve in  the legislative council of the Northwest Territories, was also the first that the council met permanently in the north; previously it had moved around the territories, often meeting in Ottawa and governing the Northwest Territories remotely from there. Given this context, Eva Aariak, while the Premier of Nunavut, described Michael's election as "an important step forward in the evolution of our territory and its democratic institutions." Similarly, Peter Kulchyski and Frank James Tester identify Michael as an important member of a "unique" generation of Inuit leaders "who seized their time to forge a new politics in the arctic", and  whose leadership "deserves special recognition". As the first elected Inuk in a Canadian legislature, Michael described his role as "telling white people about the Eskimo". Michael was a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002. Michael is the namesake of two roads in Apex: Simonie Michael Crescent, and Simonie Michael Lane. In 2020, a boat that was owned by Simonie Michael was preserved at Apex beach.