Seeing Ramah

Among the Moravian Archives’ extensive collections are records that chronicle vanished stations and settlements of Northern Labrador. Three of the five communities that make up present-day Nunatsiavut housed mission stations: Nain, Hopedale and Makkovik. But during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many more stations and settlements existed between Killiniq Island in the north and Cape Harrison in the south. The Finding Aid for the MissLabr collection makes it very easy to search the records for places like Killinek, Hebron, Okak and Zoar. But as a result of the digitization work conducted during projects like Labrador Inuit Through Moravian Eyes and the Tradition and Tradition Among the Labrador Inuit Research Partnership, we can now readily access many different types of records that document these places.

The subject of this months’ post is Ramah (sometimes spelled Rama), the site of a Moravian station and Inuit community between 1871 and approximately 1910. In the Moravian Archives’ MissLabr collection, records from the Ramah station run from pages 56900 to 57949 (see pp. 61-2 of the current finding aid). The number of records is relatively modest compared to those of other stations. But between the visual records from Labrador Inuit Through Moravian Eyes stored on Memorial University’s Digital Archives Initiative and the digitized Labrador Photo collection at the Moravian Archives, we can see Ramah station over the course of its thirty-nine years in a way that we cannot see other stations in Labrador.

The abundance of visual material relative to the length of Moravian settlement tells us something about the importance of the station to the missionaries. Ramah, we learn from the Periodical Accounts, was considered by the church to be a “Jubilee station,” established on the centenary of Moravian establishment of the station at Nain.^[1] Ramah’s objective was to allow the missionaries to expand their evangelical work amongst unconverted Inuit who were living north of Hebron.

In the published literature, however, the logic for the location of the station is a little unclear. As Hans Rollmann points out in his introduction to Labrador Through Moravian Eyes, missionaries first built a more northerly station at Nachvak Bay in 1868. However, when the Hudson’s Bay Company established their own post in Nachvak that same year, the church took the decision to move their Nachvak house south to Nullatartok Bay (now also known as Ramah Bay).^[2] Writing on the commencement of the station at Ramah, Samuel Weitz recorded the disappointment of Tuglavinek and Simigak – Inuit from Nachvak – in the choice of Nullatartok as the site for the mission.^[3] Complicating matters for the missionaries was the relatively low, local population. In July of 1871, Inuit settlement consisted of seventeen people: Kaksungaut, his two wives and five children; Nochasak, his wife and six children; and a young man named Koversak^[4].

Ramah never sustained a particularly large population of Inuit. At the time of the final service in the chapel in September 1908, Samuel King Hutton recorded that forty-five Inuit were living in the settlement.^[5] Undeterred by their absence, many Inuit remained well after the tenure of the missionaries. “I am well off here” Hutton quotes and translates an un-named Inuk resident of the community one year after the missionaries departed. “I know all the good fishing-places; I am sure of a living here. If I go somewhere else, I must begin again. All the best places will be taken by others.”^[6]

Despite some houses having been transferred to Hebron, twenty Inuit continued to live in Ramah in October 1909.^[7] One of the final published references to the community in Moravian literature comes from October 1910. Then, fifteen Inuit continued to live in the settlement who were “served in the Gospel by the native helper Jako Nochasak”.^[8] Jako remained in Ramah with his family until its church was dismantled and brought to Nain in to replace the one that had burned down there.

Evidence of settlement at Ramah remains. God’s Acre appears almost untouched. Paths around the site, stone foundations from some of the mission buildings and bits of heating works are clearly visible. Along the shore, the sod houses that were homes for Inuit families have collapsed but the footprints cut deep into the landscape. It is not difficult to square these sites with the surviving imagery.

Today, Ramah is widely known for its unique geological feature, a distinctive stone called Ramah Chert, which was quarried by Maritime Archaic peoples as early as 7,500 years ago and discovered in archaeological sites as far north as Baffin Island and as far south as New England. But the deep history of the site should help to give some perspective on Moravian settlement there. Ramah has long been a site of human occupation. Moravian missionaries occupy only a small part of that story.

Mark David Turner

^[1] “Retrospect of the Missionary Work of the Moravian Church during the past 150 years,” Periodical Accounts 32 (1881): 194.

^[2] Hans Rollmann, Labrador Through Moravian Eyes: 250 Years of Art, Photographs and Records (St. John’s, Special Celebrations Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2002), 9.

^[3] “The Commencement of a New Station at Nullatartok,” Periodical Accounts 28 (1871): 119.

^[4] Ibid., 120.

^[5] S.K. Hutton, “The Last of Ramah,” Moravian Missions 7, no. 5 (1909): 88.

^[6] Ibid., 90.

^[7] “Labrador Items,” Moravian Missions 7, no. 10 (1909): 190.

^[8] Antiguan [sic.], “Mission News in Brief,” Moravian Missions 8, no. 10 (1910): 200.