Cornelius Henrikus Wilhelmus Remie (1944–2023)

Cornelius (Cor) Remie first saw the light of day on January 9, 1944, in the city of Breda in The Netherlands. The oldest child of five, he had two brothers and two sisters. His father was a tailor employed by the Royal Military Academy in Breda; his mother worked as a housemaid, adding to the family’s income, which enabled Cornelius to complete his secondary education. After his compulsory military service, Cornelius was employed as a municipal civil servant at the Department of Finances in Breda. One morning, in the spring of 1965, on entering his office, a sudden visionary flash of his future as a civil servant stopped him in his tracks. This was not the life he wanted. His boyhood dreams of travel and adventure in countries “far beyond the horizon” would never be realized. He quit his job on the spot and moved to Nijmegen to study anthropology at the university there. Anthropology opened new avenues and possibilities for travel as well as focusing Cornelius’ fascination with the Canadian wilderness, particularly the Arctic. He took courses on Inuit culture and completed a traineeship in the Arctic Department of the Ethnographic Collection of the National Museum in Copenhagen, supervised by Dr. Helge Larsen and Dr. Jørgen Meldgaard. He graduated in December 1970. During his studies, Cornelius became acquainted with Professor Geert van den Steenhoven who would play a major role in his scientific career. Van den Steenhoven had conducted two terms of legal anthropological fieldwork in northern Canada, among Ahiarmiut at Ennadai Lake in 1955, and among Nattilingmiut in Pelly Bay in 1957, where Father VandeVelde O.M.I. had acted as interpreter and general assistant. Upon leaving Pelly Bay, Van den Steenhoven suggested to Father VandeVelde that he would ask five Inuit to keep a diary of their lives. Van den Steenhoven thought it would be interesting to discover how Inuit experienced the imminent transition to a sedentary way of life, as they moved from the land into government-established settlements. Father VandeVelde was sceptical of the diary idea. To prove that it would be in vain, VandeVelde handed a notebook and pencil to his “long-time travel guide and friend” Bernard Irqugaqtuq and asked him to record what he experienced in his daily life. To VandeVelde’s amazement, months later, Irqugaqtuq arrived at the RC Mission in Pelly Bay with his notebook jotted with notes, written in syllabics. VandeVelde then provided him with new notebooks and asked him to write only on the notebooks’ right-hand page (so that VandeVelde could make his own annotations on the left). In this way, a diary was kept from March 2, 1958 until November 27, 1964 and written down in 37 notebooks, comprising 754 pages of syllabic writing. The notebooks were later transcribed into French by VandeVelde and checked with the help of the author himself. These transcriptions would become the source material for Cornelius’s PhD dissertation. Meanwhile, Cornelius had married Agnes, become a father of two sons, and in February 1971 began his academic teaching and research career at the Anthropology Department of Nijmegen University. In the summer of that year, when Cornelius was preparing for possible fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic, he met VandeVelde, then on leave in Europe, during his visit to Van den Steenhoven in Nijmegen. It was agreed that Cornelius would join VandeVelde at his mission post to assist him in his work on the diary. Cornelius familiarized himself with Inuktitut by means of a summer course offered by the University of Saskatoon in 1972, followed in the winter of 1973 with an Inuktitut course taught by Mick Mallon at the …