In 2008 I walked into the Them Days office in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL, for the first time. It was a cold, dark winter’s night, my feet crunching on the snow and my heart beating. The building was small and nondescript, looking more like a little house with peachy-coloured vinyl siding than an office housing a cultural publication. It had a regular grey door like you’d see on any house, and inside, sparkly-eyed Susan Felsberg, who was Chair of the Board of Directors at the time, invited me into the dark porch vestibule. Its humbleness belied its stature in my mind.

For me, this was a big deal. A really big deal. A collection of Them Days magazines always sat in a prized location on a bookshelf at my house growing up, no matter where we moved. A copy of On The Goose, a Them Days special issue, was kept on my dad’s dresser along with Horace Goudie’s Trails to Remember. I used this oral history quarterly in my university courses, on papers that meant much to me. I am not an outlier. It is found in the homes of most other Labradorians too, at their cabins and often in the washrooms. (It’s a claim I’m happy to share—that’s where the most frequently read publications are kept!) The magazine may be small, but it looms large in our imaginations.

(left) Doris Saunders, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, 1976. PHOTO NIGEL MARKHAM (right) Gillian Saunders, 1990. PHOTO DORIS SAUNDERS

When Them Days started, it was originally conceived as a one-time publication by the Labrador Heritage Society and the Old Timers League. One of the Old Timers, Isaac Rich, went around and interviewed his trapping buddies. It was thought their particular way of life was disappearing rapidly in the 30-plus years since the Second World War brought the outside world to Labrador in the form of Goose Bay, the world’s busiest airport and home to military bases operated by two foreign (Canadian and American) governments. Along with thousands of military personnel, the bases brought wage work for people. They brought American movies and music, and many women married military men and left. The change was immense.

So then in the 1970s, when it came time to put together the book that would encapsulate the days that were now mostly memories, they needed an editor. They hired Doris Saunders, CM, a plucky tomboy and mother of three whose embroideries were so perfect, a gallery once unknowingly displayed hers backwards. Doris had a gift for drawing stories out. She had been a keen listener since she was small and knew what to ask to whom.

Bertha Holeiter, Doris Saunders and Joshua Obed at Them Days, 1980. PHOTO JUDY MCGRATH

The magazine had plenty of help from knowledgeable and capable volunteers and project workers—transplants like Nigel Markham, Bruce Bourque and later Judy McGrath—but they put an Inuk woman at the helm, and Doris learned the craft of publication as she went along. She did it all with limited resources—in the early days, Them Days had to borrow typewriters from other offices when they closed for lunch or for the evening, returning them the next day. Doris learned how to take photos and how to develop them in the darkroom. She even learned how to drive. 

Doris had a can-do Labrador attitude, born of a life on the land, where if you needed something done, you had to do it yourself. This helped her get through her first publication and many more, though she hadn’t had any experience in the field before. Her resilience carried Them Days through tight financial times, when she went unpaid. 

Ella Blake, Doris Saunders and Flora Baikie, North West River, 1978. PHOTO JUDY MCGRATH

By the time the very first issue of Them Days was printed in August 1975, it was already declaring itself a quarterly magazine. The first working title for the publication had been Portage, but it soon became obvious that a different name was needed, one that encompassed more people than just the trappers who had inspired the idea. “Back in them days” was the most common phrase used by every person interviewed, and thus this nod to the Labrador English dialect became the title that stuck.

Them Days featured (and continues to feature) Labradorians of all backgrounds, but throughout the years, a majority of stories have been from Inuit. Inuit stories, language, art and craft are all featured. Susannah Igloliorte’s sealskin boots and inukuluk embroideries were highlighted in early issues, and in more recent years the generational legacy of doll-making by Susan Pottle, Jane Shiwak and Inez Shiwak has been featured. A travelling exhibit of grasswork and a catalogue was produced in 1979 with the Art Gallery of Memorial University and Them Days facilitated a project on Inuit clothing displayed in our provincial museum in St. John’s a few years later. Them Days became a place in print to just be Inuit. People of mixed descent weren’t called derogatory terms or talked down to, or praised for evidence of their whiteness. Indigenous Peoples were neither exoticized nor derided. For once, our history and our lives weren’t filtered through an outsider’s gaze. 

Susannah Igloliorte using a scraper, Happy Valley, 1977. PHOTO VAL HEARDER

In these days of self-publishing and the Internet, where you can see yourself reflected and validated through social media, it’s easy to forget what it was like not to have any of that. Before Them Days and other Indigenous media started publishing and broadcasting, imagine what it was like to hold those early issues of Them Days in your hands, to open it and see pictures of people who looked like you, to read the kinds of words you used on the page. One of the beautiful things about Them Days is how the oral nature of our stories comes through the text. As you read it, you can hear the person telling their story. 

Not only were stories recorded, transcribed and published in Inuttitut, some English stories were translated from English to Inuttitut, a recognition that the story exchange went more than one way—that Inuttitut was valued and respected. 

Doris Saunders, Happy Valley-Goose Bay. COURTESY THEM DAYS

In 1984, an archive was established at Them Days’ office to preserve the body of research that had gone into nearly a decade of publication, including the audio tapes of Elders telling their truths, the donated documents and the thousands of photos copied and created in-house. From the beginning, Doris and her daughter Gillian (who came on officially in 1987 as the office administrator with a keen eye for archival organization; her tiny, precise handwriting is found all over records in the archives) maintained the archive with an Indigenous mindset. The belittling captions often included with photos of days gone by were followed by in-house captions that contained correct wording. They identified people left nameless through the impersonal colonial lens. 

In the cruelest of ironies, Doris, the woman who spent a lifetime gathering stories, publishing our history and building Labrador’s greatest memory institution, was struck by early-onset Alzheimer’s. She passed away in 2006, only a few days short of her 65th birthday and just a few years after the last issue of Them Days appeared with her name at the top of the masthead. I came back to Labrador in 2007 and started editing Them Days shortly thereafter. I never had a chance to meet her, but I sure wish I had. I’m reminded daily in the work around me and by our long-time readers of what a force she was and how she and Gillian and all the others built this small but mighty organization to be what it is today.

An assortment of covers of Them Days magazine from 1975 to present. COURTESY THEM DAYS

It is their spirit and drive that I strive for now that I am at the helm of the magazine and the archives. I work to continue the decolonization of records and to normalize and value Indigenous knowledge. I continue their work to put names to faces through our ongoing #IDThemDays project, to amplify the voices of Labradorians and to shine a light on histories otherwise forgotten. Our board, which is mostly Inuit, is supportive and understanding of these issues. The definition of “them days” continues to evolve as time marches on, and I hope we continue to reflect on our past with the same enthusiasm and desire to see ourselves as we are.

Aimee Chaulk is a writer, editor, archivist and photographer from Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL. In addition to editing Them Days magazine since 2008, she has been published in SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut. She is on the Executive of the Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Archives, and also freelances for the National Film Board. In her spare time, Chaulk enjoys sewing, embroidery and collecting aspirational craft supplies. She is learning to make slippers from her great-aunt Mary Ann.