RANKIN INLET, NUNAVUT — Almost everyone here remembers OJ’s laugh. The 11-year-old was a jokester at home and school.“I demanded he call me uncle, but he never would. He was a little bugger that way,” his uncle Louis Taparti said last year, laughing from his living room couch. The sounds of passing all-terrain vehicles and kids on bikes filtered through the window with the summer sun. “I hated when he called me Louis.”Ray Taparti, OJ’s father for whom Ray Okpik Jr. (a.k.a. OJ) was named, lived on the other side of a wall he shared with Louis, in a semi-detached house that OJ lived in until his death.“He was a happy boy ... I just miss his big smile. His laughter,” Ray said from his kitchen, staring off, his face lined with deep folds.Louis and Ray have lost other family members prematurely: one brother froze to death in the middle of this town of about 3,000. Another brother ended his own life.Tragedies like the Taparti family have experienced are not uncommon in Rankin Inlet or Nunavut.But the killing of OJ shocked the community.At school, OJ was sharp and witty and had lots of energy. He would often run around the gym in his Air Jordans. Some days, OJ didn’t get enough sleep or food. At school, he would have a nap in the cosy Corner and a snack. And then he was back to himself.He liked to tease Nelson Kablalik, a teaching assistant who was slightly hard of hearing. OJ would sidle up beside Nelson and whisper, “tiktik,” — earwax in Inuktitut. OJ and his friends would laugh. Nelson looked out for OJ, afraid the kid was slipping between the cracks.“It was hard to breathe the next day,” Nelson said a year after OJ’s mangled body was found on July 7, 2017.For many here in Rankin Inlet, traumatic events began piling up with the Canadian government’s colonial efforts in the mid 1900s. Authorities scooped children from their families and placed them in residential and ...
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