“I got to Inuvik, and someone said, you have to talk to Fred Carmichael. He is a legend, a community builder, and one of the best guys you’ll ever meet.”
– Author/historian Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail
An illustrated children’s book telling the story of how Inuvik’s Fred Carmichael made it through a turbulent childhood to become the first Indigenous commercial pilot in the Arctic has landed a host of awards and honours.
Freddie the Flyer celebrates Carmichael’s early dreams of flying and his later achievements for the people of the NWT’s most northern regions.
Readers move with Carmichael through the year, hearing about his journey in easy-to-digest tidbits, while learning the names of the months in Gwich’in and Inuvialuktun at the same time.
Artist Audrea Loreen-Wulf illustrated Freddie the Flyer. (Photo courtesy of Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail)
Art from Inuvialuit painter Audrea Loreen-Wulf captures the Beaufort Delta as well as Carmichael’s love for aviation in vivid colours on rough-hewn canvas.
Carmichael worked with Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail, a Nova Scotia-based historian, author and aviation fan.
A member of the Order of Canada and Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame, Carmichael, 89, isn’t doing media interviews at present. But coinciding with the book’s launch last fall, co-author Metcalfe-Chenail spoke with him to help promote the book.
“I’m going to pester you for a few of my favourite stories,” she said, inquiring about one particular search and rescue flight for some lost canoeists.
Metcalfe-Chenail: “Can you tell us the story about the bank manager and his friend?”
Carmichael: “What had happened is they, they were going from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk, but they got all turned around. They searched for him there, I guess, couple odd, three days. And so I was doing some stuff at a reindeer station.
“So, I called in and said, ‘If you need any help, I can run a couple of boys would come along spotters, you know?’ And they said, no, no, we won’t. We don’t need help.”
Metcalfe-Chenail: “Weren’t they the military search and rescue folks?”
Carmichael: “Well 10 days later, there’s still no sign of the bank manager. They were going to wrap up the search and head back south. I got into my airplane with a couple of boys who knew that part of the McKenzie River, the southern part quite very well. The Mackenzie Delta, it’s got so many different arms and tributaries.
“As soon as the Air Force left, we took off, and we went to this channel where they figured they may have made the wrong turn the Air Force had just they were about maybe 150 miles ahead and back to Toronto, or however, and they heard us giving our message to air radio.
A page from Freddie the Flyer children’s book. (Image courtesy of Penguin Random House Canada.)
“Then we located these people, and we’re so many miles from Inuvik, and one of them had some medical problems, so we had to have them taken in soon as we got there, because he was in very bad shape.”
Metcalfe-Chenail: “The moral the story is that local knowledge is important, right? Well, thank goodness for you and your friends for being able to find them and bring them back before any kind of real tragedy happened. They were able to get that medical attention and be okay and have quite a story for the rest of their lives about roughing it in the bush outside of Inuvik.”
Carmichael was born and raised on the traplines in the bush and in the community of Aklavik to a Gwich’in mother and a father of Irish and Scottish heritage.
The 32-page illustrated book takes readers from Carmichael’s school-age daydreams of flight in Aklavik, to living his dreams as a private pilot.
Metcalfe-Chenail spoke to CKLB Radio about working with Carmichael and the growing interest in Indigenous literature.
Fred Carmichael started Reindeer Air Service Ltd in 1959. (Photo courtesy of Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame)
“There’s a tremendous hunger for books by and about Indigenous folks, but especially having that authenticity and the experience that folks like Fred and Andrea bring to the table,” she said over the phone.
“I’m just lucky that I can help in any way that I can, and use my experiences with the publishing industry to hopefully make it a little bit easier, and then step out of the way when necessary and give as much space as possible.”
At the start of this year, the book caught the attention of the Dolly Parton Children’s Imagination Library for Canada, a free monthly subscription for children ages five and under.
It has been shortlisted for next year’s Hackmatack Award in the English nonfiction category and long-listed for the First Nation Communities Read Award in the Children’s Category.
A review of the Penguin Random House Canada product by Kirkus Reviews noted artist Loreen-Wulf’s painting on rough canvas, “underscores the breadth and beauty of the subarctic landscape with scenes of musk oxen and caribou, broad snowfields, and swathes of seasonal wildflowers beneath twilit skies and bright Northern lights.”
Carmichael still flies his Cessna 170 from his home in Inuvik, where he lives with his wife, Miki O’Kane, and their dog, Shadow.
In an APTN interview with the couple earlier this year in Inuvik, the pilot-turned-author was hesitant to accept some of the praise coming in for his book, published in October 2023 in English, including Gwich’in and Inuvialuktun languages.
“Fred, you’re a very humble guy,” O’Kane said, sitting next to Carmichael. “Your story can help kids and that’s the whole idea is to help kids follow their dreams.”
Fred Carmichael at the controls of an aircraft. (Photo courtesy of Fred Carmichael, Miki O’Kane)
