Seeing Ramah: Examining the Visual Archives of a Moravian Mission

Located on the north shore of Nullatartok Bay, Labrador, Ramah (sometimes spelled Rama) was the site of a Moravian Mission Station and Inuit community between 1871 and roughly 1910. Although it was one of the shorter-lived Moravian stations in Labrador, it was richly documented by missionaries.

Three of the five communities that make up present-day Nunatsiavut housed Moravian 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, including Ramah.

Opened one hundred years after their first permanent Labrador settlement in Nain, Ramah was described in Moravian publications as a “Jubilee station.” Its goal was to allow missionaries to expand their evangelical work amongst unconverted Inuit who were living beyond the community of Hebron, which was then the most northerly Moravian Station in Labrador. The amount of documentation relative to the length of Moravian settlement suggests how important the station was to the missionaries.

However, Ramah fell short of the missionaries’ goal. Part of the problem was location, since there were more Inuit further north in Nachvak Fjord. Writing on the opening of the station in 1871, missionary Samuel Weitz recorded the disappointment of Tuglavinek and Simigak—Inuit from Nachvak—in the choice of Nullatartok Bay as the site for the Station. When Ramah Station opened its doors in July 1871, there were only seventeen Inuit living in Nullatartok Bay: Kaksungaut, his two wives, and five children; Nochasak, his wife, and six children; and a young man named Koversak.

The station's Inuit population did not increase by much. At the time of the final service in Ramah's chapel in September 1908, missionary Samuel King Hutton recorded forty-five Inuit living in the nearby community. For many of the local population, the departure of the missionaries had no bearing on their decision to stay.

“I am well off here,” Hutton quotes an unnamed Inuk in the community, one year after the station closed. “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.”

In the Moravian record, mentions of Ramah trail off after 1910. But even then, fifteen Inuit remained, all “served in the Gospel by the native helper Jako Nochasak.” Jako remained in Ramah with his family until its church was dismantled and brought to Nain in order to replace the one that had burned down there. That church was then razed in 1921; today’s Moravian Church in Nain hails from Zoar.

Evidence of settlement at Ramah remains. An area referred to as 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. The remains of the station and community square easily with their 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. 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.