Fantastic history behind Jasperite’s Order of Canada

Dr. Otto Schaefer says he’s keeping his Order of Canada award – although he does support those who have given theirs back in protest of abortion-rights activist Dr. Henry Morgentaler. 

A handful of Canadians have returned their medals, including a group of anti-abortionists, a Roman Catholic priest and a retired police detective, after Morgentaler was listed as a recipient of the Order of Canada award earlier this month.

“He’s an abortion doctor, not a life doctor. I protest against it too,” Schaefer said, in the German accent that’s stuck with him since he left his home country more than 50 years ago. “It’s a good reaction, but you don’t necessarily need to give it back.”

Both doctors adamantly fought for causes they believe in, though Schaefer’s were never quite so controversial. 

He was inducted to the Order of Canada in 1976 for his work both in northern Canada and as director of the Northern Medical Research Unit at Charles Camsel Hospital in Edmonton. 

Schaefer fell in love with Arctic Canada after reading a book about the place and its people as a boy in Germany. Though he refused to join the Hitler Youth, he later volunteered to serve with the Nazi infantry to prove himself patriotic enough to attend medical school. 

Following a stint as a medical officer in the war, he went back to university to specialize in internal medicine, left for Canada and took a posting in the north at his first opportunity. He left Germany in 1951 when he was 32 years old.

When his wife, Didi, joined him one year later, Schaefer’s coworker offered her parents’ house in Jasper for their honeymoon. “It was wonderful,” he said. He moved to town 54 years later, in early 2006.

Schaefer is known for publishing more than 100 scientific papers and playing a major role in developing controls for tuberculosis, though the stories he shares are more often about the people and the places as they are about his career. 

He absorbed as much as he could about the cultures he encountered as quickly as possible, including the Inuktitut language. “Well, I had to,” he said. “I learned enough to handle myself, it was always a mix of speaking and showing.”

He recalls traditional ceremonies in which a teenage  girl was silent as she was tattooed using sinew and soot. If she screamed she was unmarriageable, he said. He shows photos of dog sled teams, the sun shining in the middle of the night and of his wife wearing a thick parka. 

His daughter Monika, who lives in Jasper, said as a kid she thought it was normal to know all the things she did about medicine and northern peoples. She recalled that at one time Indian women in Whitehorse were given drugs immediately after giving birth to stop their milk.

“He fought that tooth and nail,” she said. “He was also a big advocate of maintaining their country diet and opposed the coming of the western food which really changed their health.”

Though her family had moved to Edmonton by the time she was born, her father still went back to the Arctic several months each year. “He was just totally dedicated to his career, he worked very, very hard,” she said. “He had that real inquisitive mind together with a real strong work ethic.”

Schaefer now lives in a tidy apartment lined with hand-made carvings on shelves and original sketches on the walls. Though his last visit was years ago, each artifact and photograph tells a tale, and is his ticket back to the north.