Canon Jonas Allooloo, former dean of St. Jude’s Cathedral in Iqaluit, Nunavut and a key member of the translation team that created the first Inuktitut Bible, died Feb. 23 in Ottawa at the age of 79.
Friends, family and colleagues in the diocese of the Arctic and beyond mourned the loss of Allooloo, remembering him as a much-loved priest, teacher and translator over more than 40 years of service in parish ministry and the life of the church.
“Jonas’ ministry was marked by love for God, his people, and the rich culture of the Arctic,” the diocese said in an obituary. “He faced challenges with humility, grace, and a hearty laugh and bright smile. His work in obedience to his calling from Almighty God will continue to strengthen generations of parishioners and clergy, and his contributions to Indigenous ministry and biblical translation leave a lasting legacy.”
David Parsons, retired diocesan bishop of the Arctic, described Allooloo as “our blessed and beloved brother … Jonas was a very bright light within the institution, but greater than that, Jonas was a faithful, consistent light and voice within the entire Christian family.”
Born in 1946 in the Inuit hamlet of Igloolik, Allooloo grew up in a camp near Pond Inlet on Baffin Island. His father was a Christian leader who led worship services out on the land. As a child, Allooloo attended residential school in Churchill, Manitoba.
As a young man, he studied at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, where Allooloo experienced what he believed to be a call from God to return to the North and minister to his fellow Inuit. He was ordained in the mid-1970s and subsequently worked in parish ministry for decades, eventually serving as dean of St. Jude’s Cathedral from 2012 until his 2018 retirement.
Translation projects were a major focus of Allooloo’s life and ministry—particularly translating the Bible into his native language of Inuktitut, a massive endeavour that began in 1978 and took 34 years. Allooloo was part of a team of four translators that also included Bishop Benjamin Arreak, Bishop Andrew Atagotaak and the Rev. Joshua Arreak, working with translators from the Canadian Bible Society.
The team published the New Testament in 1991 and finally published a complete Bible in Inuktitut, including the Old Testament, in 2012. In a report to the 2013 Joint Assembly of the Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, Allooloo said Inuit Christians reacted with joy to the Inuktitut Bible, with 2,000 leather-bound copies selling out on the first day. “It has been a privilege for me to do this for my people,” he said at the time.
Those who knew Allooloo recalled him as hard-working and driven in his translation projects. His nephew, the Rev. Caleb Sangoya, rector of St. Timothy’s Anglican Church in Pond Inlet until his retirement in 2021, says Allooloo would consult family and friends regarding translations, drawing on their knowledge of different Inuktitut dialects when a word was difficult to translate.
“He was an honest person, humble,” Sangoya says. “The people fully trusted him when he translated, as well as [with] spiritual growth …He had a special gift … He [knew] quite a bit about Inuit languages.”
Bishop Jared Osborn, suffragan bishop for the diocese of the Arctic, worked with Allooloo at St. Jude’s Cathedral while serving as a deacon and assistant priest. The cathedral offered worship services in both English and Inuktitut, with Allooloo preaching in the appropriate language at each.
“Sometimes we’d have bilingual services that were a joint service, and he would preach in both languages,” Osborn says. “He’d just say some things in Inuktitut and then he’d interpret them on his own into English, and go back and forth that way.”
Even after completing the Inuktitut Bible in 2012, Allooloo continued to work on updates, correcting errors and refining the translation in response to feedback.
Allooloo worked on a children’s Bible in Inuktitut featuring simplified versions of Bible stories for kids, which Anglican congregations have distributed in the North, Osborn says. He also translated internal materials for the diocese.
“The thing that Jonas really loved the most was the translation work,” Osborn says. “It’s something that he did for decades. He just always loved to keep working on that. When projects were finished, he was looking for new projects. ‘What else needs to be translated? What else can we do to get the word of God into the hands of Inuit people?’
“Even when he came to Iqaluit as the dean, he had a lot of responsibilities, but he still managed to keep working on those projects as much as he could. Into retirement, he also kept working on that translation work pretty much right up to the end.”
Two years after Allooloo retired as dean, he and his wife Meena found themselves homeless, unable to find affordable housing. An outpouring of support followed reporting in the Anglican Journal about his plight and the larger housing crisis in the North, with parishes raising money that allowed the couple to move into a small one-bedroom apartment in Iqaluit.
That network of care was one result of the close relationships Allooloo developed with colleagues and residents in the communities where his ministry brought him.
“He was always very gentle … He definitely served as a mentor to me and to my wife, Rebecca, as we were new in the Arctic and just trying to figure things out about the culture and the lifestyle and the church up here,” Osborn said.
Allooloo, he said, would be remembered as “a man of God, as a faithful pastor, as somebody that dedicated so much of his life to the work of ministry and to translation … People in [many] communities remember Jonas and ask about how he was doing. He was well-known and well-loved all across our diocese.”
