Celebrating Inuit Art

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Celebrating Inuit Art is not a book to read in a hurry but one to savour
slowly and return to often, perhaps on winter nights. The carvings, made
widely available to the public through professional photography, are
striking and memorable. Each has been given the space it deserves,
namely a full page in a large-format book. The longest section, “The
Artists Speak,” deals with 11 Arctic regions. The artists, for the
most part, are Inuit. James Houston, former member of the Canadian
Eskimo Arts Council and retired chairman of the American Indian Art
Center for 20 years, remained active in encouraging Inuit artists until
his death in 2005. His 20-page essay, “Fifty Years of Thinking It
Over,” covers his long experience in the Arctic from 1948 until his
death in 2005.

Inuit carvings are now sold in Toronto, New York, Paris, Berlin, and
Tokyo. Printmaking and carving have helped the Inuit to earn the
independence they desired, during a period of great change for their
people. The 1950s and ’60s were the critical decades during which most
Inuit in the Canadian Arctic gave up their nomadic existence and settled
into communities that were developing around the Hudson’s Bay trading
posts that had existed since the early 1900s.

In her essay “The Artists Speak,” Maria von Finckenstein discusses
the perceptions and experiences of a number of first-generation Inuit
artists whose lives had previously depended on hunting and trapping. She
was delighted to learn that they could feed their families through
making art. They had begun carving for the “white” traders from the
south, while continuing to hunt. Gradually, over the years, Inuit art
broadened into carving, sewing, drawing, printmaking, and the weaving of
tapestries. Asked how they had learned to carve without any training,
Josie Papialuk replied that he had just sawed off a piece of very hard
stone and started carving.

This beautiful book, which covers both the art and the history of the
Inuit, as well as the slowly changing lives of the creators whose works
are illustrated, includes a foreword by Adrienne Clarkson and a fine
article by Ann Meekitjuk Hanson.