Hunting Art III

Bear Handstand, Soapstone Cape Dorset Artist Ottokie Samayuallie
Courtesy Sivertson Art Gallery  https://www.sivertson.com/

When James Houston returned to Montreal, he showed his small collection of carvings to the Canadian Guild of Crafts in December 1948.  Houston's nascent idea was a good one.  He soon returned to the Arctic with a grant of $1000, plus $500 of his own money to purchase more carvings.  When they had the exhibition in Montreal, the entire show sold out, 90% of it in three days.  He was soon offered a job with the Canadian government to expand 'this new Arctic work.'  He married Allie Bardon and together they traveled around the Arctic on their honeymoon, often by dogsled, hunting for carvings.  They settled in Cape Dorset, Baffin Island, where they worked for 11 years, traveling the Arctic, commissioning Inuit to join the growing art colony.

River Fishing 1966 stonecut on paper Gov A/43 Artist Victor Ekootak (1916-1965) Courtesy Winnipeg Art Museum http://www.wag.ca/ 

 Inuit souvenir trade carvings of the Late Historic period changed quickly.  By 1952, Houston began calling Inuit carvings "art."  The population of Cape Dorset reached 1000 working artists during his tenure.  This was a natural progression for a people used to working communally.  After researching printing methods in Japan, Houston also set up the Cape Dorset print shop in 1958.    Eventually the Guild enlisted the help of the Hudson Bay Company and other arts groups in the United States and London to distribute the art works.

Caribou  Linocut, stencil on paper, 1958 Artist Joseph Pootoogook Courtesy Winnipeg Art Gallery  http://www.wag.ca/

                      Caribou The above print was created from 

                         a drawing by renowned Cape Dorset camp 

                         leader and carver Pootoogook. The earliest 

                         prints were made with the assistance of James 

                         Houston.  http://www.wag.ca/

Inuit Way of Art And Life

Inuit hunters are skilled butchers, giving them a fluent knowledge of anatomy.  The whole family would take part in Butchering game.  An old belief is animals prefer being killed with beautiful tools, so Inuit incised their ivory and whalebone implements with delicate carvings, later influencing southern whalers' creation of scrimshaw.

Artifacts from the ancient Dorset culture were found on the southwest coast of Baffin Island, near the Arctic Circle, an apt connection to the new Inuit art community there.  Terry Ryan began working at the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in the 1950s.  He was graduated from Toronto Art College and convinced the Department of Northern Affairs to hire him to fill in for James Houston.  His early impressions of the colony are noteworthy:

"When I got here I found a great many Eskimo drawings in the old building Jim (Houston) had been using as a (work) shop. They were unbelievably good!  I'd no idea Eskimos could express themselves so well.

"Working in stone comes naturally to them.  Wood is something they're not really accustomed to, because there's not much of it in the Arctic.  They work freely with stone.  The Eskimo carver doesn't feel it's an alien material since his people have worked with (stone) for thousands of years," Farley Mowat observed, in High Latitudes, An Arctic Journey.

Few aboriginal cultures have stepped out of their old ways into Western life and within twenty years reach the top of the West's art markets.  Inuit artists work has been called, "A splendid new art of acculturation," their natural abilities quickly catapulting them out of the handcraft genre and into art's mainstream, like Athena, sprung full grown.

It's hard to imagine how drastically and rapidly Inuit lives changed.  Their names for instance. It wasn't until the 1940s Royal Canadian Mounted Police census that every person was assigned an identification number to avoid confusion about given names, for they lived in such small extended families that surnames didn't exist.  Many carvers signed their works with their i.d. numbers (called disc numbers) to avoid confusion in the 1950s and 60s.  

Surnames were officially adopted in 1969.  The Canadian Inuit population reached an all time low of 8,000, in the 1930s, due to starvation and disease.  Today they number about 35,000, and have one of the highest birthrates in Canada.