Handing Down of Culture | Chapter 16 | Joy Cohnstaedt

Chapter 16 | Joy Cohnstaedt

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My interest in the Eskimo, as they were then called, had begun in high school when I first read about stone cut prints. In 1962, as a visual arts student, I bought #1/50 of “Sea Monsters Devouring Whale” a stone block print series by the Cape Dorset artist, Kiakjhuk. I was unaware at the time that the Inuit were still known in the Arctic by numbers and not by names, nor that the names would be spelt differently by officials who could not speak their language or dialect. Providing a name rather than a number for the artist became part of the arts marketing strategy, but numbers can still be found on the carvings and their documentation.

In the spring of 1967, I flipped a coin — heads, Expo 67, tails, Rankin Inlet, Northwest Territories. By June I was one of a few archaeology and cultural anthropology university students on a train that stopped on request to let Indian and Métis off with the supplies they had traded for skins and fish. As they disappeared on foot into the bush, the train continued to the town of Churchill on the southwest edge of Hudson’s Bay. I stayed overnight in a hotel and the next morning flew north by bush plane to the west coast of the Bay and Rankin Inlet. The plane landed inland — had it been winter we would have settled down on the ice — and the Inuit, who met the plane, unloaded it. I spent the summer months learning the Inuktitut language from a local teacher, reading about the Arctic peoples, working as an artist in the Arts and Crafts Workshop with Inuit craftspeople, documenting the settlement and observing the interactions among the Inuit themselves and with their non-Inuit neighbours.

On the edge of the town stood the shell of a copper mine. It was part of an earlier government and the private sector effort to create an economic foundation for the settlement and had been abandoned as uneconomic. The then current ill-fated industrial effort was to create a niche market in the south for canned seal meat, sometimes curried or with other sauces, and other “county foods” such as whale and caribou. Earlier, Inuit arts and crafts workshops had been set up in the larger communities of the Eastern Arctic as part of the same effort to establish viable northern industries. The Rankin Inlet artists were experimenting with clay, firing hand built pottery head shapes in electric kilns. When the kilns failed, green ware production continued and salaries were paid to the Inuit craftspeople. Regardless of the result, art and craft making had become a rationale for the delivery of social assistance. Stone carving was still practiced in the community and both the pottery and carvings were marketed as “Eskimo Art” especially in the larger cities in Canada and the USA.

Carving for the tourist trade was already well established in the 1940s but a commercial and artistic venture on a large scale was the result of an initiative by Alma and James Houston and the government. This industrial effort began with carving and printmaking in Cape Dorset and other isolated communities. It later expanded to other media. At the community level, art making was a division of labour based both on race and gender. The work was celebrated for its originality in Arts Canada and other magazines that were targeted to help promote sales. Under the sponsorship of the federal government, the aesthetic and cultural values of the dominant society prevailed. “Eskimo Art” had become an ethnic indicator of the Inuit and was promoted in commercial and public galleries and specialty stores throughout North America and Europe.

As I wandered through the empty copper mine, I read the notices posted on the walls. One advised the non-Inuit workers that if they were caught on the road to the “Eskimo village,” they would be sent south immediately. Rankin Inlet was a segregated town. The utilador, an above ground system of pipes, delivered some of the utility services to the residents and businesses, but it stopped at the road to the Eskimo village. In the “government” part of the town, the houses were a standard southern bungalow style, built above the permafrost, though sometimes wired together to keep the walls from separating. The standard government-issue furniture, like the houses, was provided for the teachers and other professionals in the community, at a highly subsidized cost. Only one resident, a British immigrant and academic, Bob Williamson, whose knowledge of the Inuit and their language was considerable, had battled to buy a house as a demonstration of his commitment to the north. He flew the territorial government flag on his pole as symbol of NWT’s wish for independent status, similar to that of a province. No one else, neither Inuit nor non-Inuit owned their home, and the federal government controlled everything through their non-Inuit employees while the Inuit provided the labour.

Chapter 16, continued >