Editor’s Note

Reframing the North.

She looks off toward a vista, a horizon, that we cannot see. It’s left outside the frame — a choice of the photographer in making this young woman, and not the changing northern world around her, the sole focus of the camera’s gaze. Her face framed by a furtrimmed parka, she is frozen in time.

Among the thousands of images commissioned or collected over the decades by The Beaver magazine, this issue’s cover photo is special for four simple, handwritten words found in the margins of the print: “Dora Klengenberg” and “Lorene Squire.”

Squire, a photographer, made this photo in 1938 in Aklavik, N.W.T., while on assignment for The Beaver. This is a rare image — a photo of a woman by a woman — that was created at a time when few female photographers were given opportunities to work alone in Canada’s remote northern wilderness.

The photo is even more special thanks to Squire’s decision to name Klengenberg, who was then the teenaged daughter of a prominent Inuit trader and schooner captain. Since The

Beaver’s debut in 1920, the magazine had rarely named Indigenous peoples in photographs or stories. As a result, Inuit, First Nations, and Métis peoples were metaphorically pushed to the margins of the magazine — present, yet obscured. Especially during its first few decades of

Lorene Squire, right, photographed Dora Klengenberg, left, in 1938. Both women’s names are seen handwritten in the margins of the Klengenberg portrait.

Inuit children stand at the railing of a ship, likely the RMS Nascopie, circa 1938. Photograph by Lorene Squire.