NOTES

1 Bodil Kaalund, The Art of Greenland: Sculpture, Crafts, Painting (English and Danish Edition) (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 89.

2 Once Tunumiit were converted to Christianity, they could produce tupilak figures— concrete, tangible, non-powerful forms—since they no longer believed in the power of a tupilaq being. See Knud Rasmussen, The People of the Polar North: A Record (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company Limited, 1908), 308. 3 Encyclopedia of the Arctic, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), s.v. “tupilak.”

4 Even the US Chaplain Maurer amassed a collection of over 50 tupilak figures and published a small pamphlet about them.

5 Carvers were offered several workshops in the late 1970s by the Royal Greenland Trade Department, but it was not a system of production set up like the Canadian counterpart with instruction and help from artists and mentors. In Canada there was an Igloo Tag attached to every original work of art made by a Canadian Inuk sculptor that stated who made it, where it was made and the material of which it was made. In East Greenland, they tried using a turquoise two-sided blue tag: on one side was the crest of the Royal Greenland Trade Department and a man in a kayak between the words ROYAL and GREENLAND, and on the other, the carver’s name, the date and the place. This tagging practice lasted only about three years and was never consistently used across Greenland. Most of the tags were labelled Kunstforenigen (artist’s workshop) instead of the carver’s name, since it was not important to the RGTD who actually carved each sculpture. As long as the figures could be sold as tupilat, the Royal Greenland Trade Department purchased them.

6 Gedion Qeqe, conversation with author, 1998.