Inuit art shows life on cusp of upheaval
Drawings from 159 Inuit depicting everyday life are of historical importance, DON BUTLER writes.
The Canadian Museum of Civilization is eyeing the acquisition of a unique collection of 1,863 drawings — described as being “of outstanding significance and national importance” — created by Inuit in northern Baffin Island nearly half a century ago.
The pencil and pen drawings were created in 1964 by 159 Inuit, ages seven to 72, living in and around Clyde River, Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet and Igloolik.
Terry Ryan, who was general manager of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in Cape Dorset from 1962 to 2001, collected the drawings during an arduous four-month dogsled trip, financed by a $4,000 arts grant.
Ryan distributed paper and pencils to the Inuit he encountered on the outward leg of the epic journey. Though only two had ever drawn before, he asked them to draw something, then bought their work on his return trip.
“They were so anxious to do it,” said Ryan, who will turn 80 in December,
Ryan gathered the drawings just as Inuit in north Baffin Island were abandoning their traditional nomadic hunting camps and moving to permanent settlements.
“It’s like a camera shot of that time in history,” he said of the collection. “It speaks to a time now gone.”
The Art Gallery of Ontario exhibited 75 of the drawings in 1986, but the vast majority has never been displayed. “They’re still sitting on a shelf,” said Ryan, who received a Governor General’s Award in 2009 for his work promoting Inuit art.
In an interview in the AGO exhibit’s catalogue, Ryan recounted the 1964 trip to the north Baffin communities.
The trip between Clyde River and Pond Inlet, he said, was a rough one. With wind chill, temperatures dropped to -60 C, and the sea ice they travelled over was littered with truck-size pieces of ice. Some days they were able to travel only five or six kilometres.
When his interpreter told the Inuit what “this crazy qallanaaq” Ryan wanted, “the response was always uproarious laughter, like ‘You must be kidding! Is that all he came up all this way for?’ The reaction was one of amusement, real amusement,” Ryan recalled.
In 2011, Ryan approached Norman Vorano, the Museum of Civilization’s curator of Inuit art, to see if the museum would be interested in acquiring the collection. Documents obtained by Ottawa researcher Ken Rubin under access to information legislation show that it was.
The museum’s collections committee recommended the purchase of the drawings, along with Ryan’s trip diary, in May 2011. It valued the collection at $500,000.
The “request to purchase” document describes the collection in glowing terms, calling it “truly unique. Due to its rareness, size, level of documentation and intrinsic ethnographic/historical value, the loss of this collection to Canada would significantly diminish our shared national heritage.”
The collection, it argues, was pertinent to the museum’s mandate as a national social history museum. It “documents the culture of Canada’s Arctic peoples, and illuminates the history of Canada’s changing North in the mid-20th century, an era of great social and political upheaval.”
The collection raises issues of national significance, such as the federal government’s administration of the Arctic, and issues that resonate globally, such as the engagements between indigenous peoples and modernity.
The drawings made by the 159 Inuit are thematically diverse, the museum document says, depicting spiritual beliefs, hunting practices, transactions with outsiders, ancestral beliefs, landscapes and scenes from everyday life. Most also include Inuktituk texts, which have been translated into English.
“The collection is documentary or narrative in character, tracing the thoughts, histories and observations of the very last generation of Inuit who were born on the land, travelled by dog sled, and lived in tents and igloos,” the museum document says.
Despite the May 2011 recommendation to purchase Ryan’s collection, the museum has not yet decided whether to acquire it and has not begun formal negotiations, according to Patricia Lynch, a museum spokesperson.
“We’re talking with the gentleman in question and we are still evaluating internally whether we go ahead with it,” said Lynch.
The museum is in the process of being rebranded as the Canadian Museum of History, with a reduced focus on social history, which could be a factor in determining whether it will acquire the Inuit drawings.
If the museum declines, Ryan said he doesn’t know what else he might do with the drawings, “other than take them down to New York or something.” The Smithsonian Museum in Washington has also shown some interest in the past, he said.
Ryan has not yet set a price for the collection in his discussions with the museum, but his main objective is to keep the collection of drawings intact.
“It’s a wonderful collection,” he said. “There’s enough work there to fill about three books.”