Inuit Sculpture

As long as I can remember (and even before I was born) there was an Inuit sculpture on the knick knack shelf of my suburban family home in Winnipeg.  It's a heavy sculpture as it is a fairly big piece of soapstone,  about 10 inches high by 7 inches long and 5 inches wide.  It is a dark grey, a bit green, with a few lighter veins running through it.   A typical piece of a daily routine, a woman breast feeding her child. We are not really sure where my father got it as he had traveled to the Arctic several times for work as a cameraman with CBC.  One of his favourite places was Rankin Inlet, so we figured it had to be from there.  He had also gone to Baffin island.  However, that was quite a bit later than when he had acquired the sculpture, according to my sister who also remembered it being there as a child.

One day, while walking in a section of the Vancouver International Airport,  I noticed amongst their Inuit art section,  a sculpture that looked remarkably similar to the one we had at home.  I took a photo of it. The name of the artist on the name tag was that of Mary Kunalik,  from the community of Salluit, in what is now called Nunavik,  (a part of Nunavut) which was previously a part of arctic Quebec.  The date of that sculpture is 1954,  probably only a few years earlier than when my father got his sculpture. That got the ball rolling for me to find out once and for all who was the sculptor of that piece.

There is no better place to find out about Inuit Art than the Winnipeg Art Gallery,  as they have the most extensive and important collection in the world.   After making a phone call to someone from their library/archives department, we were told to look for a number and possible name, in Inuktitut syllabics, on the bottom of the base of the sculpture.  My father had glued a felt to the bottom of the piece to prevent it from scratching the wood it was sitting on for all those years.  So we took it off and sure  enough, there was the number and an Inuktitut script.  On a side note,  I also learned that numbers were actually like names given to people as they were being recorded by the government when the Inuit came off the land and into settlements.  Part of that was to facilitate the recording of the high number of tuberculosis in northern communities.  However, you can also imagine how priests, who found that most of their real names, besides being unpronounceable, were names of animals or spirits and associated with shamanism.  Christian names were given, as well as the numbers, which also indicated from which part of the Arctic they were from.   It was also a way to identify sculptors in the burgeoning art market for "Eskimo Art".  Until Inuit began studying in the south, many didn't know that numbers were not normal parts of Christian and English naming systems. In 1969, the government started to replace number-names with patrilineal "family surnames".  But contemporary Inuit carvers and graphic artists still use their disk number as their signature on their works of art.

The next day I visited the Winnipeg Art Gallery and gave the number to the librarian.  She typed it in and came out with the name of the artist; Miaiji Uitangi Usaitaijuk, from Salluit, the same settlement as the other sculptor in the airport.  I was shown a few books and catalogues  with photos of other pieces from that time, the 1950's,  and many of them had a similar style, not so polished, a bit rough on the surface and quite primitive looking. In a word, amazing!

Discovery Islands

Hot sun, blue skies, warm breeze, short summer....  I needed a break from work and the city.  So I threw my kayak on the roof of my car and escaped to Cortes island, part of the Northern Gulf islands between the east coast of Vancouver island and the mainland.  After a couple hours of driving and three ferries later,  I met up with my friends Erik and Naomi who had just finished building their outrigger canoe that they had been working on for a couple of months in East Vancouver.  They had spent a few days motoring there from False Creek, up the Sunshine Coast and 'Seaweed', as the outrigger is called,  still needed some work done. They were set up on a beach at Manson's Landing, one of the several picturesque bays and coves of Cortes island.  Their friend Max, who lives nearby, was there to help put up a mast and rigging and was to join us for a week of cruising around some of the other islands further north.

I set up a tent on the beach and it was so nice to be back in the ocean environment, the rhythm of tides, the sound of waves, salt in the air.  We asked the locals about red tide and it did not seem to be a problem, despite the warning signs put up by the government (they are there  permanently I was told).  There were thousands of oysters at low tide and a nearby lagoon also provided us with an abundance of clams.  Fruits of the sea!  We boiled the clams and they were delicious with some white wine sauce, onions, garlic and pasta.   The oysters were almost too big and it was a bit hard going shucking them. They still tasted great though, raw with some hot sauce and lemon.  We fried some up as well.

Cortes is a pretty laid back place.  There is no real main town,  not even where the ferry docks,  just a few communities spread out throughout the island.  It's probably not unlike what Salt Spring island was 40 years ago with some oyster fishermen, hippies and natives,  each doing their own thing.  It was interesting meeting some of the locals as well as visitors who lived on their boats.  Unlike the marinas of Vancouver, there were not many of the huge, ugly modern yachts but rather old wooden ketches, converted fishing boats, homemade trimarans,  sleek schooners.  It was pretty much the same on Quadra and the other islands as well.

There was an opaque smoke in the air from the hundreds of forest fires burning all over BC.   The haze made for a perfect red sphere at sunset,  a sort of sun you see in the fields of India or industrial Japan. It finally cleared up with a stiff breeze and we motored  (surprisingly fast)  out to Heriot Bay,  on Quadra island and had some brewskies at the local pub to celebrate Max's birthday.  It was there that Erik's 30 year old 9.9 Envinrude outboard motor died the next day.  There was nothing to be done until Monday so we hitched a ride on a boat to Read island to go to the locale "Surge Festival" near Surge Narrows.  More hippies... but there was some great music in the community hall.

We returned the following day and Erik tackled the motor problem, with the help some nice guys we met at the campground in Heriot Bay.  While he got a ride back to Campbell River for parts,  I was asked if I wanted to help Dale, one of the guys,  retrieve some prawns from his traps that were set out in the bay.  He told me to bring my fishing rod and off we went in his big new power boat. We stopped out past the spit where the locals told us was the spot where the fish were biting.  After the second cast I caught a 4 lb salmon which gave a good fight but we threw him back.  Ten casts later, wham!  I saw a big fish jumping 50 yards away.  I reeled him in and had an 11 lb Coho into the net.  Nice...!  After helping Dale haul up six of his traps, he gave me a bag of jumbo prawns and I returned with the bounty, thinking of a good meal that evening.

I had brought with me some Japanese paper, block print ink and a brush to pull off a few fish prints and with Erik's help, in a strong wind, we managed to get a few good ones of that nice looking Coho salmon. I had practiced as well on a smaller rock fish the day before.  Of course, once the print was done,  you just wash off the water-based ink and fillet the fish to eat.  We moored up next to 'Samsara' an old wooden ketch belonging to a pirate dude named Dan and, along with a friend of his,  had an awesome dinner of prawns and salmon, with some Havana Club rum on the side.

The motor was fixed and we went back to Cortes, hoping to see some orcas that were reportedly cruising the Straight. We left Seaweed moored in the bay as they were returning for some sailing in September, and headed back home by car.  First though, we got a bucket full of clams and some oysters to bring back.   The ferry crossing from Nanaimo was beautiful.  The ocean was like glass and you could see way up the Georgia Straight (or the "Salish Sea" as it has recently been re-named) in a golden orange sunset light.  As usual, it went by too quickly.