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!