How To Draw Inuit Art

Drawn From Poverty: Art Was Supposed to Save Canada's Inuit. It Hasn't.

Indigenous work is all the rage in the Canadian art world. But life in the North is as much a struggle as ever.

Hunters returning to Cape Dorset, an Inuit town in northern Canada famed for its art.

CAPE DORSET, Nunavut — Hours before flying off to her debut show in Toronto, Ooloosie Saila, a rising star in the Canadian art world, was hiding in her grandmother's room on the frozen edge of the Arctic Ocean, cowering in fear.

Between her and the future stood the man in the next room, a relative who was drunk and raging — again. She perched on the bed, terrified he would burst in. Then, she packed in a frenzy.

She threw the hand-sewn outfit she had chosen for the opening into a plastic garbage bag, pulled her two young sons out of bed, grabbed her art supplies and fled into the frigid night .

Four days and 1,425 miles found Ms. Saila at the Feheley Fine Arts gallery in Toronto, where the crowd sipped wine and gushed over her "bold use" of color and negative space.

"It's an incredible way of depicting the landscape," said Stefan Hancherow, the associate art curator for the country's biggest bank. "The paper becomes a stand-in for minimalism but it's maximal in that it's depicting snow and ice."

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Credit... Chris Donovan for The New York Times

He asked Ms. Saila, who is 28, what had given her the idea. "I just did it myself," she replied. Except for grade school, she has never taken an art class.

It is a golden moment for the Indigenous people of Canada. At least, in theory.

The country is going through a period of atonement for its history of racism. While much of the world has turned inward, becoming more xenophobic, Canada has been consumed with making amends.

Public meetings across the country routinely start with an acknowledgment that they are standing on traditional Indigenous lands. In history classes, Canada's young learn about their government's systematic attempts to erase Indigenous culture s. Buildings have been renamed, street signs changed and in one city, a statue of the country's first prime minister removed.

Canadians call this "reconciliation," and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who faces a tight re-election vote on Monday, has made it central to his government and image.

[Canadians have elected a Liberal minority government, granting Justin Trudeau a second term as prime minister. ]

In Ooloosie Saila, many might see the embodiment of these aspirations: an accomplished artist being feted f or her depictions of the Inuit landscape in brilliant pinks and oranges — a young Indigenous woman who is making it.

But the world she returned to after the opening, the hamlet of Cape Dorset, is plagued by poverty, alcoholism and domestic abuse. The possibility of brutality is never far away. T he relative raging in Ms. Saila's house on the eve of her trip has assaulted her repeatedly, and has gone to jail for it.

"I'm not afraid of him when he's sober," she said.

Cape Dorset — a community of about 1,400 on a bay cradled by low-lying, bald mountains — is synonymous in Canadian minds with art. Local artists churn out works that decorate the walls of corporate headquarters and the homes of the well-off. Cape Dorset prints are featured on Canadian stamps and currency. Its sculptures are the standard gift of Canadian diplomats.

If any town could slip the bonds of poverty that have defined Indigenous life in Canada for so long, it should be Cape Dorset. Instead, it reflects the vast disconnect between the country's aspirations and the grim reality on the ground.

It's made up of scattered homes — many boarded up — an aging ice rink and a busy jail, packed with binge drinkers. With no movie theater or downtown, a general store serves as the social hub. There is a brand-new high school, but only because the old one was burned down by fume-sniffing teenagers. The town is so small the streets are unnamed.

Almost 90 percent of its residents live in public housing that is crowded, run-down, and has a three-year waiting list. Suicide is rife: The stony graveyard is dotted with crosses marking young people. More than half the residents rely on public assistance.

Artists like Ms. Saila may do a little better, but the vast majority eke out a living, often below the poverty line. Many support large extended families that depend on them for food — most of it flown in at exorbitant cost so that a single cucumber goes for $4.50.

And as for "reconciliation?" Ms. Saila has never heard of it.

Her goals are much more practical. She needs to make enough money to feed her two children. And she dreams of buying a snowmobile so she can return to the landscapes of her drawings.

The Town That Art Built

On long winter nights, when the sun is a five-hour memory, the temperature in Cape Dorset can reach a lung-burning 40 below zero. Still, carvers sit outside their homes under lights, transforming chunks of stone into seals and polar bears, the air ringing with the high-pitched sound of their electric grinders.

The Inuit of Cape Dorset were once the epitome of self-reliance, members of a hunting culture where everyone had a role. They lived entirely off the frozen land, searching for food by dog sled.

Then government workers lured them into the town, built around a trading post in the 1950s, with promises of permanent housing and school. In some cases, they shot their dogs, stranding them.

Officials soon took note of the Inuits' artistic skills, and thought that they might offer a bridge to a stationary existence, a way to make a living. Art has been a central feature of Cape Dorset life since then.

In 1959, artists created a co-op with an Inuit-led board that oversaw sales and plowed profits into the creation of a general store . In the center of town is a symbol of the co-op's success: a new, modern $9.8 million cultural center with spacious art studios and the hamlet's first gallery space. The town has other bright spots, including a $240-a-night hotel and a new health center under construction.

Artists stream into the cultural center, work in hand, looking to be paid. The co-op compensates them whether it can sell their work or not.

"They might sit in a drawer forever," said the studio manager at the time, Bill Ritchie. "We have drawings and drawings and drawings that will never sell."

By one government estimate, most artists across the territory make only about $2,080 a year. Once discovered, the stars are paid more. A handful of artists top $75,000 a year. This winter, news broke that one artist, Shuvinai Ashoona, had been awarded a $38,000 prize. But they are the rare exceptions.

" If you work hard like that, that's what could happen," the assistant manager, Joemee Takpaungai, told one artist, Johnny Pootoogook, who was working in the studio on a drawing of five men drumming together. It was a memory from his recent stint in jail.

Mr. Pootoogook's father, Kananginak, who helped found the co-op, became such a successful artist that his work headlined the Venice Biennale. But Johnny, 48, has fallen prey to abuse, depression and alcohol. He says he tried to hang himself 20 years ago.

For him, art has been the one constant, but he is still waiting for his first show.

"I want to tell the life of the Inuit up here," he said. "Not everything is good."

In fact, some blame art for the town's problems.

"Sometimes, when they get quite a bit of money, they use it to have access to drugs and alcohol," said Timoon Toonoo , the hamlet's mayor.

By any measure imaginable, life for Indigenous people across Canada is harsh — developing-world existences in a Group of 7 country. The nation has taken steps to redress its history, paying out hundreds of millions in legal settlements, including to Indigenous people taken from their parents as children and forced into adoptions or sent to boarding schools notorious for abuse.

W hatever hopes Mr. Trudeau once aroused among Indigenous people, he has been badly tarnished as a messenger. In February, the lone Indigenous member of his cabinet resigned, and accused him of bullying her. Then in September, old photographs emerged of him in brownface and blackface.

Mr. Trudeau 's government has drawn national attention to the north. But long before reconciliation became a national buzzword, Inuit activists were granted a vast territory in 1999. They called it Nunavut — "Our Land" in Inuktitut. Cape Dorset sits on the heel of its biggest island, Baffin .

I n winter, snow covers everything — the winding roads, the polar bear skins stretching outside on homemade racks, the shells of old snowmobiles heaped in the dump. The airport is often closed and when it is, everyone is stranded: There is no other way in, or out. A few supply ships come in during the summer, but like all 25 communities in Nunavut, Cape Dorset is completely isolated.

One January evening, Ms. Saila sank into her living room couch, watching the 1980s American sitcom "Three's Company," flanked by her two young sons and her grandmother, Sita.

Their home is a modest three-bedroom bungalow, decorated with elements from the ancient Inuit world, and the modern one. Jigging lures and ulus — the curved knives Inuit women use to cut meat and prepare skins — adorn the walls. So does a plaque of Ms. Saila's favorite hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Her grandparents grew up nomadically, living in igloos and sod houses. They raised Ms. Saila, but b y then they had settled in town.

"When I think about living how our grandparents did, it seems exhausting," said Ms. Saila, heading to the freezer, where plastic bags of "country food" — caribou, seal, beluga — bumped up against frozen waffles and Cool Whip.

Ms. Saila comes from a line of artists. Her great-grandfather, Pauta Saila, was an acclaimed carver, and her grandfather, Mikisiti Saila, followed his footsteps.

Mikisiti made enough money to buy a snowmobile, and on spring evenings he would hook it up to a qamutik — a homemade sled — and take his family to nearby lakes to ice-fish. In the summer, they would set out in his boat for weeks and pitch canvas tents on a rocky island, where Ms. Saila learned to pluck sea gull eggs, pick orange cloudberries and hunt.

The Inuit call this being "on the land." Hunting and foraging are an essential part of their identity, even for those to whom it's a distant memory.

"It was family time," Ms. Saila said. "When you are out on the land, it's peaceful."

In 2008, her grandfather died of tuberculosis, leaving no savings for his family. (There are no banks in Cape Dorset.) Every one of his valuable carvings had been sold. His boat went to an uncle , Ms. Saila said. The snowmobile broke down, then disappeared.

The trips on the land became more infrequent.

When Ms. Saila was in the 11th grade, she became pregnant. She dropped out of school and got a job working at the co-op's late-night convenience store. Residents still recount her confrontation with a drunk customer.

"I got mad — I head-butted her," she said, giggling at the memory. She says she quit.

Her next stop was the welfare office.

One day four years ago, Ms. Saila saw someone in town carrying a roll of thick artist paper. It stirred a memory of her best friend when she was a child — the granddaughter of Kenojuak Ashevak, Nunavut's most celebrated artist. Together, she and her friend would lie on their stomachs on the kitchen floor and watch the artist draw.

Ms. Saila appeared at the co-op studio and asked for some paper. Over time, Mr. Ritchie, the studio manager , pushed her to try landscapes.

The result was 15-foot elegies to her childhood trips, so dense with color pencil, Mr. Ritchie said, "you can almost read them like Braille."

"No one is doing what she's doing," he said.

Ms. Saila cried when he gave her $1,900 for her first large drawing. It was more money than she had ever held at once.

All the money went to groceries for her extended family.

"I'm happy I started drawing to get something to eat — especially for my kids," she said.

In late 2017, she gave birth to her second son, Pallu , who was born with serious health issues that require regular trips to the closest children's hospital, in Ottawa, two flights away .

Ms. Saila kept drawing, and by January, she was averaging $1,500 a month. That was more than she made before, but still below poverty level. The snowmobile she dreams of costs about $10,000.

Almost three years ago, an Inuit art expert, Pat Feheley, discovered her work . She displayed some of her drawings at an international art fair, and the response was so enthusiastic she planned a solo exhibition at her gallery in Toronto in March 2019.

"I'm excited and nervous," Ms. Saila said before making the trip.

The Big City

"An Eskimo — look!"

Ms. Saila was on top of the CN Tower in Toronto, and a middle-age man was exclaiming over the visitor from the North.

People stared as Ms. Saila took selfies, with Pallu popping out from her parka hood, before a skyline dense with buildings, some housing more people than all of Cape Dorset.

From the moment she arrived in the city, Ms. Saila saw signs of Canada's reconciliation campaign everywhere.

Inside the CN Tower, there was an exhibit of photographs of Indigenous dancers at modern powwows, which a sign noted had been outlawed for nearly a century. Walking through the atrium of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she glimpsed a broadcast of Prime Minister Trudeau delivering yet another apology — this one for the government's handling of a tuberculosis epidemic in the North.

Afterward, Ms. Saila met Ms. Feheley on the ground floor of a towering bank building, where there was a display of Inuit sculptures in glass cases. They had been collected by Ms. Feheley's father.

"See that little baby musk ox on the top shelf?" Ms. Feheley asked. "That's by your great-grandfather."

"Pauta? I'm going to take a picture," said Ms. Saila. She could not have been farther from "the land," but seeing the sculptures, she felt less alone .

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Credit... Chris Donovan for The New York Times

The evening before, as guests mingled, Ms. Saila sat by the door of the Feheley gallery in a wide leather chair, breastfeeding Pallu. She had pulled her hair back into a neat single braid and painted her nails to match the beadwork on her grandmother's hand-sewn amauti — the parka she had thrown into a garbage bag the night she fled her home.

She stroked the fringe of beads for comfort.

It was the first time she had seen all her works together, framed and carefully spaced out. It took her by surprise.

"I never thought I'd done that many drawings," she said, shyly. "I never thought I could sell drawings. "

The three largest and most expensive — all priced above $3,700 — had waiting lists . They all sold.

As much as Canadians may like to wrap themselves in "We The North" gear, two-thirds live within 60 miles of the United States border, never venturing anywhere near places like Cape Dorset.

"I don't think I've ever met an Inuit person from the North," said Ian Harvey, a novice collector introducing himself to Ms. Saila at her opening. He asked her if she planned to draw different subjects, and she raised her eyebrows — Inuit for "yes" — but he didn't understand.

"Our biggest challenge is there is still so much prejudice," Mr. Harvey, a computer programmer, said later. "Now things are shifting. She's young, she's female, she's Inuit, she's from the north. What a great voice to be listened to — finally."

Near the end of the gala, Ms. Feheley gathered her guests in a wide circle around the artist and toasted her. Ms. Saila buried her face in her hands, crying. She missed her family.

"They would be so proud," she said.

The Old Normal

It was June, and Cape Dorset was stepping out of winter like a bather from a foamy tub. The snow had slid from the shoulders of the surrounding low-lying mountains, revealing black jumbled rocks dusted with orange lichen and delicate downy flowers.

The town's soundtrack of tinny grinders was drowned out by the roar of gushing water. The sun had pushed back the dark by six minutes each day, until it relented briefly just before midnight, decorating the sky with the wild pink and orange streaks of Ms. Saila's drawings.

It was spring, the time the whole town had been awaiting, and the land was calling.

Children rode their bikes in packs around the town's now-dusty roads well past bedtime.

Cape Dorset's small beach replaced the co-op as the favorite hangout. Every evening, locals with snowmobiles set out across the still-frozen harbor. Shuvinai Ashoona was among them; the artist had spent her award money on one, as well as an ATV.

When beluga were spotted in the distance one morning, a caravan of hunters rushed toward them and set to work. The whale meat was divided up, and some delivered to town elders. Ms. Saila's grandmother cut up pieces and dried them on h er water heater.

One night at 11, Ms. Saila sat at the kitchen table, fished a green pencil from a plastic bag on the floor and set to coloring her latest landscape. Her children were finally asleep, so she could work.

It had been three months since her art opening. What had changed in her life?

"Nothing."

Her time in Toronto, it seemed, had amounted to little more than fond memories and snapshots affixed to her fridge.

"It was fun," she said quietly.

The co-op manager said her rate had gone up "big time," but she hadn't noticed. How much had she saved?

"Nothing," she said again.

Her dream of buying a snowmobile, to get back on the land, was pushed back again.

As Ms. Saila worked, the back door burst open time and again. First came her sister. Then her brother. Then her aunt, trailing three young children and a boyfriend. They made themselves coffee and opened the fridge, rummaging for food.

The impromptu party woke both of Ms. Saila's boys, who began racing around the kitchen. She stayed at the table and worked.

Then her son Mikisiti, 5 at the time, climbed onto her lap, took the pencil from her hand and began coloring where she had left off. He had his own goal: Mikisiti wanted his mother to buy him a bicycle so he could join his friends outside.

Ooloosie Saila watched her child draw.

"He does it just like me," she said, looking up and smiling.

She bought him a bike for his birthday two months later.