Inuksuit

In 2000, I took a Christmastime trip to Quebec City with my mother and a group organized by my undergrad alma mater. (Washington and Lee University has a marvelous travel program, though the trips aren’t inexpensive because they stay and eat at the better places and take along a faculty member or someone else knowledgeable about the destination as a kind of “intellectual sherpa,” along with whatever tourist escort may also travel with us.  I reported on another trip with W&L, to Istanbul, on ROT on 24 June 2010.)  

Quebec at Christmas is like a Currier and Ives winter scene and it was a wonderful trip, not least because I got to speak French again after many years of disuse.  (I’m proud to say that a lot of it came back pretty quickly.  It was fun to do that again.) 

Anyway, it’s become my practice to bring back as a souvenir from my travels nowadays a piece of local art or craftwork if I can find something appropriate that I like, and my selection from this vacation was a piece of Inuit sculpture.  I ended up with a small piece called Inukshuk by Davidee Qimirpiq [Qimirpik; b. 1985], a Canadian Inuit artist from Cape Dorset (Kinngait), Baffin Island, in the Territory of Nunavut. 

The figure was a common subject among Inuit artists when I was in Quebec, and the carved green soapstone stands about eight inches tall and vaguely resembles the silhouette of a man assembled from large stones with two legs, a torso with a head, and two arms stretched out to the sides parallel to the ground.

The Inuit, still called Eskimos in the U.S., especially in Alaska, were nomadic hunter-gatherers well into modern times.  Traveling constantly across land and water, the Inuit couldn’t really carry much that wasn’t of immediate practical use, so artwork, aside from a little carved ivory or bone, was uncommon. 

In about 1945, however, the Canadian government encouraged the Inuit to settle in towns, learn cultivation, and give up the nomadic way of life.  The world around the Inuit had changed and their subsistence existence was becoming untenable, but the sociological effect was nevertheless profound. 

The government saw that the move to permanent habitation left many Inuit without traditional occupations.  Looking around for something with which to replace the lost income and work, the government lit on art and established training programs and outlets for the Inuit output.  The plan succeeded: the Inuit had a latent talent for art of all kinds, and they started a co-op to market and pricetheir work. 

Inuit art took off in popularity and desirability in the south and several artists became renowned.  (I published a profile of Inuit painter and printmaker Pudlo Pudlat on ROT on 28 September 2009.)  Art museums organized exhibitions of Inuit works and collectors began buying the art.  Whole villages thrived on the art turned out in their community studios. 

The themes and subjects of the art expanded from a focus on traditional culture to embrace the modern universe around them.  The media used by Inuit artists has expanded as well, from simple carvings to sophisticated sculpture, painting, drawing, lithography, and all the forms commonly used by Western artists.

Among the most popular subjects when I was in Quebec and later in Vancouver at the other end of the country were native animals, Inuit figures, and the mysterious and majestic inuksuit, a form nearly ubiquitous in the galleries and shops all over both cities.

The title of my sculpture, Inukshut, is actually a misnomer.  According to Norman Hallendy’s Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic (Seattle: University of Washington Press; Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2000), an inuksuk (“acting in the capacity of a human”; pl. inuksuit) is a symbolic structure that conveys a message.  Actual inuksuit aren’t anthropomorphic and may, in fact, be composed of a single large rock standing on end. 

[Norman E. Hallendy (Canadian; 1932-2023) was an Arctic researcher, writer, and photographer.  He was a graduate of the Ontario College of Art in the field of Industrial Design.  Over 40 years, Hallendy had a continuous relationship with the Inuit of Southwest Baffin Island.  During this time, he has acquired an extensive body of traditional knowledge.  He’d been an invited lecturer at numerous Canadian, American, and British universities and he was an associate of the World Archaeological Society and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.  He was a Research Fellow of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec (now the Canadian Museum of History) and a Research Associate with the Nunavut Research Institute in Iqaluit, and Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution.  His field of expertise was Arctic ethnogeography.]

The structure depicted in my sculpture, often called an inuksuk, is actually an innunguaq (“in the likeness of a human”; pl. innunguait).  Innunguait aren’t really a category of inuksuit according to Hallendy, though other sources seem to consider them one.

I suppose that the artists (or gallery owners) misnamed the artworks because, first, inuksuk is a little easier for us Southerners—to Nunavummiut (people from Nunavut), even Quebeckers are Southerners!—to say (it’s pronounced ih-NOOK-shook) and, second, most art patrons, unless they’re steeped in Nunavut sociology and anthropology as well as aesthetics, don’t make the distinction.

Whatever the reason, the facts about inuksuit and innunguait are fascinating.  When I got home with my sculpture, I did a little reading on the topic; I’d heard a little about them while I was in Quebec and there were books around on them, but I didn’t have the leisure to get into the subject until I got back. 

(The English spellings of Inuktitut words vary from source to source, and apparently the preferred forms in Nunavut and Canada are inuksuk, inunnguaq, and inunnguat.  I’m going to stick with the way Hallendy spells the words because he was my first source.  I’ll let the Canadian government and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada come after me if they want.)

The name inuksuk is based on the Inuktitut word inuk, which means, simply, ‘person.’  (It’s also the singular of Inuit, which consequently means ‘The People.’  This is analogous to several American Indian tribes, such as the Navajo, whose name for themselves is Diné, which also means ‘The People.’)

Innunguaq, despite its different appearance, is derived from the same word.  Innunguait are probably more recognizable to non-Inuit, though they aren’t the most common form of stone structure, because of the striking shape and the dramatic sight they provide when seen looming upon a hill or rising up on the horizon, like a giant guardian standing watch over his land. 

Inuksuit are of uncertain age; though, since they’re practical objects, they’re constantly being built and rebuilt or allowed to fall into neglect and deterioration when they’re no longer useful.  (Inuksuit may decay naturally—polar bears have been knownto knock them over—but it’s considered sacrilegious to destroy one or remove its stones.  Bad luck will plague anyone who does.) 

Some of the most ancient, turned “black, dark green or blazing orange” with lichen or white with “the signatures of countless birds,” have been dated back to the Tuniit (or Tunniit) people, known in the West as the Dorset Culture but whom the Inuit call their ancestors.  The Tuniit, a tall and strong people, migrated to Greenland from Alaska between 500 B.C.E. and 1000 C.E. 

(The appearance of innunguait, the cruciform stone constructions that resemble humans, may only date from the arrival of Christian missionaries in Arctic Canada, but that conclusion’s debatable.  After contact with the Vikings around 1000 C.E., the first Europeans to interact with the Inuit and other inhabitants of the Canadian Arctic were an English explorer in the late 16th century and then North American colonials in the 17th century.) 

Many of the ancient inuksuit are venerated regardless of their usefulness today because of their age and because they were built by the ancestors of the Inuit.  Whenever they began to appear, inuksuit could be monumental stone constructions built and used by Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, and Yupik peoples, and other inhabitants of the North American Arctic. 

In a region where the flat tundra presents few natural landmarks—the terrain’s either featureless or the snows and ice shift constantly, obliterating any recognizable topography—the man-made cairns served as navigational signals and markers to later travelers in a land where the natives were nomads who followed the scarce game as well as the open water ahead of each year’s freeze. 

In addition to the trackless terrain, there were no trees on which to carve signs or symbols, so those who passed through first left piles of stones that loomed up on the horizon as the next travelers arrived.  An inuksuk might point the way to a plentiful fishing or hunting ground, warn about danger, blaze a safe trail, or mark a good camping site or cache of food.  They could also convey more complex messages that only the knowledgeable and astute hunter could read.

According to Hallendy, some inuksuit, like the ones intended as navigational aids, were made to be visible from far away, while others, such as those that designate a cache of food, might be hidden so that only the intended traveler could see them.  Some inuksuit were built so they stood out against snow; others so they could be seen on the shore from sea. 

In some cases, a series of inuksuit were sited so that they could lead travelers over a great distance along a difficult route; in other instances, the cairns have been arranged in a circle, marking a site of power or reverence, like a kind of Inuit Stonehenge. 

Some inuksuit are large enough and so fortuitously situated and constructed, says Hallendy, that they can create their own “microclimate” with their “own temperature, wind conditions and humidity within a one-metre (three-foot) circle.” 

Some inuksuit are as simple as a single stone, as I said, and some are constructed from three or four large, flat stones fashioned into a kind of doorway or some abstract shape, but many are immense stacks of large rocks, standing many feet tall and sometimes covering several feet of ground as well.  (My little sculpture is a single piece of soapstone carved to look like assembled rocks.  It is, of course, Qimirpiq’s representation of an inuksuk, not a miniature replica.) 

Clearly it took many hands to construct these, though Inuit nomads traveled in small bands, usually a single family, and often the father would travel ahead to hunt or scout the route to the next fishing or hunting ground.  Yet somehow the huge cairns were built to send messages to those following behind.  Hallendy describes how one Inuit created an inuksuk as he observed:

Because of the importance placed on inuksuit, their construction was rarely taken lightly.  I often watched an elder studying a jumble of broken rock, without so much as touching a single stone, visualizing how one piece could fit with another.  Only when the picture was complete in his head would a helper bring the selected stones to where the inuksuk was to be built.  The figure that emerged was determined as much by the shape of the stones selected as by their arrangement.  Since it was essential to shim and balance the rocks as they were put in place, often a wonderful construction came into being as the builder cautiously sought the centre of gravity to give his inuksuk a long life.  Like a three-dimensional puzzle, the pieces fit together with such precision so as to be held in place by the force of gravity.  Though they may be of varying sizes and shapes and perform a variety of functions, inuksuit are not only a pleasure to behold but are so well balanced and constructed that they can withstand the ravages of time and countless storms.  “Nakalanagu!” its creator may exhort: May you stand forever!

It’s not clear how a subsequent trekker could interpret the earlier travelers’ messages, but somehow the inuksuit communicated not only from one nomadic band to the next, but across the years.  (Inuktitut, the Inuit language, had no written form until one was invented by Europeans in the 18th century, so there was no way of leaving notes or inscribed messages to explain what the inuksuk meant.) 

There’s nothing overtly recognizable in the shape of the cairn that would suggest a meaning, and no two inuksuk obviously resemble one another so that some kind of traditional iconography might seem to have been established.  Hunting partners might devise common signs and signals, but it’s just a wonderful mystery—and it must have worked or the Arctic people wouldn’t have kept using inuksuit for so many centuries.  For existing inuksuit along a familiar route, someone who knew the path might explain the cairns newer hunters will encounter, often in the form of a song.

There are many stories about what inuksuit and innunguait have been used for, including forms of defense against Indians, who were threats to the Inuit in past centuries. 

(The ancient enmity between Indians and the Inuit is, in fact, part of the reason the name Eskimo isn’t used in Canada.  It’s a “foreign” word: the derivation is arguable, but in any case it’s believed to be from one Indian language or another and is considered derogatory.) 

Hallendy figures from the stories he heard that the inuksuit were built to look at a distance like crouching Inuit to scare away the invading enemy.  Whatever their purpose, the giant innunguait do look like sentinels standing watch, though how effective that’d be as a deterrent is certainly questionable. 

Some of the stories say that the innunguait were armed with spears and draped with skins to fool the Indians who, the tales insist, were effectively frightened away.  Hallendy reports that Inuit friends have told him that some inuksuit can make whistling or moaning sounds, perhaps from the wind blowing through the stones, creating an eerie effect.  (There are inuksuit that are made with a kind of Aeolian harp installed so that the wind would cause them to clang and clatter across the soundless Arctic terrain.) 

Well, that’s the story, anyway.  It makes great folklore. 

Inuksuit are among the oldest and most significant man-made objects on the vast Arctic landscape and for the Inuit, inuksuit possess spiritual meaning as well. 

The inuksuk has become a part of Inuit folklore and a symbol of Inuit history. The Inuit people celebrate the inuksuk through the handcrafted carvings, like the Qimirpiq I own, that sell in galleries all over the world. 

Today many Inuit display the inuksuk to show pride in their native culture. This may explain why the flag of Nunavut, established in 1999 as an Inuit homeland (the name means ‘our land’ in Inuktitut), bears a bright red innunguaq imposed on the half-yellow, half-white banner. 

The inuksuk has become not only a symbol of Inuit culture but is increasingly serving as a Canadian national symbol.  The 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, for instance, adopted the innunguaq as an official symbol, and the lobby of the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., boasts a large innunguaq-like sculpture by Inuit artist David Ruben Piqtoukun (1950-2026).

Because for centuries they’ve guided hunters to safe passages across the measureless Arctic tundra, the inuksuit remind the Inuit of their dependence on one another and the value of strong community. 

Because they’re ancient, they connect the people to their past and inspire awe.  Because not even the Arctic winds and snows can knock them down, they represent endurance.  Because they are constructed only of stones found on the spot, they demonstrate resourcefulness.  Because there’s no mortar or cement, they exemplify ingenuity.  Because they serve practical functions, they have significance. 

Though each stone of an inuksuk is a separate entity, it supports the stones above and is supported by the stones below it. Its significance comes from its meaning as a whole, not the parts that compose it; its strength lies in its unity. The inuksuk symbolizes cooperation, balance, and selflessness. That’s a pretty admirable symbol for a people—or a nation.

Pudlo Pudlat, Inuit Artist

Some time back, I wrote a profile of experimental stage director Leonardo Shapiro and his theater troupe, The Shaliko Company, for TDR ("Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony," The Drama Review 37.4 [T140 - Winter 1993]: 65-100). I had spent months following Leo around, plowing through his files and records, interviewing him and his colleagues, and attending rehearsals and classes. I had first met Leo when I covered the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in 1986 and saw his magnificent production of The Yellow House, a play about Vincent van Gogh he’d composed with his company, and I interviewed him as one of the participating artists. After that, I’d kept up on Shaliko’s work so I knew a little about Leo, most pointedly that he took his inspiration from the theories of Bertolt Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski. Later, when I was preparing the TDR article, I asked Leo who his other influences were. At first, he said he didn’t know; he’d never thought about it. Then, a few days later, he handed me a list of names and works of art which he said were the influences or inspirations of his artistic and philosophical life. It was a varied and fascinating list, covering all the arts and some politics, and including some names and works that I found surprising in Leo’s case. I’d at least heard of most of the names on the list, but there were four or five that were unfamiliar to me, and one or two that I couldn’t find when I first looked them up. One of these was an Inuit artist, Pudlo Pudlat, whom Leo admired because of his “courage and openness.”

Some years later, because I found the subject of Leo and his theater work so interesting, and because I had so much unused material left over after the TDR profile, I decided to expand the essay into a book-length examination of Leo’s art. One of my first notions was to research the names and art works on Leo’s list and see what in them might have inspired Leo’s art and ideas and use that as a sort of reflection of Leo’s own work, a commentary, so to speak. When I came to Pudlo--Inuit commonly use only one name and the artist is internationally known this way--I found an engrossing and revealing subject in its own right. I fancy myself a devotee of art, especially modern art, so I pursued the story of Pudlo a little more extensively than other names on Leo’s list. The artist just interested me. Here’s some of what I learned.

First, a number of years after I did this research, I made a visit to Quebec, which is a center of Inuit art. The galleries all over the city show Inuit artists and there’s an Inuit art museum, the Galerie Art Inuit, a few doors up the street from our hotel. I learned some general facts about the whole niche that is Inuit art, which has an interesting, and I suspect unique, history. Since Pudlo’s part of this continuum, let me précis this chronicle before I go into his own story.

If you are my age or older, you are probably more used to speaking of Eskimos, but especially in Canada the more current, and preferred, expression is Inuit. (That’s the plural; the singular is Inuk, which means person). Eskimo, which is still used in Alaska, refers to several native peoples, including the Inuit. The term Eskimo is a foreign word applied to the Inuit and other peoples by outside tribes. Its most likely etymology is a Montagnais word meaning snowshoe-lacer. (The Montagnais are a group inhabiting the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Quebec and Labrador.) In Canada, however, the word is believed to be derived from an Algonquin word that means raw meat-eater, and although linguistically this is less likely, the belief is widely held in Canada and the word Eskimo is considered derogatory and racist. In any case, the Canadian government officially recognizes the people of the far north, including Nunavut, as Inuit; the name Eskimo is seldom heard in the country.

The Inuit were a nomadic culture of hunter-gatherers well into the 20th century, following the fish and game of the far north as the ice receded, living in igloos (which means simply house and may be made of ice and snow, according to the image we have, but is also commonly built from stone, sod, mud, skins, or any other convenient material), and moving from spot to spot as the hunting, weather, or terrain necessitated. Traveling by dogsled across land and in umiaks or the smaller kayaks across water, an Inuit family or clan could not really afford to carry much with them that wasn’t of immediate practical value in their harsh life, so decoration was minimal, and artwork, even on practical items, was uncommon. What little there was was carved ivory or bone. A change occurred in about 1945, however, when the Canadian government encouraged Inuit and other native peoples to settle in towns and villages, learn cultivation and other domestic skills, and give up the nomadic way of life they had known for centuries. I won’t get into the socio-political implications of this change (except to suggest that it wasn’t entirely insensitive and cold-hearted as the world around the Inuit had changed and their subsistence existence was becoming untenable), but the sociological effect was profound.

The Canadian government saw that the move to permanent habitation in towns and villages left many Inuit without traditional livelihoods or even pastimes. This was mostly true of the men, as the women were able to transfer their traditional responsibilities of homemaking and child-rearing from the nomadic existence to the permanent one with little significant change (except, of course, that they now got their material needs from stores instead of the wild). The men, on the other hand, were the ones who lost their customary occupations. Looking around for something with which to replace the lost income and work, the government lit on art and established training programs and outlets for whatever the Inuit produced, even supplying them with the materials they needed. In what may be one of the rare examples among artificial cultural redirection, the plan succeeded wildly. I guess the Inuit had a hidden tribal talent for making terrific art, and they started a co-op to market and determine the prices of their work so that they wouldn’t be ripped off by gallery owners and dealers or, in turn, cheat the buying public. (That Inuit art museum in Quebec is run by the co-op, and all the galleries, from the high-end chi-chi ones to the shops in hotels to the tourist dives, all sold the Inuit art at the same range of prices.) Inuit art took off in popularity and desirability in the south. Over time, some artists became recognized and art museums began organizing exhibitions of Inuit works. Collectors, first in Canada then in the United States, began to buy the art. Whole villages lived off the art turned out in their community studios, some making it, some marketing it, some managing the studios; printmaking became a profitable concern. Over 60 years now, Inuit art has become established and while it started as naïve work, it now has a sophistication and dynamic that compares easily with the works of American Indian artists in, say, the Taos art colony area. In both cases, too, the themes and subjects developed from strict focus on traditional culture to an embrace of the whole universe around them--in the case of the Inuit, the Canada of the Europeans and the technology of the middle- and late-20th-century world. Though many Inuit artists work in a naturalistic style, carving animals or scenes common to the Canadian north, many others work in symbolist and abstract styles that draw on indigenous images and refer to the style of Inuit art that developed in the post-WWII years (there not having been a true indigenous precursor). The media used by Inuit artists has expanded as well, from simple carvings to sophisticated soapstone sculpture, painting, drawing, lithography, and all the forms commonly used by Western artists.

Pudlo was born on Baffin Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (now part of Nunavut Province, the Inuit homeland), on 4 February 1916. He straddled the generation that lived an entirely nomadic life and that born in permanent abodes of towns and villages. In 1957, Pudlo suffered a hunting accident which he dismissed as minor until the injury required medical attention a month later and was flown south for treatment. A few days after he returned north to recuperate, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and went back south again to recover. The injury and the illness forced Pudlo and his wife, Innukjuakju, who had also been ill, to give up their nomadic life and they settled in the village of Kiaktuuq, Cape Dorset, in the spring of 1958 when Pudlo was 42. Cape Dorset was the epicenter of the emerging Inuit art community, established there only a few years earlier. Pudlo met James Archibald Houston, the Canadian southerner who was the prime force in developing Inuit art, and took up art himself. Though he made sculptures, he found carving difficult because of the hunting injury to his arm and by 1959 or ’60, his preferred media became watercolors, oils, and especially drawing and lithography. (Many of Pudlo’s works exist as both a drawing and a subsequent print.) Pudlo saw ten of his first drawings commercially printed in 1961 and he continued to make art for the last 33 years of his life and left an output of over 4,500 drawings and 190 prints in the end. His work is exhibited in galleries and museums around the continent and abroad, including MoMA, and his drawings and prints are still in demand. A few years after that trip to Quebec I was in Vancouver, on the opposite coast of the country, and I recognized several of his prints in the city’s art galleries. (One gallery owner was astonished that I not only knew Pudlo but that I spotted his work almost instantly. Shocked my mother, too! Thank you, Leo.) Pudlo has been the subject of many articles in art magazines and several books, which include reproductions of his drawings and prints. Among his other accomplishments as an artist, one of his drawings, Umingmuk (1970, the image of a huge, shaggy, but rather friendly-looking muskox), was reproduced as a 1972 UNICEF greeting card and in 1978, Aeroplane (1976) was chosen as the design for a Canadian postage stamp. Pudlo died in Cape Dorset on 28 December 1992 at 76.

The artist had a wonderful sense of humor which only expanded as his art became more elaborate, from the simple pencil drawings of his early work to his colorful later sketches drawn with felt-tipped pens. Pudlo not only worked in many forms but he incorporated in his art images of both indigenous subjects such as caribou, fish, hunters, and dog sleds, and modern, technological ones such as helicopters, snowmobiles, power lines, and satellite dishes. He mixed in Christian iconography with Inuit shamanistic symbols. Pudlo also included imaginary images alongside the old and new reality, all to create a portrait of his times and the world he saw around him, metaphorically and actually. In a way, Pudlo the hunter transferred his sharp eye and analytical mind from finding game with gun and dogsled to depicting life with paper and ink. In a broad sense, he was a documentarist. “Artists draw what they think . . . ,” said Pudlo. “That’s how they are. They draw what they think--and what they have seen also. But sometimes they draw something from their imagination, something that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.”

Although other native artists had begun to incorporate the modern European world in their art, Pudlo was among the earliest who recognized that modern technology had long ago become part of human, even Native American, culture. He treated this encroachment on traditional life as integral to the world of his people, a permanent and everyday element rather than a temporary or unwelcome intrusion. (In contrast, American Indian artists often see Euro-American technology as a dangerous threat to be expunged.) Pudlo’s work is a visual evocation of the nexus between the traditional life of the Inuit and the modern world of Canada and the south. He saw, more clearly perhaps than other native artists, that there were now more snowmobiles than dog teams; more motor boats than umiaks; that Christianity was quickly displacing traditional shamanism; airplanes were commonplace; and telephones, television, and the Internet were bringing the south into the Inuit’s living rooms and keeping far-flung members of the tribe in regular contact with each other and the tribal center. No longer foreign or alien, the planes, helicopters, angels, and churches in Pudlo’s drawings had become part of northern life. It is this openness to the new experience, which he encountered repeatedly whenever he went south, that is fundamental to Pudlo’s art. Over his career, the artist demonstrated an endless inventiveness and versatility both in his techniques and his subjects. Pudlo not only saw that, along with the indigenous images, the formerly foreign objects had long ago become part of the native culture, he knew that by drawing these once-alien images, capturing them in various juxtapositions with traditional ones, such as a miniature airplane tethered to the horns of a gigantic muskox, he gained a measure of control over them. In Leo Shapiro’s words, Pudlo “adapts art to his incomprehensible life.”

That muskox image is in Pudlo’s Winds of Change (1983/1984 drawing; 1985 lithograph) which shows two Inuit and a dog (the indigenous form of transportation) bound together like mountain-climbers on the undulating, knobby back of a muskox, tied to one of the horns, and an airplane attached to the tips of the animal’s horns as if in a giant slingshot. Another plane is buzzing the ox--perhaps one that’s already been launched. It’s a wonderful example of Pudlo’s tendency of juxtaposing the familiar and the exotic--though what he found “familiar” and “exotic” were, of course, the reverse of what we southerners find so. (The juxtaposition still functions, however.)

Aeroplane, the drawing that was reproduced for the stamp, depicts a large, colorfully-decorated prop plane over an arctic mountainscape while seals lie on floes in the blue sea below. "This is like an iceberg or a big hill of snow,” the artist explained; “that is what I was thinking when I was drawing." Four anorak-clad Inuit stare up at the plane. Two huge icebergs rise up to the plane and two more figures stand on them as if to reach the plane. The airplane became a frequent symbol in Pudlo’s later work of the confluence of the old way of life and the new--but it was an object of interest, not of fear. Pudlo’s two worlds meet here, not in a clash of cultures but in an atmosphere of curiosity and wonder. "Whenever there is a plane,” Pudlo said, “we go up to the hills to get a better look at it." Not only did the artist depict modern technology alongside more traditional images in his art, he found it to be a beneficial addition to society. Having been saved from death or permanent handicap by being airlifted to the south for medical treatment on at least two occasions, he saw planes and helicopters as useful inventions. It is interesting to note that Pudlo explored the meaning of modern technology in other ways as well. In New Parts for an Inuk (1981), for instance, he drew an anthropomorphic figure with a light and antenna on its cap and a clock over its heart in a reflection of the artist’s own pacemaker, installed that same year. Some descriptions assert that the figure bears horns, antlers, and hooves (though what these are is more than open to interpretation, I’d say), all of which would be references to the game that Pudlo used to hunt in his nomadic days. While New Parts remains true to Pudlo’s documentary approach, that is, recording the world he saw around him, it is full of visual puns and fantasy, a self-portrait--the Inuk, or man, is Pudlo himself, of course--that shows himself in a highly symbolic and whimsical manner.

His investigation of the convergence of the European and native worlds in Canada is most vividly portrayed in North and South (1974) which shows the “white Arctic camp scene” of the Inuit north on the right and the “blue lakes and lush, green forests” of the European-dominated south on the left, each in a separate field surrounded by a border, but connected by a bridge-like arc. Pudlo asserted that the bridge demonstrates how cultures that were “split off” from one another “before telephones or radio” (i.e., technology), “even though we were part of one piece, Canada, . . . are touching each other--through CBC radio and telephones.” Having himself been saved from possible death from a hunting accident in 1957 by being airlifted to medical care in Western hospitals, Pudlo deemed the airplane and helicopter useful inventions for aiding stranded and isolated people.

One aspect of Pudlo’s art that is distinctive and makes him such a captivating artist (along with his whimsy), is the way one work carries over to the next. Within one drawing, one idea or image might be echoed in another, but each drawing can also be seen as a preparation for another one, with each succeeding work developing or continuing explorations the artist started earlier. He could take an image or idea, either Western or traditional, and experiment with it, looking for a way to depict it accurately. Images or ideas might be repeated differently or Pudlo might experiment with technique or approach, resulting in a series of drawings that explore and develop that new approach. Pudlo didn’t just document what he saw and experienced around him, he examined it, learned from it. He saw art as a kind of investigation, both for the artist and for the spectator: The muskox, for instance, a frequent image in Pudlo’s work (including Umingmuk, the print that UNICEF made into a greeting card in 1972), is not actually indigenous to his native territory in Nunavut: he first saw some being corralled in northern Quebec in 1957, and then he saw a herd from the air while on a flight from the south in 1969. He became fascinated with this strange, new beast. And like the snowmobile, the airplane, or the helicopter, this unfamiliar creature fascinated Pudlo and he attempted to understand it by drawing it. “If an artist draws a subject over and over again in different ways,” Pudlo said, “then he will learn something. The same with someone who looks at drawings--if that person keeps looking at many drawings, then he will learn something from them too.”