I have submitted the following letter to the editor:
“
Drawn From Poverty: Art Was Supposed to Save Canada’s Inuit. It Hasn’t.” paints a grim picture of life in Cape Dorset, on Baffin Island. I have visited Cape Dorset and other communities in Nunavut, and I am familiar with the Inuit art market. Unfortunately, the article only scratched the surface of a complex problem, and concentrated on sensational details.
Yes, there are serious problems with substance abuse and domestic violence in the North. But there are real structural economic issues that the article doesn’t acknowledge. Further, the reporter appears to be complaining that Cape Dorset doesn’t look like a suburban American community (“no downtown . . . streets are unnamed . . .”), and is dismissive of significant improvements like the new community center.
Like other communities in Nunavut, Cape Dorset is a small (population about 1400) community on the seacoast. There are no roads between towns; all transportation is either by air, by boat, or (when sea ice permits) by snowmobile. The airport is frequently closed, because of poor weather. It is far north of treeline; agriculture is not a possibility. Many Inuit still rely on traditional hunting, fishing and foraging for the bulk of their food. Climate change is threatening traditional hunting, by changing historical game migration patterns.
Employment opportunities are limited; the major employers are the government or the cooperative store. Art is the most significant cash crop available to the Inuit. It was probably never realistic to expect art to make Cape Dorset self-sufficient. Now, however, we are about 70 years removed from the beginnings of the Inuit art market, and the earlier generations of Inuit artists are gone. Unlike their forebears, who portrayed their experience living on the land, today’s rising generation is far removed from a traditional life.
There is no easy answer to providing infrastructure – physical, economic and social – for communities like Cape Dorset. But, having forced the Inuit to move into permanent communities in the 1950s and 1960s, the Canadian government has an obligation to do a better job.
