Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Kananginak, one of the original four Inuit who learned printmaking techniques from Houston, became the artistic hand and guiding voice of Cape Dorset after Houston traded the ice flows of Baffin Island for the skyscrapers of Manhattan in the early 1960s. Cherishing the old customs and beliefs, Kananginak embraced the future with a strategic intelligence that honoured traditional culture while enabling the Inuit to chart an independent and self-sufficient destiny.

  A founding member of the Inuit-organized West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, Kananginak served as the inaugural president of its board of directors from 1959 to 1964. He was instrumental in developing its graphic arts and stonecutting centre, the Kinngait Studios, and in transforming the original shop for hunters and trappers — an alternative to the Hudson’s Bay Company store — into a multi-million-dollar community-owned business.

  Today the co-op sells everything from milk to snowmobiles and manages and builds infrastructure and housing projects in the community. There are dozens of artists’ co-ops across the North, and Inuit art is world-famous and the only Canadian art form that has spawned galleries outside Canada. It is hard to imagine how that could have happened without Houston to strike the entrepreneurial spark and Kananginak to nurture and sustain the flame.

  JAMES ARCHIBALD HOUSTON was born in Toronto on June 12, 1921, one of two children of James Donald Houston, a clothing importer, and his wife, Gladys (née Barbour). He went to local schools and, because he loved to draw, began taking lessons at age eleven with Group of Seven artist Arthur Lismer at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario).

  He spent a year at the Ontario College of Art before enlisting with the Toronto Scottish Regiment in 1940, the day after his nineteenth birthday. After serving in British Columbia, Labrador, and overseas, he remained in France to study drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris.

  When he returned to Canada, he became a successful commercial artist in Grand-mère, Quebec. His restlessness and his itch to experience the northern wilderness spurred him to ride the railroad to its terminus, a Hudson’s Bay Company post in Moose Factory, at the southern tip of James Bay. It still isn’t easy or cheap to reach the Arctic, but back then there were no regular flights. Houston hitched a ride with a bush pilot flying a doctor into Baffin Island to treat an Inuit child who had been savaged by a dog. Even then, Houston found a seat on the small plane only because he agreed to help load and unload the gasoline drums on their stops to refuel.

  Once in the Arctic, Houston refused to climb back on the plane. He was enchanted. “I looked around at the barren rocks and tundra with the few tents greying with age and weighted down against the wind,” he said later, “and I took in the steel-blue sea and the biggest ice that I had ever seen and then the tanned smiling people. I could scarcely breathe.”

  Equipped with a sketch pad, a toothbrush, a can of peaches, and two words of Inuktitut — iglu and kayak — Houston survived on his charm, the generosity of the local Inuit, and his ability to rough it on the tundra. The Inuit, fascinated by Houston’s sketching implements, grabbed them and began making their own, insouciant drawings. Later some shyly offered their carvings in exchange. Houston was astonished by the elemental nature of their art, which was as timeless as it was modern, as simple as it was profound.

  When the bush pilot flew in again, Houston went back south determined to find a way to return. He took some Inuit carvings with him, which he showed to the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in Montreal. They hired him as a consultant, advanced him a thousand dollars, and gave him institutional status to work through the Hudson’s Bay Company and the federal government to export and promote Inuit sculpture in stone, bone, and ivory to the rest of the world.

  The carvings he brought back from his next expedition north sold out in three days. In 1950 he went to the east coast of Hudson Bay, stayed for more than a year, and brought back more than three thousand carvings. Avid collectors, both private and institutional, camped out overnight and elbowed each other for the chance to pay the rapidly escalating prices the guild was charging for this new sensation in the international art market.

  One of those early buyers was Budd Feheley. He was making an advertising call in Montreal in 1950 when he saw the commotion outside the Canadian Handicrafts Guild on Peel Street and joined the queue. He was entranced from his first glimpse because, as he said later, “it was the last primitive art available in the world, and it was being produced just north of us.” Feheley amassed his own collection, went north in 1961 on the first of several trips to serve as a founding member of the original Canadian Eskimo Arts Committee (later Council), and eventually opened his own art gallery, Feheley Fine Arts, to represent Inuit artists internationally.

  From the beginning, Houston lived as a fellow hunter in Inuit society, using dog teams and eating raw seal meat. He lived in the Arctic for fourteen years (from 1948 to 1962), working most of that time as a northern service officer and civil administrator for the federal government. In 1950 he married Alma Bardon, a reporter for the Montreal Star who had been sent to interview him. On their honeymoon she climbed a twelve-metre frozen waterfall and became the second white woman to cross Baffin Island by dogsled. They settled in Cape Dorset and had two sons, John and Sam, to whom they spoke only Inuktitut.

  Carving was something the Inuit had always done, and so was embroidery. The urge to make a mark and to decorate tools, clothing, and packs arises from a universal and primordial human impulse. Printmaking, which became a huge cultural enterprise, was new to the Inuit, and it came about by chance.

  In the late 1950s Houston and carver Osuitok Ipeelee were having a companionable smoke when Osuitok, noticing the illustration on Houston’s tin of Player’s tobacco, remarked that it must be tedious to paint the sailor’s head individually on each tin. Realizing that Osuitok had no clue about lithography, Houston set about demonstrating the process in a culture where paper was scarce, if not alien. He put some frozen ink on an image that Osuitok had carved into a walrus tusk, pressed a piece of toilet paper on top, took it off, and got a semblance of a reverse image. “We could do that,” Osuitok said, with a hunter’s decisiveness. And so they did. Houston travelled to Japan to learn printmaking techniques, which he then introduced to the Inuit.

  “The whole question of printmaking hung in limbo, no one knowing whether the idea would be accepted by West Baffin Islanders,” Houston wrote in Confessions of an Igloo Dweller. “We worked to gain the support of Pootoogook and Kiaksuk, those two important elders of the Kingaimiut. I got up my nerve and went and asked Pootoogook to make me an illustration of something he had been trying to explain to me. He did this and sent the results next morning. I asked his son, Kananginak, to help print his father’s drawing of two caribou. . . . Pootoogook greatly admired the result, and after that the whole stone block and stencil printing project was off to a powerful start.” That is when Kananginak, age twenty-two, began working for Houston, doing odd jobs and some carving in the art studio and learning the technical aspects of printmaking.

  KANANGINAK POOTOOGOOK WAS born on January 1, 1935, in Ikerrasak, a camp located about eighty-five kilometres east of Cape Dorset on Baffin Island. He was the ninth son of more than a dozen children born to Joseph Pootoogook and his wife, Sarah Ningeokuluk.

  In winter the Pootoogooks lived in an igloo, but as soon as the snow started to melt, they moved into a canvas tent or a sod house while they trapped foxes to sell the pelts to the Hudson’s Bay Company. At its height, Pootoogook’s trapline had close to four hundred traps and extended over a long stretch of land from one side of Baffin Island to the other.

  When Kananginak was seven, his family moved into its first wooden house, but they still went out on the land every summer. That is the way he imagined his life would be. “All I thought about was growing up to be a man, having a team of fast dogs and being able to get all the game I needed,” he recounted in a biographical essay published by t
he Museum of Inuit Art in 2010. He was still living on the land when he married his wife, Shooyoo, in 1957, but he soon moved his family into Cape Dorset to help care for his father, who by then was old and ill.

  At first Kananginak was nervous about drawing. He spent his time making prints and then lithographs of the work of other artists and working to establish the co-op store with Terry Ryan, a newly arrived southerner. Ryan, like Houston, had studied at the Ontario College of Art. He arrived in Cape Dorset aboard the icebreaker C. D. Howe in 1960 to take up a summer job working for Houston. Kananginak and Shooyoo provided his accommodation — their own house — while they joined a group of hunters on the land for the season.

  Ryan decided to stay in Cape Dorset, accepting the position of general manager of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative and its nascent marketing arm, Dorset Fine Arts. He was the first white person ever hired by the Inuit to manage the co-op store. Later he said about Houston in an interview in 2005: “He’d established the nucleus of the co-op. There was one studio, a few drawers of drawings and a group of four men who had the ability to cut and print a stone-cut. But more than anything, he had instilled an enthusiasm in people to put pencil to paper, and prior to that had encouraged people to expand on their carving skills.”

  Houston, charismatic and dashing in the mode of rakish movie star Errol Flynn, was enormously appealing to women. By 1962 his marriage was foundering. He left Cape Dorset to become a senior designer for Steuben Glass Works, in a move that many found bewildering for a man who had always wanted to escape contemporary urban life.

  His wife, Alma, moved south with their sons to Montreal and then to London, England, before returning to Canada and settling in Ottawa in 1965. There she helped start Canadian Arctic Producers, an Inuit-owned marketing co-operative. Like Ryan, Alma Houston was inspired to carry on and expand the work that Houston had started.

  Although the Houstons divorced in 1967 and he subsequently married editor Alice Watson, the duo remained colleagues. In 1981 they opened an Inuit gallery and bookstore in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, which she operated for many years. She died in 1997 of lung cancer. At the time, their older son, John, told the Globe that his father was the spark that had created interest in Inuit art, but his mother was the one who tended the flame.

  Although Houston had left the Arctic, it never left him. He returned on visits many times and he often used Arctic animals and landscapes in his own designs. In his more than four decades with Steuben Glass, he created over 120 sculptures and became the first designer the company honoured with a major retrospective exhibit, in 1992. Among his best-known works were Arctic Fisherman, a sculpture showing an Inuit fisherman preparing to spear a fish in the water, and Trout and Fly, in which a crystal fish leaps to catch a gold fly. He was the first person to introduce the use of gold, silver, and other precious metals to Steuben’s glass sculptures. His creation Aurora Borealis, a twenty-one-metre work of polished prismatic spears, is on permanent display at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

  At the same time as Houston was turning images of the North into paintings, drawings, and glass sculptures, he was rising every morning at six to spin his life experience into stories for young people, most of which he also illustrated. A prolific and dramatic storyteller, he wrote screenplays, produced documentary films and animated shorts, and wrote some thirty books, of which the most famous is The White Dawn. It was published in eleven languages and later made into a film. The royalties enabled him to cut back on his design work for Steuben, spend more time at his country house in Connecticut, and concentrate on his own projects, especially his burgeoning preoccupation with West Coast Native art. Beginning in the late 1970s, the Houstons spent summers in Haida Gwaii and winters in Stonington, Connecticut. That’s where he died from heart disease in a nearby hospital on April 17, 2005, at age eighty-four.

  WHILE HOUSTON WAS popularizing the North in stories, films, and glass sculptures, Kananginak was living in the North and finding his way as an artist. Although he had been represented in almost every print release from Cape Dorset since 1959, it wasn’t until the early 1970s, when he was in his mid-thirties, that he had the confidence to give up his job in the studio and work full-time on his own art. Once unleashed, he was prolific, making carvings, drawings, and prints and showing his work in museums and commercial galleries.

  Unlike other early Cape Dorset artists, such as Kenojuak Ashevak, who are more imaginative and overtly spiritual, Kananginak belongs to a naturalistic and narrative style. He inherited his father’s love of drawing and the documentary skills of his paternal uncle, the photographer and historian Peter Pitseolak. He recorded the material culture of the past in detailed drawings of weapons, clothing, and tools, and he chronicled the transition from ancient to modern and the effect of southern communications, travel modes, and social influences on the traditional Inuit way of life. Using a narrative form, he told stories in images of Inuit hunting and fishing, watching television, surfing the Internet, riding snowmobiles, and consuming drugs and alcohol.

  As a hunter and a butcher, he understood the anatomy of the creatures that he killed to feed his family; as an artist, he had the ability to transform that appreciation of sinew and muscle into drawings and carvings that captured an animal’s essence. Often called the “Audubon of the North,” he was particularly good at birds and owls, depicting them so realistically and yet so intuitively that they seem to be staring back at the viewer with a knowing if wary regard. Like the wildlife artist Fenwick Lansdowne, Kananginak captured the essence as well as the form of the creatures he depicted.

  From his earliest work, in the initial 1959 release of Cape Dorset prints, to the mural-sized coloured drawings of caribou that he made in the last few years of his life, Kananginak was inspired by both the world around him and the one he carried inside his head. In 1977 the World Wildlife Commission released a limited-edition portfolio of works that included four of his images, and in 1980 he was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Governor General Roméo LeBlanc commissioned him to build a nearly six-foot-tall inukshuk in Cape Dorset in 1997, which was then disassembled and shipped to Ottawa, where Kananginak and his son Johnny put it back together again on the grounds of Rideau Hall. He travelled to Vancouver for the Olympics in February 2010, attended the opening of a solo exhibition of his drawings at the Marion Scott Gallery, received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for the Arts later in the spring, and had another solo exhibition at the Museum of Inuit Art in Toronto from February through May 2010.

  Usually Kananginak worked at home, but after he turned seventy he began finding it more physically difficult to carve and decided to work in the Kinngait Studios, where he had toiled as an apprentice more than half a century earlier. Studio manager Bill Ritchie thought he also wanted to spend more time with the art community in town because he had things to say to them. “He was a real gentle soul, always settling disputes, just one of those guys who was always there to help out.” The younger artists flocked around him in the studio when he took a break from his own work, according to Ritchie. “Even then he was teaching people how to get along and how to work in groups and not to be isolated and sit by yourself, as so many drawers do,” said Ritchie. “It was a real communal experience when he was around.”

  Much as he gave to the younger artists, he also gained something: the impulse to work on large-scale drawings, as they were doing. These huge pieces represent Kananginak’s final artistic flowering. His last, unfinished drawing was a huge depiction of his father’s diesel-powered Peterhead, a wooden boat with two masts that was used for hauling soapstone and walrus and whale carcasses. While he was working on it, he was so racked by coughing spells that he often had to stop and hold his chest. He guessed he had lung cancer, and he was correct.

  Even when Kananginak was old and sick, he was not only moving in new artistic directions, he was trying to help his people prepare for a future without him. In his most ferve
nt messages he beseeched the Inuit to preserve the Inuktitut language and to keep working together in the co-op. He also warned that if the market for Inuit art looked as though it was going to collapse, they needed to look ahead at what else was out there and plan for the future.

  In 2010 he and his wife, Shooyoo, went to Ottawa and moved into Larga Baffin, a facility that houses Inuit people who have come south for medical treatment. He underwent surgery in October, but he never recovered from the operation and he died on November 23, 2010. He was seventy-five.

  Celia Franca

  Dancer and Founder of the National Ballet

  of Canada

  June 25, 1921 – February 19, 2007

  FEBRUARY IS A cruel month, especially in Canada, but neither the howling winds nor the icy snowbanks dissuaded Celia Franca from mounting the biggest performance of her life: the National Ballet of Canada. In February 1951, when Franca stepped onto the tarmac at Toronto’s Malton Airport in her Persian lamb coat, she was a twenty-nine-year-old raven-haired British ballerina and choreographer. Along with a suitcase or two she had a reputation as a powerful personality, a dramatic dancer, and a demanding teacher.

  What really mattered was less obvious: the delicate, aquiline-nosed, 110-pound, five-foot-four Franca was a risk-taker with steely determination and stratospheric standards. At the time there were only two ballet companies in Canada, the flamboyant and Russian-influenced Volkoff Canadian Ballet and the still largely amateur Winnipeg Ballet. Franca was not impressed by either and chose to model her company on the ones she knew best, Ballet Rambert and the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in London.

  Luckily for Franca, she arrived at a propitious time. The shoots of a cultural spring were germinating across the country. Canada had helped win the war, our cities had not been bombed, and the men and women who had survived the conflagration overseas had come home buoyed by exposure to European cultural institutions. Many veterans returned with sophisticated ideas to a country that was confident about itself and the future and eager to nurture homegrown talent. Besides the National Ballet, which premiered in 1951, CBC Television launched in 1952, the Stratford Festival and the National Library in 1953, and the Canada Council in 1957.