In an art world that frequently commodifies trauma, it is perhaps not surprising that the humour and playfulness embedded within these images has been overlooked in favour of darker themes. This is unfortunate, as satire is frequently utilized within contemporary Inuit drawings as a powerful decolonial strategy, a contemporary approach that rebukes the many traumas of colonization, while also remaining faithful to traditional Inuit knowledge. Although many contemporary Inuit artists partake of this tradition of satire, Alootook Ipellie\u2019s cartoons make for a particularly compelling study, as they anticipated how Inuit drawings and their subversive humour would come to impact the mainstream art world. Ipellie\u2019s work demonstrates the revival of a longstanding Inuit tradition of satire as a strategy for decolonization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ipellie\u2019s life and career ran parallel to the aggressive colonization of Inuit Nunangat.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Inuit Nunangat refers to the four Inuit homelands within Canada: the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Nunavut, Nunavik, and Nunatsiavut.<\/span> Born in a hunting camp on Baffin Island in 1951, he had a tumultuous and traumatic childhood and spent much of his youth moving between his homeland and the foreign southern world of the Qallunaat <\/em>(the Inuktitut term for settlers); eventually, he relocated to Ottawa. In 1972, he began work at Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the newly formed Inuit political organization in that city. While working as a translator and writer for the organization\u2019s publication Inuit Monthly<\/em>, he drew small illustrations to fill in space between articles, eventually developing them into a serial comic strip called Ice Box<\/em>,which premiered in the January 1974 issue and ran until 1982. The strip centred on the life of an Inuit family and thematically complemented the political subject matter of the articles, while frequently satirizing how Qallunaat<\/em> view Inuit and the Arctic. Ipellie returned to cartooning in the early 1990s, creating a comic strip, Nuna and Vut<\/em>, for Iqaluit\u2019s Nunatsiaq News.<\/em> As he had in his previous work, in this strip he explored tensions between Inuit and Qallunaat<\/em> worldviews. Reflecting on his career in 1997, Ipellie wrote, \u201cOne of the driving forces behind any of my writing or artwork is the incredible challenge of interpreting the mixture of the two, very different cultures I live with on a daily basis, by no choice of my own.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Alootook Ipellie, \u201cThirsty for Life: A Nomad Learns to Write and Draw,\u201d in Echoing Silence: Essays on Arctic Narrative<\/em>, ed. John Moss (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997), 100.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The roots of Inuit satire can be found within unipkaaqtuat, <\/em>a word that translates broadly as \u201cmyth\u201d or \u201clegend\u201d but does not have an exact analogy in English. These stories are as diverse as are Inuit\u200a\u2014\u200athe inherent flexibility of the oral tradition allows for personal flourishes by storytellers to better suit the needs of their communities\u200a\u2014\u200ayet, regardless of local variations, many are imbued with examples of humour, providing a glimpse of how satire has thrived from time immemorial to the present. Linguist Alex Spalding notes that unipkaaqtuat<\/em> have a primarily didactic function with \u201ca constantly high level of sharp biting humour and satire maintained.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Alex Spalding, Eight Inuit Myths\/Inuit Unipkaaqtuat Pingasuniarvinilit<\/em> (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1979), vi.<\/span> The humour instructs the listeners in proper behaviour in accordance with traditional values known as Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit<\/em> (\u201cthat which Inuit have always known\u201d).4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Frank Tester and Peter Irniq, \u201cInuit Qaujimajatuqangit: <\/em>Social History, Politics and the Practice of Resistance,\u201d Arctic<\/em> 61, no. 1 (2008): 48\u200a\u2014\u200a61.<\/span> In general, these values stress harmony and community over individualism. Thus, within unipkkaaqtuat<\/em> narratives, abusive or selfish behaviour is punished, whereas kindness, quick thinking, and resourcefulness are rewarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Satire promotes these values as a part of an intricate toolkit of social strategies that avoid direct confrontation, while nonetheless correcting undesirable behaviour and also navigating a powerful emotion of fear and awe that Inuit call ilira<\/em>. Although the concept is difficult to translate into English, anthropologist Jean Briggs explains it in the following way:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ilira <\/em>is in part a feeling that we would label \u201crespect,\u201d even \u201cawe,\u201d in the face of someone\u2019s superior abilities, status, or power to sanction\u200a\u2014\u200aand perhaps force of character\u2026. A person who has not learned to feel ilira <\/em>is dangerous\u2026. However, nobody likes to feel ilira<\/em>; it makes one feel constrained, anxious, and inhibited. People who feel ilira<\/em> retreat into silence or (if children) cry; they don\u2019t want to eat or to accept proffered gifts, can\u2019t laugh and joke.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Jean Briggs, Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year Old<\/em> (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 148.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Avoiding this complex emotion is the social function of much Inuit satire. Briggs\u2019s research demonstrated that exaggerated and playful jokes allowed for indirect requests, personal wishes, and complaints.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Jean Briggs, \u201cConflict Management in a Modern Inuit Community,\u201d in Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World: Conflict, Resistance, and Self-Determination<\/em>, ed. Peter P. Schweitzer, Megan Biesele, and Robert K. Hitchcock (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), 111.<\/span> If an individual were acting improperly, the community would joke or make fun of them to correct their behaviour. When tensions ran particularly high, satirical song duels were used to air grievances without violence. According to Briggs, these ironic and metaphorical duels \u201cembedded conflict in an artistic form, isolated it within a ritualized context, concealed it behind irony and an ambiguity of genre, and at the same time publicized it by focusing the attention of the entire community on it.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> This approach to conflict is effective in a society in which all members understand and respect this code of behaviour. However, as Rosemarie Kuptana points out, the aggressive interpersonal style of Qallunaat <\/em>provoked the feeling of ilira<\/em>, and many Inuit therefore found it hard to say no to their demands.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Rosemarie Kuptana, \u201cIlira, or Why it was Unthinkable for Inuit to Challenge Qallunaat Authority,\u201d Inuit Art Quarterly<\/em> 8, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 5\u200a\u2014\u200a7.<\/span> Humour within contemporary Inuit art has a function similar to the song duel: it uses satire to draw attention to issues and demonstrates correct behaviour by lampooning Qallunaat<\/em> and their colonial ideologies. For instance, an illustration from Ipellie\u2019s 1993 book Arctic Dreams and Nightmares<\/em> depicts French actress Brigitte Bardot, an anti-sealing activist who became the face of anti-fur protests. The success of the protests resulted in legal restrictions on sales of seal fur that caused economic devastation to Inuit communities. Ipellie imagines Bardot as a hypocrite, clad in a fur coat and walking alongside an Inuk lover, unaware of the maniacal seal sneaking up behind her with a club.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The revival of this age-old pedagogy as a contemporary decolonial strategy is evident even in Ipellie\u2019s early comic strips.<\/em> In one strip, made in 1981, Canadian Government Laboratory<\/em>, government officials are building the \u201cideal\u201d robotic Inuk with the mind of a cabinet minister, eagerly looking forward to constructing pipelines in Nunavut. In another, an Inuk in a dogsled speeds by a frustrated man trying to repair a broken snowmobile, labelled \u201cmotor-doggy,\u201d and quips, \u201cWell brother, that\u2019s progress!\u201d In his comics, Ipellie\u2019s strategy aligns with the practice that Inuk curator and art historian Heather Igloliorte defines as \u201cresilience.\u201d\u2009Igloliorte argues that resilience is a reaction to oppression that is significantly different from resistance: it draws from Inuit values that favour the communal over the individual and is \u201ccultivated through the adoption of mature defenses\u200a\u2014\u200asuch as humour and altruism.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Heather Igloliorte, \u201cThe Inuit of Our Imagination,\u201d in Inuit Modern<\/em>, ed. Gerald McMaster (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010), 44\u200a\u2014\u200a45.<\/span> Ipellie\u2019s satirical drawings contribute to this resilience, and it is notable that his cartoons, poking fun not only at Qallunaat<\/em> but at Inuit readers, were published almost exclusively in Inuit magazines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The colonization of the Arctic was overwhelmingly devastating for Inuit. The era during which Ipellie grew up saw aggressively assimilationist social policies, forced relocations, the slaughter of sled dogs, residential and day schools that tore children from their families, the disruption of seasonal practices, the banning of Inuktitut, and generational ripples of trauma from physical and sexual abuse. Additionally, Inuit were divorced from their humour. Missionaries forbade bawdy stories and shamanistic practices, and Qallunaat<\/em> took to portraying Inuit as humourless stoic hunters and as childlike, naive, desexualized, primitive, and reliant on the guidance of the white man for survival. This representation of Inuit as noble primitives unable to control their destinies or land has been termed \u201cEskimo-Orientalism\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Ann Fienup-Riordan, Freeze-Frame: Alaska Eskimos in the Movies<\/em> (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), xi\u200a\u2014\u200axii.<\/span> by Ann Fienup-Riordan. Ipellie\u2019s drawings directly confront this stereotype. An untitled strip from 1994 depicts Ipellie\u2019s shaman character (a self-portrait of the artist) peering through binoculars at two Inuit. One man is dressed in the grass skirt and floral headdress of the Polynesian \u201chula girl\u201d and the other is dancing in a wooden African mask, satirizing the performativity of \u201cprimitiveness\u201d that Qallunaat<\/em> seek in the racialized Other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Many of the persisting stereotypes of Inuit have their genesis in Robert Flaherty\u2019s widely popular 1922 \u201cdocumentary\u201d film Nanook of the North<\/em>,which portrayed Inuit as technologically inept noble savagesand helped set the stage for the Canadian government\u2019s paternalistic policies. It is no coincidence that Ipellie named the main character of his Ice Box<\/em> comic after the film\u2019s protagonist. His Nanook character, which in many ways embodies the antithesis of the artist\u200a\u2014\u200aa formally educated and urbanized Inuk\u200a\u2014\u200ais drawn as a buck-toothed, fur-clad man with a bowl-cut, an extreme characterization that highlights the ridiculous nature of primitivism. In an early comic from 1974, Nanook is drawn strolling down the busy streets of Toronto, the composition framed by looming skyscrapers. In his hands, he holds a sign that reads, \u201cI\u2019m Nanook from the far North. I\u2019ve come here to dig up someone\u2019s grandfather to find out what an interesting life people used to live in Toronto. Have a happy day!\u201d This is an obvious dig at Qallunaat<\/em> archaeologists who excavated Inuit remains for display in museums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ipellie wrote about his struggles with art institutions accepting and promoting his drawings, which were hard to categorize in a market uncomfortable with subject matter outside Arctic wildlife and scenes of pre-contact life. He wrote that the reaction of the \u201cstewards of Inuit art\u201d was \u201cdisinterest at best\u2026. Was my work not easy to categorize and, therefore, not fit [sic] <\/em>the mold they had steadfastly built and helped protect on behalf of my fellow Inuit artists?\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Alootook Ipellie, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares<\/em> (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 1993), xvi\u200a\u2014\u200axvii.<\/span> Despite these repeated disappointments, Ipellie persevered, continuing tirelessly to create works that challenged stereotypes about Inuit and the primacy of Qallunaat<\/em> ideologies over Inuit knowledge. Although Ipellie died in 2007, just as Inuit art was breaking through contemporary barriers, his drawings mark the beginning a new era of Inuit art\u200a\u2014\u200aone in which satirical traditions are creatively adapted and utilized to challenge colonial assumptions both about Inuit and their art.<\/p>\n![\"Ipellie_Dessin](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO03_Prouty__Ipellie_Dessin-sans-titre_Nuna-and-Vut-scaled.jpg\")
Untitled drawings from the series Nuna and Vut<\/em>, 1994.
Photo : courtesy of Richard F. Brush Art Gallery,
St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Ipellie_Canadian](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO03_Prouty__Ipellie_Canadian-Government-Laboratory-scaled.jpg\")
Canadian Government Laboratory<\/em>, 1981.
Photo : courtesy of Richard F. Brush Art Gallery, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Ipellie_Dessin](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO03_Prouty__Ipellie_Dessin-sans-titre_Ice-Box-scaled.jpg\")
Untitled drawings from the series Ice Box<\/em>, May 1986.
Photo : courtesy of Richard F. Brush Art Gallery, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n