October 26, 2019

In Canada's North, Art Emerges In the Face of Difficulty

By Catherine Porter

Hi, this is Catherine Porter and I am filling in for Ian Austen.

This week I told the story of Ooloosie Saila and her hometown: Cape Dorset, the town that art built but, as I learned, has not redeemed.

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

Cape Dorset on the frozen edge of the Arctic Ocean.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Cape Dorset is the farthest north I've ever been. It was an enlightening experience for me as a Canadian. We consider ourselves a northern nation, but few of us really go north, not only because it's sunnier in Florida.

It's also a lot cheaper to head south. I flew to Cape Dorset three times for this story and just the flights for each trip cost 3,200 Canadian dollars.

I had dreamed of going to Cape Dorset since a friend gave me a print created there as a wedding gift. The town is often called the art capital of Canada. Perched on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, it has produced more artists per capita than Toronto or Montreal.

Art was stitched into the hamlet's very existence. One of the first local businesses was the West Baffin Eskimo Co-Operative, which produced carvings and prints lauded by the country's establishment.

It seemed a brilliantly progressive idea: an Inuit-led cooperative encouraging local artists to express their culture, sell their work and then plow the money back into the community. That, I assumed, had shielded Cape Dorset from some of Nunavut's depressing statistics. Just look at the $9.8 million cultural center that had opened!

Ooloosie Saila at the opening of her show in Toronto.Chris Donovan for The New York Times

I hadn't even landed before I discovered I was wrong.

The airplane was filled with members of the circuit court, flying in to hold trials in the community hall. I learned that this was their busiest docket, jammed with assault and sexual assault cases. Almost all of the cases involved binge drinking.

"Everyone in town seems touched," said Mike Blanchard, a defense lawyer.

Cape Dorset is officially a restricted hamlet, meaning that people who want to buy alcohol must be approved by a local committee that checks criminal records. Many residents instead turn to the black market, where a 750-ml bottle of vodka goes for a mind-blowing 600 Canadian dollars. That's one reason residents across Baffin Island in Iqaluit voted to open a beer and wine store: They figured it would reduce poverty as well as violence.

Johnny Pootoogook is an artist in Cape Dorset who has stayed on friends' couches during periods of homelessness.

I was in Cape Dorset only a few hours when I heard the name Ed Horne. He is notorious in Canada as a convicted pedophile, a teacher who moved around the north. He taught in Cape Dorset for three years, starting in 1978, and sexually assaulted a whole generation of boys. Many were left with severe PTSD that went untreated for two decades, until a settlement was reached with the government, Allison Crawford, a psychiatrist, told me.

Over days, I sought out artists who would talk to me about their work and their lives. One of those I met was Johnny Pootoogook — an artist of unusual talent and of thoughtfulness. He was also homeless, couch surfing as he made his way up the town's lengthy waiting list for public housing. Mr. Pootoogook did have a house once. He lost it after he was sent to jail for using a firearm while drunk.

His story was not unusual.

The view from on high of Cape Dorset, Nunavut.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Councilor Chris Pudlat told me that while art had helped some residents, it could not fill an existential crisis that began when the Inuit left their nomadic existence.

"My grandparents were born in igloos or skin tents on the land, literally," said Councilor Pudlat. "Before, people had something to do to contribute to the community or camp. They had a sense of purpose in life. That was taken away."

Some have managed to bridge both worlds and fashion a life as a modern Inuk. Quvianaqtuk Pudlat is one of them. I trudged to his house through a snow squall on my second trip and found him drawing at his kitchen table. He picked up a pencil three years ago, after an injury made construction work too painful. His subjects are mostly the wild animals he sees while out hunting.

Cape Dorset's Aboriginal Day celebrations in June.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Mr. Pudlat lived nomadically for the first years of his life. For him, being on the land isn't just recreation, it's what makes him Inuit.

When I came back in June, he took me ice fishing one night. At 8 p.m., the sky was still bright and the clouds were reflected in pools of water on the ice, giving the illusion we were flying through the sky behind his snowmobile. It was breathtaking.

Most artists told me they dreamed of this, making enough money to buy a snowmobile or a boat to get back to the land. But few pull it off. Even Mr. Pudlat planned to return to construction, and create art on the side. "It's not really making a living," he told me.

Over the course of my trips, my thinking evolved. Initially, I wondered why, with all that talent, Cape Dorset had not been saved by art. By the end, the question I asked myself was how, against all the odds, the artists of Cape Dorset kept producing such spectacular work.

You can check out the latest prints from the hamlet, released last weekend.

This week's Trans Canada and Around The Times were written by Ian Austen.

Trans Canada

"The Realm of Appearances," by Matthew Wong.Matthew Wong Estate and Karma, New York

Matthew Wong, a 35-year-old, self-taught artist from Edmonton whose work was attracting critical acclaim and international attention, died this month. "He synthesizes stylized representations, bright colors and mystical themes to create rich, evocative scenes," one critic wrote of Mr. Wong's paintings. "His works, despite their ebullient palette, are frequently tinged with a melancholic yearning."
As most of you know by now, Canada's federal election returned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to power, if humbled and without a majority in the House of Commons. Dan Bilefsky and I also looked at how the campaign and the result affected Canada's ever-present regionalism.
In Opinion, which is a separate shop from News where I work, the editorial board of The Times wrote of its hope "that Mr. Trudeau returns to office chastened and wiser." Jen Gerson, a political journalist in Calgary, argued that the "only factor saving Mr. Trudeau from a disastrous outcome on Monday was that none of the other parties convinced the electorate that they were better equipped to deal with the future that lies ahead." While Cheryl Thompson, a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto who has researched the history of blackface in Canada, said that responses to Mr. Trudeau's brownface and blackface past "made me realize what lies at the heart of Canadian racism. It's our signature behavior, our made-in-Canada brand. Nice and polite people can't be racist, after all."

On Nov. 11, a live edition of The New York Times podcast "Still Processing" featuring The Times's critic-at-large Wesley Morris and New York Times Magazine staff writer Jenna Wortham will close out the Hot Docs Podcast Festival in Toronto. Tickets and details are available here. And Canada Letter readers who use the code NYTPODFEST19 will receive a 10 percent discount.

And for those of you who missed the pre-election discussion Dan and I held, you can find a recording of it here.

Around the Times

Men suspected of being Islamic State members at a prison in northeast Syria.Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

A giant padlock was undone, a steel door opened and my colleague, Ben Hubbard, found himself in a jail cell in Northern Syria with 22 prisoners who had been captured in battles with the Islamic State.
If, like me, you enjoyed — if that's the right word — Patricia Highsmith's dark, psychological thrillers and the films they inspired, you may now be awaiting the publication of selections from her diaries, the 56 volumes of which were discovered at the back of a linen closet after her death in 1995. The editors promise they will provide an unembellished look at Ms. Highsmith, without glossing over her racism and anti-Semitism.

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.