Working the Dead Beat (21 page)

James Houston

Artist, Adventurer, Writer

June 12, 1921 – April 17, 2005

&

Kananginak Pootoogook

Inuit Elder and Artist

January 1, 1935 – November 23, 2010

C
ARVERS AND PRINTMAKERS
put down their tools and closed up their studios in Cape Dorset when they heard the news that Saumik, “the Left-Handed One,” had died. That's the name the Inuit at Cape Dorset had given the artist and dealer James Houston when he arrived on Baffin Island half a century earlier, seeking a simpler, more elemental life. He stayed just over a dozen years, but in that time he helped the Inuit create a new art form and launched an international craze for the carvings that Inuit had been making for centuries. In so doing he changed their way of life and his own.

Five years later, the community shut down again to honour Kananginak Pootoogook, the internationally recognized Inuit artist and community leader in the Arctic after Houston returned to the south. Kananginak helped his people develop their own artist-run studios and manage the transition from a nomadic life of hunting and fishing through cycles of plenty and starvation on the land to a modern one in permanent settlements. After Kananginak died in an Ottawa hospital of lung cancer on November 23, 2010, all of Cape Dorset waited for his body to be flown home.

Then, despite a snowstorm that had made many roads impassable, three hundred people crowded into the community centre for an emotional Anglican service in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit. Because darkness comes early in the arctic winter, the mourners used flashlights to wend their way to the cemetery, where they placed Kananginak's coffin in a shallow grave, covered it with a blanket of gravel, rocks, and snow, and marked the mound with a handmade cross.

These two men, one white, one Inuit, are forever linked through family ties and the sunburst of Inuit carving and printmaking. Kananginak's father, Joseph Pootoogook, ancestral leader of the Ikerrasak camp, adopted Houston into his clan in the 1950s, thus making it easier for the southerner to live and work among the Inuit. In his turn, Kananginak adopted Houston's son John, carrying on a tradition and a relationship with the younger Houston that lasted as long as Kananginak lived.

With his artist's eye, Houston was the first white man to recognize the beauty and integrity of the carvings the Inuit had been making since before time was recorded; with his entrepreneurial muscle he found a market for the best pieces in the south; with his creative vision he helped them learn printmaking, a gender-neutral artistic and income-generating activity. A charismatic figure, an artist, and a storyteller, Houston was a modern man at odds with his own civilization. His dual role in the Arctic – as a paid servant of the Canadian government and an art dealer who profited from the marketing of Inuit art — made him a controversial figure, but in the end the markers pile much higher on the positive side.

Houston wasn't responsible for contact and commercialization. That was as inevitable as the long polar night following the midnight sun. Transportation and communications systems — especially television and air travel — became more pervasive and sophisticated in the 1950s and 1960s, just as life on the land became less sustainable with the depletion of trapping and hunting.

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 the 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.