Alootook ipellie biography sample
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Illustrator, cartoonist, poet and essayist born in Nuvuqquq (Nunavut) in 1951 – died in Ottawa (Ontario) in 2007.
Alootook Ipellie was born in 1951 in Nuvuqquq, a hunting camp located on Baffin Island, in today’s Nunavut. The son of Napachie and Joanassie, he was also the grandson of well-known carver Inutsiaq (also known as Ennutsiaq). Alootook Ipellie had a half-brother, Joanassie, and a half-sister Elisapie who died at an early age. Alootook Ipellie’s childhood was nomadic until he was four years old and his father died in a hunting accident. His family then moved to Iqaluit, where he lived with his mother and his stepfather. Alootook Ipellie contracted tuberculosis at the age of five and was sent to the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, Ontario, and in this institution, he learned to speak English. During childhood summers in family in hunting camps, he was lulled by the many tales and traditional stories his grandfather Inutsiaq told him. Alootook Ipellie experienced first-hand
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Note: While this is a review of the book “Arctic Dreams and Nightmares,” a collection of art and accompanying short stories by the late Inuk artist, Alootook Ipellie, we are also taking a look at Ipellie’s larger body of work, and the significance of his contribution to Inuit art and political comics in general.
The title “Arctic Dreams and Nightmares” is a woeful summation of this haunting journey through the imagination of a man who seems to have been, as the title suggests, a dreamer. But within modern memory, it is an easy thing to understand how any Inuk’s dreams might turn to nightmares.
Writing as a qallunaat from the privileged perspective of the south, it is outside my role to interpret these dreams for the world. But as a sometime-student of Canadian colonialism and its violence against the indigenous people of the Arctic, I can help to shed some midnight sun on the darkness of this genocidal history.
Rachel Attituq Qitsualik wrot
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Long Saturday Afternoon
Don’t! I didn’t say “Nunavut”!, 1980
The Woman Who Married a Goose
Author, editor, artist, cartoonist
Born in a camp near Iqaluit
Some reading and watching
Some publications
Biography
Alootook Ipellie was born in a camp near Iqaluit (formerly Frobisher Bay), the capital of Nunavut, where he spent his childhood and teenage years experiencing the transition from a traditional nomadic way of life to life in government-sponsored inuit village settlements. In 1973, after a short stint as an announcer and producer for CBC Radio in Iqaluit, he moved to huvudstad i kanada to study and pursue a career in art. He became involved with the inuit Tapirisat that same year and took on the duties of principal writer, designer, photographer, and translator of Inuit Today, later serving as the magazine’s editor from 1979 to 1982. As a noted artist and important figure in the Inuit literature movement, Ipellie’s essays, stories, and poetry have