INTERNATIONAL FASHIONZ

History of Canadian Inuit Art The North has been Canada's last frontier. Until the Second World War - it had remained largely ignored by the rest of Canada, except for the very bold and adventurous. Since the mid-1700s a succession of explorers looking for the Northwest Passage, of whalers looking for oil, Hudson's Bay traders looking for fox pelts as well as missionaries looking for souls ventured into the North and met its inhabitants, the Inuit. Although these visitors to the North introduced some new trade goods, especially rifles and tea, tobacco and flour, the nomadic lifestyle of the Inuit hunters remained fairly untouched by the intruders. In the late 1940s, most Inuit still lived in small family camps, used dogsleds for travel, lived in igloos during the winter, and divided their time between trapping white fox and hunting. All this was to change dramatically over the next two decades. For a variety of political and strategic reasons, the federal government of...