Time Immemorial

2017
Pen, brush and ink on archive quality watercolour paper
18” x 24”

We have always been a people of the seal.

Since time immemorial the seal has provided us with meat when we were hungry; fat for oil in our lamps when it was cold and dark; pelts that clothed us and became our shelters and our kayak.

Later in our history, there was a vibrant market for seal pelts for fancy clothing in the outside world; and again the seal was a way for us to provide. We could exchange our dried seal pelts to the traders and fur markets; we made a decent living from this!

Then in 1977, protestors, including the infamous Brigette Bardot among others, made their way to the ice floe off the coast of Newfoundland... and the price of the seal pelt was decimated overnight.

Now activists such as Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and others are fighting to let the world know that the Inuit seal hunt, as it always has, is a viable, sustainable and ethical hunt. Nothing of the seal goes to waste.

We still hunt the seal, and always will... we just wish that the groups out there who know little to nothing of our way of life would accept that the way we harvest is acceptable...

That it's a way to provide food and money for our families; we eat the seal, yes, but it is getting more and more expensive to buy staples from the local stores. Seal pelts made sure we almost always had money for the basics like flour, sugar and tea.