When James Houston began looking for carvings and handicrafts on his first buying trip to Port Harrison in 1949, Akeeaktashuk eagerly obliged. Apparently he had been carving already for a number of years, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Akeeaktashuk became the most prolific, accomplished, and celebrated of artists in the earliest years of modern Inuit art production. We don’t know if the artist himself thought of making bases for his now iconic images of hunters brandishing their weapons or if Houston suggested it, but we imagine the two men discussing this important innovation!

Hunter with Spear and Knife includes the soap inlay used by Akeeaktashuk and others in the early years, and also the incised trademark drawstring tied just below the hunter’s hood that we see on a number of the artist’s carvings. This resembles the example illustrated in George Swinton’s Sculpture of the Inuit, fig. 274.