For inland Inuit communities, fishing through the winter ice offered an essential supplement to caribou hunting, especially when the herds moved unpredictably or autumn stores began to thin. Born near Haningayok (Back River), Jessie Oonark spent her early years among Utkuhiksalingmiut camps before settling in Qamani'tuaq, and would have known this seasonal pattern firsthand. Fishing appears here in the small figure holding an oversized kakivak, with two finely scaled fish set before him.

The title, however, only partly describes the scene. Above, and on a far larger scale, a woman watches as a man draws a seal upward through the ice. Such an image is unusual in an inland graphic but it was not outside Oonark's experience. When Knud Rasmussen visited the Utkuhiksalingmiut around Back River and Lake Franklin in 1923, he recorded that they had until quite recently maintained ties with the sea, travelling to hunt seals in March, April, and May. He also noted that young men still knew the methods of breathing-hole hunting [1]. Oonark, born in 1906, would therefore have grown up within living memory of the practice.

1. Knud Rasmussen, Fra Grønland til Stillehavet: Rejser og Mennesker fra5. Thule-Ekspedition 1921–24, vol. II, Gennem Nordvest-Passagen med Hundeslæde (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1926), p. 70. I am grateful to

ND