For the first decades of Luke Anguhadluq’s life, Christianity was still a distant presence. The homeland of the Utkuhiksalingmiut [1] around the Back River and Chantrey Inlet lay deep in the continental interior, difficult to reach from Hudson Bay and far removed from the coastal routes travelled by ships. Because missionary expansion tended to follow the infrastructure of the fur trade, and Qamani’tuaq did not acquire a permanent Hudson’s Bay Company post until the 1910s, Anglican and Catholic missions arrived only in the late 1920s.

Born in 1895, Anguhadluq was already an adult by the time sustained Christian missionary activity reached the region. Indeed, when Knud Rasmussen encountered him among the Utkuhiksalingmiut in 1923, he described Anguhadluq as:

A young man, tall and broad-shouldered, a head higher than all the others, was at first the one who acted [as] spokesman for his fellow villagers. And he did so with the dignity of a chieftain [2].

Christianity would spread through the region and many members of Anguhadluq’s community were baptized, yet we have found no evidence that he himself converted. Indeed, his final wishes are suggestive, at least, of a continued attachment to the older spiritual framework and lifeways that had shaped him in his formative years: Upon his death in 1982, Anguhadluq specifically requested not to be buried in the Anglican cemetery. Instead, his body was transported by dogsled to a hill overlooking Baker Lake, a place where he had spent significant time observing caribou [3].

Drum dancing belongs fully to this traditional cultural world. While closely associated with Shamanism, the experience was not detached from daily life. It was social, communal, theatrical, and profoundly physical: bodies gathered, turned, stamped, watched, and answered the drum. For Anguhadluq, it seems, this conjunction of spirit and spectacle seems to have held a lasting fascination. Drum dancing became one of Anguhadluq’s most persistent and celebrated subjects. The present drawing immediately calls to mind his Drum Dance of 1970 in the collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery (G-83-107), one of the defining images of his career. Its importance is reflected in its appearance on the cover of Cynthia Waye Cook’s From the Centre and, more recently, as the header image for the Inuit Art Foundation’s biography of Anguhadluq.

As in the celebrated 1970 Drum Dance at the WAG, Anguhadluq abandons the fixed groundline and lets the figures scatter, swing, and settle wherever the page takes them. It has long been noted that the artist drew without allegiance to a single orientation. Jack Butler, the former custodian of this work, explained that Anguhadluq would sit with the paper on the floor, legs stretched before him, turning the sheet as he worked [4]. For a drum dance, this unique method could hardly be more appropriate. The figures wheel around the page in a loose spiral. Dancers tilt, cluster and scatter in shifting scales, some advancing, some turning, but all drawn toward the enormous yellow drum at the centre, which pulls both the figures and our gaze inward with the force of a great gravitational sun.

Scale is handled with the same freedom as orientation. Some figures swell while others shrink, and the drum itself positively dwarfs the drummer who carries it. Colour is treated just as freely. Yellow, red, orange, and black skip from figure to figure, visually binding the gathering across the sheet. Yellow is especially insistent, flashing at the faces and clothing of the figures, as though the colour of the drum were radiating outward through the crowd.

Just as telling is what Anguhadluq leaves out. There is no horizon, no architecture, and no landscape to pin the scene down. The figures almost float in open, untouched paper, their place determined by one another and, of course, by the undeniable and centripetal pull of the drum.

1. Utkuhikhalingmiut (also Ukukhalingmiut, Utkukhalingmiut) translates to “people of the place where soapstone is found”, or more literally, “people of the stone used for cooking pots.”

2. Knud Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24, vol. VIII, nos. 1–2 (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1931), 470-1.

3. William Eakin and Jack Butler, in their photo essay Baker Lake 1983-84, published in Arts Manitoba (Fall 1984, p. 20) and cited in Cook, 1999, p. 13, footnote 43.

4. From K. Jack Butler, Untitled Lecture, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 10 Feb 1977, p. 8, as cited in Marion E. Jackson, Baker Lake Inuit Drawings: A Study in the Evolution of Artistic Self-Consciousness, University of

Michigan, PhD Dissertation, 1985, p. 150, footnote 14.

ND