Kiakshuk, the eldest hunter-turned-artist in Cape Dorset, occupies a unique space in the history of Inuit art. Though regarded as a powerful shaman, his work rarely lingered on the supernatural. Instead, his drawings carried the weight of lived experience, a kind of visual memory rendered in steady, deliberate lines. His younger cousin and fellow artist, Pitseolak Ashoona, recalled his work with reverence: “Because Kiakshuk was a very old man, he did real Eskimo drawings. He did it because he grew up that way, and I really liked the way he put the old Eskimo life on paper.” 

What Pitseolak recognized was a preservation of culture—a quiet but profound act of resistance to time and change. Kiakshuk’s images, drawn from his early life on the land. Each scene captures the rhythms of camp life: the scraping of hides, the construction of tools, the gestures of survival that shaped a world. In this particular work, a woman scrapes a hide, hands engaged in the cyclical transformation of raw material into essential clothing. It is a moment both ordinary and monumental, a single instance in the flow of daily life that underpinned an entire way of being.