Not many travelers, including other Canadians, venture to Nunavut (pronounced NOO-nah-voot), which comprises one-fifth of the country's land mass. There are 30 times more caribou than humans in Nunavut, formerly part of the Northwest Territories and created in 1999 as a result of an important land claims settlement.
In the last century, the Inuit, once known as Eskimos and formerly a nomadic people, were resettled by the government to this forbidding region. It was here that their innate skills as artisans began to be widely recognized.
Now the art of the Inuit people in Cape Dorset -- sensuous stone sculptures and evocative prints inspired by traditions and history and the northern landscape -- are an integral part of the Canadian psyche.
On a recent Friday at the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, the community's center for the arts, a line of artists holding their works made of stone, antler, and bone is snaking out the office door. Friday is one of the days the co-op buys carvings to ship ``down south" to Toronto.
One of the eager artists is Taqialuk Nuna, 45, known as ``Tuk," who made his first carved piece when he was 9. He learned to carve by watching his father, who was killed in a boating accident in 1979 while hunting walrus. Nuna places his creation on buyer Chris Pudlat's desk. Made from a carving stone called serpentine , it is a 2-foot-high dancing bear, standing on one leg and playing a drum.
Dancing bear carvings are as familiar a sight in Cape Dorset as all-terrain vehicles, but this one is unusual and not just because the entire figure, including the drum, is carved from a single piece of stone. It also balances securely on either leg, a triumph of engineering, considering it weighs nearly 20 pounds.
Pudlat, 34, examines it carefully for cracks and flaws, and purchases it for slightly more than $1,000 American, to Nuna's obvious relief. The piece may sell for four times that in a Toronto gallery.
