Inukjuak Art History

THE DISCOVERY OF INUIT ART: JAMES A. HOUSTON - ANIMATEUR

An article written by Nelson H.H. Graburn and published in the 1987 spring issue of Inuit Art Quarterly (IAQ), vol. 2, no. 2:3-5.

This discussion of James Houston's dual role of fostering commercial art among the Inuit and of promoting it to the outside world is intended to supplement my article "Inuit Art and Canadian Nationalism" (IAQ, Fall 1986), in which I dealt with the role played by Inuit arts in Canadian art history and national identity.

The title of this article was inspired by Alma Houston's description of her ex-husband as a "great animateur" (personal communication, 1977). I am grateful to James Houston for checking many of the factual statements in a draft of this paper.

An artist in his own right, James Houston was trained in Toronto and, following a stint in the Canadian Armed Forces, in Paris. In 1948, yet to make his mark on the Canadian art scene, he went north, following in the tracks of his artistic forbears, the Group of Seven. He took the long train journey through the Ontario forestlands to Moosonee, bent on seeking his images in the "purely Canadian" lands and inhabitants. There, by happy coincidence, he was offered a ride on a Canadian Air Force plane bound for Port Harrison (Inukjuak), where a meteorological station had been established as part of the war effort. In the small settlement and the Inuit out-camps along the east coast of Hudson Bay, he "discovered" Inuit ant (see Houston 1951, 1977).

In Port Harrison, a large number of small stone and ivory souvenir sculptures and models caught his fancy, as being so different, so fresh in conception - in comparison with other art and, indeed, with more commercialized ethnic arts. He brought back a representative sample to Montreal, where it aroused the interest of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (now known as the Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec; see Walt 1980: 11-15). The Guild's directors had been sensitized to the plight of the Inuit by Arctic anthropologist Diamond Jenness and had long been interested in "saving" and promoting Inuit handicrafts. For some years, the Guild had been sending a pamphlet, Suggestions for Eskimo Handicrafts, to the white women residents of the North. The Guild suggested that Houston retrace his steps and encourage Inuit to produce more carved items for export sale. Showing remarkable courage and foresight, they raised $1,100 to enable Houston to fly back to the same area the following year to purchase items for sale. With assistance from wealthy patrons and influential people such as Ian Lindsay and Jacques Rousseau, they were able to enlist the grudging support of the federal government and, later, the Hudson's Bay Company.

Houston spent the summer of 1949 in Port Harrison, Povungnituk and Cape Smith (now Akulivik). In November of that year, the public response to more than 1,000 small carvings he brought out for sale at the Guild surpassed anyone's expectations. The sale was beneficial to Inuit and non-Inuit alike, providing delightful small pieces for a few lucky people in Montreal, and supplementary income for the Inuit who were suffering low prices for their fox pelts and sealskins.

From 1950 to 1952, Houston served as a roving "crafts officer" for the Handicrafts Guild, supported by government grants, and later (1952 to 1955), he became an employee of the federal government, with similar functions. During this time, he travelled all over the eastern and central Arctic, spreading "the word" in many Inuit settlements. These trips, which were made by dogsled, airplane and the Eastern Arctic Patrol vessel, C.D. Howe, greatly added, of course, to the romance surrounding Inuit arts. In 1951, the Department of Northern Affairs published a small book for Inuit entitled Sunuyuksuk, illustrated by Houston with drawings of arts and crafts that they could make for sale. The images in this booklet were in the style of the Alaska Native Arts and Crafts annual catalogues put out in the 1940s and 1950s.* The text, written in English and in Inuktitut syllabics, encouraged the Inuit to "make them well" and suggested the use of local materials. These booklets were distributed in the North by Houston and the RCMP as well as other government employees. Later, Houston became area administrator for the federal government at Cape Dorset (1954 to 1962), where he and his wife, Alma, encouraged Inuit to carve and to make graphic prints (Houston, 1967).

In 1950, at Houston's instigation, the Hudson's Bay Company lent its cooperation by accepting money from the Handicrafts Guild in Montreal to buy the sculptures that Inuit preferred at their northern stores. In exchange, the Inuit received credit to be spent at the same stores for otherwise slow-moving goods. At first, the Guild was the sole retailer of Inuit arts and crafts in the south, but, after 1952, it began purchasing an annual allotment from the Hudson's Bay Company, which itself became a major retailer.

The sailing was not always smooth, however, Houston was pleased with the quality of the carvings, which improved steadily, but, after the successes of 1949 to 1951, the total volume of sculptures increased both within particular settlements and because many more settlements were producing them. The 1952 shipment was too massive for the Guild to handle and, by Christmas, president Jack Molson called a halt to the project.

Had it not been for the intervention and resourcefulness of Houston, the enterprise might have ended then and there. Undaunted, he called upon Eugene Power, his longtime camping and fishing friend in Ann Arbor, Michigan, presenting him with the problem of marketing the mass of slow-moving items made by Inuit. A successful inventor and businessman, with a passion for challenge, Power agreed to buy the lot for $15,000, and then see what he could do with them. Accordingly, he set up Eskimo Art Inc., a non-profit corporation (of which Houston became a director) with exclusive rights to import Inuit art into the United States. Through his business connections, particularly in New York and Washington, D.C., Power was able to publicize and sell many of the sculptures. Though this venture remained strictly a sideline (some have said that he ran it out of his secretary's desk drawer), it served as a powerful testimonial to the Canadian authorities of the appeal of Inuit art outside Canada. That same year, at an interdepartmental meeting in Ottawa, to consider further subsidy to Houston's work and the Guild, a positive decision for greater expenditures and promotion was reached in the light of the Cold War and the American presence at the DEW-line stations in the North. The Prime Minister's representative stated: "If we can get these [arts and crafts] in visible places and to important people, we will be able to show the world ... that we are indeed a true northern power."

In spite of this grand ambition, the task of promoting Inuit art was left pretty well to Houston and the Handicrafts Guild. In 1950 and 1951, the Guild organized a series of exhibitions in Canada and the United States, at which both Houstons were in demand for appearances and radio talks, at times arousing the envy of federal officials who were underwriting the costs but not getting public credit. Well known as a writer and lecturer as well as an artist, Houston continued to publish exhortatory articles not only in such Canadian publications as The Beaver, Canadian Art, Canadian Geographic and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal, but also in such prestigious "arty" foreign journals as Studio, Paletten, Craft Horizons and Design (Martijn 1964). The message and the style were always the same. The articles told the personal story of the discovery of this original Canadian art form, one with strong connections to traditional spiritual culture, and of adventures with the Inuit and the opportunity to purchase. Comparing these articles with others of the same period, Houston seems singularly out of place, as out of place perhaps as early Inuit sculpture would have been at such shows as Canadian Artists in Washington (1950) or Canada at the Guggenheim. Yet Houston wrote so well and told such a good story, with the best of photographic illustrations, about these interesting new arts, that his articles were enthusiastically embraced.

Soon other Canadians followed Houston's lead, recounting the story of his discovery in such diverse journals as Western Business and Industry, Graphics, Canadian Geographical Journal, Encyclopedia Canadiana (1958), Bank of Montreal Staff Magazine, Reader's Digest, Popular Mechanics, Polska Sztuka Lud, Illustrated London News, Palacio, Canadian Forum, National Film Board Bulletin, New York Times, Vogue, Apollo, Time, Life and Connoisseur. These articles appear to have been based almost exclusively on Houston's control of the information. In 1954, through the Department of Northern Affairs, Houston published the "official" booklet entitled Canadian Eskimo Art. Material almost identical to what was contained in this book appeared in the promotional publications of the Handicrafts Guild and Eskimo Art Inc., as well as in The Beaver and promotional material published by the Hudson's Bay Company. The same information was taken up and reprinted almost without question by many scholars, some of them far removed from the Canadian scene. One example was Jorgen Meldgaard's EskimoSculpture (1963), which, conveniently, was reviewed for Canadian Art by James Houston, who gave it unstinting praise. Another, Schaeffer-Simmerns' Eskimo-Plastik aus Kanada (1958), came close to plagiarism. To his credit, Edmund Carpenter exposed its hollowness, roasting it in the American Anthropologist (62:346-48, 1960), a journal relatively obscure to the world of taste-making in art.

This near-saturation of the print medium only led publishers to clamour for more. The federal government, eager to share the financial burden and get the credit, were happy to cooperate. Through the federally funded National Museum of Canada, the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the government conveyed the same messages into other media. There was little opportunity or inclination to rebut some of the more romanticized tales in which Houston carefully wrapped the presentation of Inuit arts to the world.

In spite of all this promotion, the efforts of the Hudson's Bay Company and the Canadian Handicrafts Guild were not always successful on the economic level. There were times during the late 1950s when, unable to move their stock, the HBC simply stopped buying. Even such dedicated advocates as George Swinton declared that there were times in the 1950s when he thought, along with others, that the whole venture was bound to fail (1972: 107).

The uneven participation of the HBC provoked further direct government involvement and subsidy. In settlements where the Inuit were suddenly bereft of a reliable means of earning money, the newly created northern service officers were encouraged to buy art directly, rather than paying Inuit welfare (relief or rations) for inactivity. Thus, further arbiters were brought into the purchase situation, leading to a whole series of deeper involvements in the 1960s. New institutions were created: Inuit-owned cooperatives in most northern settlements, the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council (founded in 1963) and Canadian Arctic Producers (the wholesale agency established in October 1965). At the same time, the government appointed a large number of crafts officers in the North, whose tasks were similar to those so successfully carried out by Houston himself in Cape Dorset, where he had settled as administrator cum local crafts officer in 1956.

James Houston left the North in 1962 and was ably replaced by Terry Ryan in Cape Dorset. He has, however, continued his involvement with Inuit art through 10 years of service, including the chairmanship, on the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council, and through visits to Inuit settlements. He has also remained active writing books and making movies about Canadian native peoples and their arts.

*This hypothesis first struck Molly Lee when she compared illustrations in a copy of Sunuyuksuk with her own knowledge of Alaskan government (IANA) publications. The connection was later confirmed by documents in the National Archives of Canada.