Description

Alec (Peter) Aliknak Banksland devoted himself to depicting traditional Inuit ways of life at a time when they were fast disappearing in the Arctic. In the winter fishing scene shown here, he whimsically captures the high point of the hunt as the fisherman peers at his open-mouthed prey through a hole in the ice. Aliknak was a founding member of the Holman Printmaking Cooperative, established in 1961 to provide artists with a means of recording their past and earn income as the Canadian government forced the Inuit off the land and into European-style settlements.