–Jaime Luria

George Ahgupuck is one artist who was active during the mid-twentieth century and who lived through a period of extreme colonial suppression of Native peoples. Born in 1911 in Shishmaref, Ahgupuck attended government school as a young child and later worked as an artist, often hunting the seals, reindeer, and caribou on who’s heavily treated skins he drew with ink throughout his career.

Typical subjects for his drawings are hunting scenes, views of towns, and landscapes. The horizon line is given distinct importance in almost all of his work, as are details of clothing and landscape, ice and sky especially. Images that speak to traditional Iñupiaq life and identity are essential to his practice. His illustrations are featured in a 1959 publication, I Am Eskimo: Aknik My Name, in which Iñupiat author Paul Green offers a self-reflexive discussion of traditional life, stories, and customs. Considered a classic work of authentic Iñupiat cultural representation, this book is one example of Native Alaskan artists’ dedication to exhibiting the dynamic relationship of artists’ present and traditional culture on their own terms and by means of their own visual language.

The images may appear to be romantic illustrations of an idealized past, of “happy Eskimos,” rather than “realistic” impressions of a man’s actual experience living in an Iñupiat context. Perhaps such an expressive testament to Iñupiat peoples and history as Ahgupuck’s drawings is better interpreted as a reflection of the artist’s relationship to his community and his past. His work serves to represent not only his individual visualizations of his home, but also those of the artists whose work informed his own.  Self-representation can be seen as a response to colonialism as well as a product of it.

Biographical essay and images from the California Academy of Sciences