Bowhead Butchering

 
Click image for gallery

Click image for gallery

In the sum­mer of 2008, Justin Nobel trav­elled to Nunavik, a group of four­teen com­mu­ni­ties in north­ern Quebec inhab­ited by about 12,000 peo­ple, most of them Inuit, and about 4,000 vis­i­tors a year, mainly min­ers and hunters. In the com­mu­nity of Kangiq­sujuaq, Nobel pho­tographed the whalers who par­tic­i­pated in the first offi­cial bow­head whale hunt off Nunavik’s Hudson Strait coast in over a hun­dred years. Fisheries and Oceans Canada had issued a licence for the 2008 hunt after the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada changed the bowhead’s sta­tus from endan­gered to threat­ened in 2005. Residents of the area gath­ered for the butcher­ing of the bow­head meat, which was then given to the com­mu­ni­ties in Nunavik. However, a bull­dozer that was sup­posed to be brought in to flip the whale had trou­ble get­ting to the site, and much of the meat rot­ted. After three days, the stench of the car­cass was so potent that some spec­ta­tors vomited. 

During the High Arctic Relocation in 1953 and 1955, the Canadian gov­ern­ment moved Inuit fam­i­lies from north­ern com­mu­ni­ties, includ­ing Nunavik, to the more north­ern set­tle­ments of Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord to strengthen Canada’s sov­er­eignty over the Arctic dur­ing the Cold War. The set­tlers had to adjust to a colder, harsher cli­mate and a very dif­fer­ent set of wildlife pat­terns, and hunt­ing was dif­fi­cult. During the 1993 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, those who sur­vived gave accounts of unimag­in­able hard­ship and depri­va­tion. To hon­our the Inuit who suf­fered dur­ing the High Arctic Relocation, two mon­u­ments will be unveiled in Nuna­vut in September 2010. The unveil­ing was sched­uled for September 2009, but it was delayed by a year because the stone used for one of the mon­u­ments — local Grise Fiord gran­ite — was so hard to work with that the artist broke more than twenty dia­mond blades in comple­ting the work.