In 1990, after a cat­a­stroph­ic fire at Bak­er Lake under­scored the fragili­ty of north­ern cul­tur­al hold­ings, the West Baf­fin Eski­mo Co-oper­a­tive (WBEC) trans­ferred stew­ard­ship of its vast cache of works on paper to the McMichael in Klein­berg, Ontario, about 30 min­utes north­west of Toron­to. The result — 90,000 draw­ings from the late 1950s through the ear­ly 1990s — became one of the most sig­nif­i­cant doc­u­men­tary archives of Inu­it visu­al culture.

That archive anchors Worlds on Paper: Draw­ings from Kin­ngait, an exhi­bi­tion and book curat­ed by Emi­ly Lau­rent Hen­der­son, Asso­ciate Cura­tor of Indige­nous Arts and Cul­ture. An Inuk cura­tor, Hen­der­son spent a year immersed in the col­lec­tion. Her through-line is clear: cen­ter the artists’ mem­o­ries, dai­ly lives, and acts of look­ing — before south­ern mar­kets fil­tered their visions.

“Artists in those first decades were rapid­ly trans­lat­ing their world as they saw it — fam­i­ly, work, encoun­ters, new tech­nolo­gies — straight onto paper,” Hen­der­son says. ​“I want vis­i­tors to feel a human con­nec­tion to that immediacy.”

Back in 1957, the small Inu­it com­mu­ni­ty, Kin­ngait (for­mer­ly known as ​“Cape Dorset”), on the south­ern tip of Baf­fin Island in Nunavut, Cana­da, start­ed a gov­ern­ment-sup­port­ed print pro­gram which became a cor­ner­stone of the local wage econ­o­my and a glob­al engine for Inu­it graph­ic art. But the pol­ished prints that trav­eled south were only the tip of a much larg­er cre­ative ice­berg. Stu­dio man­agers select­ed, cropped, sim­pli­fied, and recol­ored for mar­ket — nec­es­sary deci­sions for print­mak­ing, but edi­to­r­i­al, nonetheless.

The draw­ings show every­thing else: the exper­i­ments and era­sures; the cof­fee-ringed sheets passed between hands; motifs that nev­er became prints; sub­jects that didn’t fit colo­nial expec­ta­tions. They reveal both canon­i­cal fig­ures — Keno­juak Ashe­vak, Pit­se­o­lak Ashoona, Kanang­i­nak Pootoo­gook, Pud­lo Pud­lat — and artists like Parr and TK whose work was over­looked because it wasn’t steered to market.

Seen togeth­er, the draw­ings map a com­mu­ni­ty nav­i­gat­ing pro­found shifts: from dog teams to Ski-Doos, sum­mer camps to pre­fab­ri­cat­ed hous­ing, land-based spir­i­tu­al­i­ties to Chris­t­ian iconog­ra­phy. The show treats those changes not as bina­ries — ​“tra­di­tion­al vs. mod­ern” — but as a lived con­tin­u­um of adaptation.

In 2023 the McMichael fin­ished dig­i­tiz­ing all 90,000 draw­ings in part­ner­ship with WBEC/​Dorset Fine Arts — work­ing close­ly with pho­tog­ra­ph­er Edward Bur­tyn­sky and his Toron­to stu­dio Think2Thing, which engi­neered a cus­tom rotat­ing-plat­form imag­ing rig. What had been fore­cast as a 10 – 12-year, sheet-by-sheet project became a six-month sprint, pho­tograph­ing thou­sands of draw­ings per week with con­sis­tent light­ing and scale.

The entire archive is now acces­si­ble through Iningat Ilagi­it (“a place for fam­i­ly”), includ­ing a trilin­gual, low-band­width ver­sion designed for north­ern com­mu­ni­ties. For Inu­it artists, schol­ars, and fam­i­lies, this access returns knowl­edge home; for researchers, it unlocks a pri­ma­ry-source record of cul­tur­al his­to­ry — process marks and all — unmatched in scope and immediacy.

The project is also a mod­el for how major insti­tu­tions can stew­ard Indige­nous archives: with tech­ni­cal invest­ment, edi­to­r­i­al restraint, and cura­to­r­i­al lead­er­ship from with­in the com­mu­ni­ty. Henderson’s role — and the book’s major­i­ty-Inu­it author ros­ter — sig­nal a shift from extrac­tion to col­lab­o­ra­tion, from ​“about” to ​“with.”

The Kin­ngait Draw­ings Archive mat­ters now because it restores a miss­ing lay­er of con­text to Inu­it art his­to­ry. Dai­ly life, humor, self-por­trai­ture, Chris­t­ian devo­tion, and even pop cul­ture — long over­shad­owed by mar­ket-dri­ven selec­tions — return to view, com­pli­cat­ing and enrich­ing how the field is taught, col­lect­ed, and val­ued. It also coun­ters era­sure, recov­er­ing the work of artists whose styles diverged from south­ern expec­ta­tions and expand­ing the canon of who gets cit­ed, exhib­it­ed, and remembered.

Through dig­i­tal repa­tri­a­tion, fam­i­lies and emerg­ing artists can now trace lin­eages of tech­nique and sub­ject mat­ter on their own terms, strength­en­ing cul­tur­al sov­er­eign­ty. At the same time, the draw­ings illu­mi­nate issues — hous­ing, infra­struc­ture, faith, tourism — that still echo in north­ern pol­i­cy debates today.

A sub­stan­tial book accom­pa­nies the exhi­bi­tion, with Henderson’s lead essay and con­tri­bu­tions by Inu­it writ­ers, artists, and schol­ars weav­ing crit­i­cism with mem­o­ry. Many works appear in print for the first time, expand­ing the archive’s reach.

Inu­it artists once drew their chang­ing world onto paper; dig­i­ti­za­tion sends those worlds back north, where they can be seen, claimed, and built upon. That motion — paper to pix­els to peo­ple — makes this archive not just his­to­ry, but a tool for the future.