Photos of aboriginal Northerners are usually taken by outsiders. These three photographers are anything but outsiders. And you can tell the difference.
To see the photos, please grab a copy of the June issue of Up Here Magazine.
There’s no shortage of old pictures of First Nations and Inuit Northerners. They were, to the white photographers who began visiting the Arctic a century ago, an exotic species. By the thousands, their images were captured in black-and-white photos, which were carried back south and displayed like big-game trophies. There they hung: strange and nameless natives, gawked at across a gaping cultural void.
But there were also different photographs, taken by very different photographers. These shooters were themselves aboriginal – the three great pioneers of Northern indigenous photography. In the Yukon, there was George Johnston, who, not long after the goldrush, began documenting everyday life among his fellow Teslin Tlingit. Soon after came Nunavut’s Peter Pitseolak – an Inuk who practiced his ancestors’ nomadic lifeways and captured them vividly on film. And finally, there was James Jerome, who, as the NWT surged into the modern world, photographed his Gwich’in brethren in the Mackenzie Delta living much as they had for eons.
Such images, says Erin Suliak, are unique. An archivist with Yellowknife’s Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Museum, Suliak spent months preparing an exhibit of Jerome’s work, and says when Dene and Inuit were photographed by one of their own, it’s obvious. “There’s a beautiful familiarity – a comfort-level with the subjects you might not get otherwise,” she says. “They’re photos of family and friends. You can just tell.”
James Jerome
The NWT’s first Dene professional photographer was born in Aklavik in the summer of 1949. Raised with his five older siblings at a Gwich’in camp called Nichìitsìi diniinlee, he got his first camera before he was even in his teens. After residential school, he became a welder – a job that allowed him buy good cameras and lenses and to travel throughout the North and Canada, exposing him to photographic subjects and inspiration.
In the 1970s, Jerome became concerned about the fate of Gwich’in traditions and culture-bearers. He embarked on a grand project: to create a photo book called Portraits and History of the Dene Elders. He toured the Mackenzie Delta, being welcomed into communities and fish camps and shooting images of people and indigenous activities that have, since then, largely passed into history.
Tragically, Jerome himself passed into history when he was just 30. In November 1979, his house in Inuvik caught fire. The greatest Gwich’in photographer died in the flames. Thousands of his negatives, however, were saved, and endure as a memorial to a nearly vanished age.
Peter Pitseolak
Born in 1902 on Nunavut’s Nottingham Island, Peter Pitseolak documented Inuit life during its frenzied transition from nomadic to modern. At age 10 he met Robert Flaherty, director of Nanook of the North, who spurred his interested in photography. His first photo was with borrowed gear: When a visiting white man was afraid to approach a polar bear to take its picture, so Pitseolak did it for him.
In Cape Dorset in the 1940s, Pitseolak got a camera of his own, acquired from a Catholic missionary. Recognizing that Inuit culture was in transition, he spent the next 20 years documenting the old ways, taking at least 2,000 photos of himself, his family and his friends hunting, dogsledding, feasting and playing. Other images were staged scenes from his childhood, to record practices that were already gone. In the harsh conditions of the Arctic he was ingenious, creating a lens filter from old sunglass and developing many of his shots inside igloos lit with red-cloth-covered flashlights.
When Pitseolak died in Cape Dorset at age 71, most of his negatives were bought by Canada’s National Archives, where they remain an invaluable Arctic treasure.
George Johnston
Known among his Tlingit brethren as Kaash Klaõ, George Johnston became the North’s first aboriginal photographer. It’s thought he was born in 1884 near B.C.’s Nakina River, just south of the Yukon border. Early on, he became interested in documenting Tlingit culture; in his mid-teens he set off for the Alaskan coast to study his people’s roots. Then, after returning inland to the Yukon village of Teslin, he wrote away to a mail-order catalogue and bought a camera. With it, he taught himself to shoot pictures – of hunting and gathering, feasts and funerals, and the joy and freedom of aboriginal life.
Johnston was a pioneer in more than just photography. In 1928 he also became the first aboriginal Yukoner to own a car. He had it shipped up by barge and, in an era when the territory was roadless, carved a five-kilometre trail upon which to drive it. Perhaps ironically, in 1944, Johnston’s trail was incorporated into the Alaska Highway, the construction of which caused social upheaval in Teslin. Suddenly, the Tlingit who Johnston had lovingly photographed were launched into sometimes-unforgiving modernity. A more innocent time was lost. Johnston’s images of it, however, remain.
