People from Our Side

Peter Pitseolak, the first native Baffin Island photographer, was born in the eastern Canadian Arctic in 1902. As a child he lived the nomadic camp life his ancestors had known, but during his lifetime missionaries, fur traders, law, government, schools, and alcohol came to Baffin Island. Peter Pitseolak's account of his life shows how these developments changed the Inuit existence forever. The text consists of Peter Pitseolak's manuscript - originally written in syllabics - and a narrative drawn from interviews conducted by Dorothy Eber with the help of young Inuit interpreters. Peter Pitseolak learned the system of reading and writing brought by the missionaries and from an early age formed the habit of keeping a diary. He took his first photograph for a white man who was afraid to approach a polar bear and later, in the early 1940s, acquired his own camera and taught himself, with the help of his wife Aggeok, to develop films in igloo, tent, and hut. His pictures catch, as no white photographer's could, the authentic quality and detail of Eskimo life in the last days of the camp system. From nomadic times to the early 1970s, Peter Pitseolak provides a frank and vigorous account of how change came to Baffin Island. A realist who knew he was providing a social history of a vanishing way of life, his story is a farewell to traditional camp life and to Seekooseelak - where the people of Cape Dorset once had their camps. Peter Pitseolak died in 1973. "People from our side" was published posthumously.