Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
People from Our Side: A Life Story with Photographs and Oral Biography

People from Our Side: A Life Story with Photographs and Oral Biography

Pitseolak, Peter
Hanson, Ann
Eber, Dorothy

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ISBN10: 0773511180
ISBN13: 9780773511187
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Sep 2 1993
Pages: 160
Language: English

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 in People from Our Side shows how these developments changed the Inuit existence forever.

The text of People from Our Side 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.

Sweeping 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.

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