Inuksuk Point

← Encyclopedia

Over the last rise on the headland they are there, on the rock as they have stood for generations: figures of piled stone, more than a hundred of them, spread across a treeless slope that runs down to the cold water of Hudson Strait. Some are single boulders set on end. Some are careful stacks, shoulder-high or higher, with a flat capstone laid across two uprights like a lintel, or an arm of stone pointing off toward the sea. They fall into two loose crowds on the ground, the southern one about two hundred feet across, the two set roughly four hundred and fifty feet apart, and between and around them the land is empty of anything else that a person made. There are no trees here, and never were. There is the rock, the low tundra, the water, the sky, and these standing shapes — waiting, as they were built to wait, for a traveler who can read them.

That is what they are for. Not to be looked at, but to be read. This is Inuksuk Point, on the Foxe Peninsula of southwest Baffin Island, and the same silhouette that stands here in the hundreds now sits on the flag of a territory and once branded a Winter Olympics on the far side of the continent. The distance between those two facts — the stone figure that tells a hunter where the caribou cross, and the stone figure that tells a tourist that this is Canada — is most of the story of the inuksuk in the modern world.

The place of many inuksuit

The site has several names, and each carries part of what it is. In Inuktitut it is Inuksugalait, which is glossed as “the place of many inuksuit” — the place where the stone figures are thick on the ground. On the older maps it appears as Enukso Point. In the register of the country that claims it, it is Inuksuk Point, a small peninsula on the Foxe Peninsula of southwest Baffin Island — Qikiqtaaluk — in the territory of Nunavut. It lies about 88.5 kilometers, roughly fifty-five miles, from the hamlet of Kinngait, the community that until February 27, 2020, carried the imposed name of Cape Dorset and then took back its own. Its position, at about 64°34′ north and 78°12′ west, is deep enough into the Arctic and far enough west that the land around it is snow and rock for much of the year and open tundra for the short remainder.

The figures themselves are the reason to know the place. There are, by the standard count, more than a hundred inuksuit at Inuksuk Point — one of the greatest concentrations of them known anywhere in the Arctic. They range across the whole vocabulary of the form: from a single vertically set stone, to the complex piled monuments, some of which reach about seven feet in height. The stones are not mortared and not carved. They are chosen and balanced — selected for shape and weight and set so that they hold, sometimes for centuries, in a country of frost and wind. Their exact age is not precisely dated. They belong to the long Inuit landscape tradition rather than to a single datable event, raised and re-raised over generations by the people who traveled this coast, and the field as a whole reads less like a monument built at one moment than like an accumulation, a place that people kept adding to because people kept coming here.

On October 23, 1969, the Government of Canada, through the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, designated Inuksuk Point a National Historic Site of Canada. The formal statement of reasons records the inuksuit at Enukso Point as “one expression of the ingenuity and artistry of the Inuit,” and locates the heritage value of the place in the scientific, social, and spiritual importance of the figures — noting that they may serve, depending on size and location, as landmarks on hilltops, cache markers for meat, memorials, kayak stands, pillars for drying lines, elements of caribou fences, and in ceremonial and spiritual roles. It is worth marking who made them and who did not. The peninsula sits in a region whose deep past belongs to the ancient Dorset people — the Tuniit of Inuit memory — and then to the Thule, the direct ancestors of today’s Inuit. The colonial place-name “Cape Dorset” borrowed the label of that vanished archaeological culture. But the inuksuit are not Dorset work. They are the work of the Inuit, a living people, and they stand at the near end of that long occupation, not the far one.

Inuksuit at Inuksuk Point (Inuksugalait), Foxe Peninsula, Baffin Island — one of the greatest concentrations of the stone figures known. Ansgar Walk, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.5.

The word carries its meaning openly. An inuksuk — plural inuksuit — is built from two Inuktitut morphemes: inuk, “person,” and the suffix -suk, which marks a substitute or a thing acting in another’s capacity. The standard gloss is “that which acts in the capacity of a human,” and the older, blunter translation is simpler still: a likeness of a person. That is the key to the whole thing. The inuksuk is not a statue of a god and not, in the first place, an idol. It is a stand-in for a human being — a person of stone left on the empty land to do a person’s work, to say what a person would say, in a place where the person who built it cannot stay.

Writing on the land

To grasp why a people would raise a hundred stone figures on one treeless point, it helps to stand where they stand and try to find the way. There are no trees to blaze, no roads, few fixed landmarks; the coastline runs for hundreds of miles of similar rock, and in winter the snow flattens the whole country into one white surface under one gray sky. In such a land a heap of stone that a human hand has plainly arranged is the loudest thing there is. It is unmistakably not natural, and so it is unmistakably a message. The inuksuit are the answer to a hard problem: how to hold knowledge in a landscape that keeps none on its own.

So they guide. Set on a hilltop or a headland, an inuksuk marks a route, a coastline, a safe crossing, the direction of a distant camp; a line of them can carry a traveler across country that offers no other bearings, one figure raised to be seen from the last. They mark the caribou drives — the tuktu hunt that fed the inland year. Rows of stone figures, sometimes running for great distances, were built as fences the migrating caribou would not cross, funneling the herds along a chosen path toward the water, or toward a narrows, or toward the waiting hunters and the harpooners in their kayaks. There the inuksuit did a work no fence of that length could otherwise do in a country with no wood to build one: they turned the animals by standing in the likeness of the people the animals had learned to fear.

They mark, too, the smaller necessities of the seasonal round. An inuksuk flags a cache of meat or supplies laid up under the cold, so that the one who buried it — or another traveling hungry months later — can find it again. It indicates a good fishing place, a hunting ground, a spot where a kayak may be safely drawn up, a stand to support a drying line for fish or hide. And some commemorate: this is where a person of importance was, this is where something happened, this place is to be remembered. Across all of these, one function runs beneath the rest. The inuksuk communicates. A well-placed figure carries a message across time to a stranger the builder will never meet — go this way; food is stored here; people passed here; here is danger, here is safety. It is, in a real sense, writing on the land: a system by which a people with no alphabet set durable meaning into stone and read it back off the country. The ethnographer Norman Hallendy, working over decades with the elders of Kinngait, recorded the depth of that vocabulary — the distinctions of form and placement and purpose that turn what looks to an outsider like a pile of rocks into a legible sentence.

Inuksukjuaq, a “very big inuksuk,” standing on the Foxe Peninsula near Inuksuk Point. Ansgar Walk, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.5.

Here a distinction matters, and Inuit sources insist on it. The figure most familiar to outsiders — the one with a head, a torso, two outstretched arms, and two legs, plainly a stick-figure human in stone — is not, strictly, the common inuksuk at all. It is the inunnguaq, plural inunnguat: the word means “imitation of a person,” and it is a distinct and comparatively rare form. Most true inuksuit do not look like people in that literal, anatomical way. They are cairns, uprights, pointers, windows of stone — figures that act in a person’s capacity without picturing a person’s body. The inunnguaq is the exception that the wider world has mistaken for the rule, and the mistake, as will be seen, has consequences.

Beyond the working landscape there is a further register, and it is described here at the distance the record keeps it. Some inuksuit stand not to guide or to cache but to mark a place of veneration, a place where a presence is felt, a place set apart within the sacred geography of the land. In this world the sacred is not walled off from the daily business of travel and hunting; it is folded into it. The same country that holds the sea-mother Sedna below the water, and answers to the diffuse power of the air and weather and right order the Inuit name Sila, and yields its animals only to the hunter who keeps faith — that country is marked, at certain of its places, by these figures. To read the inuksuit only as signage, then, is to read half of them. Some are signposts. Some are something nearer to shrines. And the tradition does not sharply distinguish the two, because in it the way a person travels and the way a person keeps faith are not separate things.

From the land onto the flag

The inuksuk has become the emblem of the Inuit and of the whole Canadian Arctic — and the manner of that becoming is itself worth telling, because it runs from the exact and the rooted toward the borrowed and the sold. When Nunavut was created on April 1, 1999, as an Inuit-majority territory carved out of the old Northwest Territories, the new jurisdiction needed its symbols, and it reached for this one. The flag of Nunavut, designed with the Pangnirtung artist Andrew Qappik, places a red inuksuk at its center, dividing a field of gold from a field of white; in the upper corner sits a blue star, Niqirtsuituq, the North Star, the one fixed point by which travelers have always steered, and a figure for the leadership and constancy of the elders. The territorial coat of arms carries the inuksuk too. Here the choice is coherent and self-made: an Inuit government, on Inuit land, took the Inuit stone figure as the sign of itself, and set beside it the star that the stone figures were built to serve. The guide of the land became the guide of the polity.

Eleven years later the same silhouette traveled much farther from home. For the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the organizers adopted an emblem named Ilanaaq — “friend” in Inuktitut — a cheerful, multicolored human figure designed by the Vancouver artist Elena Rivera MacGregor. It was, and this is the heart of the objection, not an inuksuk but an inunnguaq: the rare, anatomical, arms-and-legs form, the very one that Inuit sources single out as untraditional. The criticism was sharp and specific. Peter Irniq — an Inuk cultural activist, a builder of inuksuit, and a former commissioner of Nunavut — argued publicly that the emblem should not even be called an inuksuk, since the inunnguaq form had been built largely in the last hundred years and largely by non-Inuit, and was not a true inuksuk at all. Others pressed a second point: a figure rooted in the Eastern Arctic had been chosen to brand a Games staged on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples near Vancouver — First Nations of the Pacific coast, whose own art of totem and form-line the emblem did not reflect, and who noted as much. The Grand Chief Edward John observed that the logo did not represent the Indigenous people of Canada’s west coast. What was sold as a symbol of welcome read, to more than a few, as a symbol lifted from one people to stand for all of them, and planted where it did not belong.

The flag of Nunavut: a red inuksuk dividing gold from white, with the blue North Star, Niqirtsuituq. Kooma (original), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Defenders of the Olympic emblem pointed to a local precedent. On the shore at English Bay in Vancouver stands a large inuksuk built in 1986 by the Inuit sculptor Alvin Kanak, for the Northwest Territories pavilion at that year’s world’s fair, and later left in place as a landmark; it had become, over the intervening quarter-century, a familiar figure of welcome on the Vancouver waterfront. That precedent is genuine. But it does not dissolve the objection so much as name its origin — the point at which a working figure of the Arctic began its career as a decoration in the south.

That career is now everywhere. The inuksuk saturates the souvenir trade: it is sold as a keychain and a fridge magnet, cast in resin and pewter, stacked as a garden ornament on lawns thousands of miles from any tundra, printed on the packaging of a hundred products that wish to say “Canada” or “North” without further explanation. The scale of the drift can be measured. The tallest inuksuk in the world, recognized by Guinness, stands not in the Arctic but in Schomberg, Ontario, south of any caribou range: built in 2007, it rises 11.377 meters — 37.33 feet — a stone figure some five times the height of the tallest at Inuksuk Point, and one that guides no one to anything. Canada has also made gifts of authentic inuksuit, built and given as diplomatic tokens, to cities including Washington, Oslo, Brisbane, and Guatemala City — the figure sent abroad as a portable piece of national identity.

All of this belongs in an account of Inuksuk Point, but it belongs as reception, and it should be reported as such rather than adopted. The commercialization is a fact about what the wider world has done with the figure, not a fact about the figure. The distinction the Inuit critics of Ilanaaq were drawing — between the inuksuk and the inunnguaq, between a message-bearing tool of a specific people and a generic mascot of friendliness — is a distinction about meaning, and it is easily lost the moment the stone shape is emptied and refilled. The people who built and read these figures are not a closed chapter. They build and read them still. Nunavut is their territory, made in living memory; Kinngait renamed itself, an act of self-naming, in 2020; the elders whose knowledge Hallendy recorded were passing on a practice, not preserving a relic.

Which returns the account to the headland, and to the plainest measure of the distance traveled. The stone figures that once told a hunter on this coast where the caribou would cross, where the meat was cached, where the safe passage lay, have become the stone figures that most often tell a visitor, from a shelf or a flagpole or a logo, only where they are — Canada. The originals are still here. They stand on the Foxe Peninsula in their two crowds, more than a hundred of them, saying what they were built to say to anyone who comes over the rise and knows how to listen. The land has not stopped speaking. It is only that most of the people now holding the symbol have never learned to read it.

→ Related: The Inuit · The Yupik · The Dorset Culture · Sedna · Nanook · Torngarsuk · Sila · Tupilaq · Aasivissuit Nipisat · Qajartalik · Nunalleq