Inuvialuk sculptor David Ruben Piqtoukun sits in front of his piece entitled 'Thar She Blows!' at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in January, 2023.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
David Ruben Piqtoukun once attributed his existence to the trial-and-error survival skills that he learned growing up in the western Arctic. But it was carving that rescued him at his lowest point in adult life and it was sculpture inspired by traditional storytelling that shaped his career as an Inuvialuit artist living in Southern Ontario. He could have said he owed his existence to art.
The sculptor, who used the Inuvialuit name Piqtoukun, died from cancer Jan. 22 in Hospice Quinte in Belleville, Ont. at the age of 75.
One of 17 children in a nomadic family, he was born in a canvas tent near Paulatuk, NWT. His parents, Billy Esoktak Ruben and Bertha Thrasher, were the descendants of Alaskans who had worked in the whaling industry until it collapsed and they relocated to the Paulatuk region (in what is now the Inuvialuit Settlement.)
Billy, renowned as a hunter and trapper, was of Irish and Yupik ancestry while Bertha, a seamstress and storyteller, was of Portuguese-African and Yupik descent. The family lived on the land and Bertha raised her many children with both Christian and Inuit beliefs. At birth David Ruben was also given the Inuvialuit name Piqtoukun, meaning strong wind, a reference to Arctic hurricanes.
Mr. Piqtoukun’s sculpture, 'Generations.'Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
He was only five years old when he was forcibly removed from his family by Catholic missionaries and taken to a residential school hundreds of kilometres west in Aklavik, NWT. He would refer to this as “the abduction,” and in sculptures about planes and flight often represented the terror he felt as a child.
“The rules were very straightforward,” he wrote in a 1991 text that he reworked in 2014, describing how the children had their parkas and kamiks stripped off them and their heads shaved to discourage lice. “Do not speak your language or even whisper your original language to yourself or anyone else around you. You will be dressed to all look alike, in pants, shirt or sweater and will wear shoes (whether they fit or not). … Always obey the nuns, keep your snotty nose clean, no fighting and never speak your Eskimo language! Welcome to an education in forgetting.
“My recollection was that I retaliated at every turn. I was always cussing and cursing, fighting. … But my deepest resentment was being surrounded by all the religious statues and forced to recite religious prayers and to eat unknown food; and not having a clue about the whereabouts of my parents. I was your classic Lost Child.”
He left the Arctic at 18, scrounging enough for the plane ticket to Edmonton, and would never return north to live, although he often visited family in Inuvialuit. At first he worked as a labourer and a roughneck in Alberta, but he said he could never hold down a job. Around 1970, he moved to Vancouver where his brother, the artist Abraham Anghik Ruben, encouraged him to take up carving.
“There’s something magical about this material. It felt like silk,” he recalled of his first experience carving stone in a 2023 interview with the Canadian Press.
Mr. Piqtoukun’s sculpture, Big Fish, 1989.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
He did an apprenticeship at the New World Jade Company in Vancouver and was soon selling pieces to galleries.
He didn’t stay long in Vancouver, however, but relocated to Toronto around 1972. In the mid-1970s, he met Allan Gonor, a medical doctor and Inuit art collector from North Battleford, Sask., who often worked in settlements in the western Arctic. It was Dr. Gonor who encouraged Piqtoukun to collect traditional stories from his family every time he went home to access a mythology he could then translate into his carving. The artist once cited Shaman Returning from the Moon, a stone carving from 1984 now at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, as an example: It was based on a story his father told him.
Yet despite his artistic development, the 1980s in Toronto were not kind to Piqtoukun, and by 1991 he was in crisis: “My personal life was collapsing,” he said in the essay. “Mentally, emotionally, physically and financially, I was totally spent. I was a troubled Inuk. I endured borderline homelessness, with nowhere to turn and a questionable future.”
Mr. Piqtoukun's 'Shaman.'Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail
His solution was to carve Bear in Shamanic Transformation, a figure of a bear with a man’s head, as a reminder of the shaman’s ability to bring about spiritual and physical healing. Piqtoukun explained in his essay that the bear-man was the most powerful Inuit shaman and was summoned to cure the people of illness and hunger, and to bring back the caribou, fish and geese that had disappeared. The shaman observed that taboos had been broken and once this was recognized order would be restored. The moral was that acknowledging and then learning from mistakes were crucial, and that message returned Piqtoukun to himself. Trial and error had helped him survive so far, and it would help him again.
In 1996, he met Katherine Lee, an artist of Korean heritage, at a studio in Toronto; they married in 1998 and soon moved to Georgina, Ont. They lived on Lake Simcoe where Piqtoukun would sit on the dock whittling and took up ice fishing, returning to his art after the winter season finished. The couple then resettled in Cobourg from 2017 to 2019, and more recently lived in Plainfield, near Belleville.
The art Piqtoukun created in these decades, “an education in remembering” as he called it, always relied on an Inuit iconography, yet it was an idiosyncratic practice, developed outside the co-op system that had supported artists in the eastern Arctic at Kinngait (Cape Dorset) and Baker Lake. Living and working in southern Canada, he created a hybridized style that evoked modernist abstract sculptural traditions and contemporary installation art as it told traditional stories from the North. He was recognized with the Governor-General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2022 and his art was the subject of a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2023.
That exhibition revealed that his work could also be political. It included several environmental statements and People of the Midnight Sun, a two-sided stone mask mounted in a red metal ring so that it could rotate, and inscribed with the testimony about Inuvialuit life that two elders from Paulatuk gave to the Berger Commission in the mid-1970s. (Justice Thomas Berger’s 1977 report about pipeline projects in the North included Indigenous views and launched the land claim process that eventually led to the Inuvialuit Settlement.)
Mr. Piqtoukun’s sculpture 'Shaman in Flight' in 2000.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Or Piqtoukun could be funny: Big Fish was another of his many metamorphizing figures but it showed a boastful fisherman whose widespread arms had become the head and tail of his catch.
Two figures from the early 2000s returned to the theme of flying, including a big shaman, his face turned to the sky, and a tiny plane. From the memory of his own abduction to his images of the shaman who could travel to the moon, the adult artist remained fascinated with flight; both dangerous and fantastical, it could represent a magical escape from the confines of life in the urban south.
Piqtoukun leaves his wife, Ms. Lee, and 10 surviving brothers and sisters.
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