Stephanie McDonald
Northern News Services
Published Monday, September 24, 2007

NUNAVUT - A heart attack claimed the life of 56-year-old artist and writer Alootook Ipellie in Ottawa on Sept. 8.

His work attempted to make sense of the two worlds he traversed - his Arctic homeland and the south, where he spent the greater part of his life.

Ipellie was born in a hunting camp in 1951 and moved with his family to Frobisher Bay when he was four years old. While still in elementary school, he was sent south with a group of 30 to 40 Inuit youth. He returned to Nunavut as a teenager, but said he had become "a cultural cast-off."

In the introduction to his book Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, Ipellie writes, "Like many of my peers, I would never again pursue my traditional culture and heritage as an Inummarik, a real Inuk. Once embedded in a southern environment, I was trained largely to cope with the white, Angle-Saxon, Euro-Canadian culture."

It was a transition that would shape his work for the rest of his life.

Throughout his career, Ipellie wore many hats: cartoonist, illustrator, columnist, poet and fiction writer. He was editor of Inuit Today, a publication of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami from 1979 to 1982. He also ran a popular weekly comic strip in Nunatsiaq News entitled 'Nuna & Vut.'

The words that friends often use to describe Ipellie are quiet, reserved and friendly.

"You wouldn't get a word out of him, that's how quiet he was," said Peter Irniq, former Nunavut commissioner, and in the same group of students sent south with Ipellie.

"He knew how to communicate quite effectively through his writings and cartoons."

Barry Pottle, another of Ipellie's friends, first met him 15 years ago through the Inuit community in Ottawa.

"He's probably one of the best to come out of the North," Pottle said of Ipellie as a writer.

What Pottle will remember most of Ipellie was his work in bringing Inuit and non-Inuit culture together, and bringing awareness to the tumultuous changes occurring in Inuit culture.

"I think he tried to bridge that gap through his art and through his writing. I think he did a good job on that," Pottle said.

Approximately 70 people came to say good-bye to Ipellie at a memorial service held in Ottawa on Sept. 17.

Irniq said that Ipellie was often mistaken for well-known environmentalist David Suzuki, whom he resembled.

At the memorial service the minister officiating quipped that, as both were remarkable people, "Maybe somebody should start calling David Suzuki Alootook Ipellie."

"We all had good laughs, no matter where we were, we all had good laughs. We all had fun with Alootook," Irniq said.