Kinngait: The Camps, the Trap Line and the Move Into the Settlement

For about fifty years, families on the south coast of Baffin Island lived in small camps strung along five hundred kilometres of shoreline, moved with the season and the animals, and came in to one wooden trading post a few times a year. Their winter work was a fox trap line, and what it earned was not money. It was a figure written in a book by somebody else, in a building two days away, at a price decided at auction on the other side of an ocean. Then, in roughly a decade after 1950, almost everybody moved into one settlement with houses, a school, a nursing station and wages. This is what life looked like on both sides of that change: the seasonal round month by month, the credit book at the post, a full day out on the trap line, what it cost to feed a dog team, and what the move into the settlement actually involved for the families who made it. 📌 What you'll learn • The fur economy as a ledger: how credit was advanced against a catch nobody had made yet, why the trading year ran from the first of June, what was on the shelf against a fox skin, how debt was carried and eventually written off, and the two honest readings of that arrangement • The seasonal round you can follow month by month: seal at the breathing holes and the floe edge in January, boats launched off the ice edge in March, char and eggs in July, caribou inland in the autumn, the stone caches in November, and the weeks of freeze-up when nothing moves at all • The dogs as an economy of their own: the fan hitch, six to twelve animals to a team, what they were fed and where that food had to come from, what a lost team did to a whole district's income, and the winter of 1949 and 1950 when people were eating the food cached for the dogs • The decade that moved everybody: the nursing station and the first school in 1950, the tuberculosis evacuations south, the first government houses at sixteen feet square, the count falling from sixteen camps to two, what happened to the dogs, and the co-operative and print studio the community built for itself Educational and historical content. 📚 Key sources - Qikiqtani Inuit Association — Qikiqtani Truth Commission: Community Histories 1950–1975, Cape Dorset (Inhabit Media, 2014) - Qikiqtani Truth Commission — Qimmiliriniq: Inuit Sled Dogs in Qikiqtaaluk, Thematic Reports and Special Studies 1950–1975 (2013) - Library and Archives Canada — Royal Canadian Mounted Police fonds, Record Group 18, annual reports on conditions at Cape Dorset and Lake Harbour, 1950–1964, and the Library and Archives Canada photograph collection - G. Higgins et al. — The South Coast of Baffin Island: An Area Economic Survey (Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Ottawa, 1968) - Christine Lalonde — Pitseolak Ashoona: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute), together with Dorset Fine Arts and the co-operative's own published account of its founding — and other sources. This history belongs to the community before it belongs to anybody else. If you are from Kinngait, Kimmirut or anywhere on the south Baffin coast, tell me in the comments which camp your family was at, which post they traded into, what the move into town was like, and what I got wrong or left out. And tell me where you are watching from. #HowWeLivedHere #Kinngait #Nunavut #Inuit #CanadianHistory #Documentary ℹ️ About this video Educational and historical content. The script, research and edit are the author's own, based on the sources listed in the description. The visual reconstructions and the narrator's voice are created with the help of AI, for illustrative purposes — these are not real recordings or authentic archival footage. Stories are simplified for a general audience and may contain small approximations. Purpose: to inform and to remember. 🕰️ Historical context The events described took place under legal and social conditions very different from today's. They are presented for historical understanding, without intent to justify or condemn any person, community or group.