Despite the impact of North American media and other modern influences, many traditional elements of the Inuit culture have been preserved. In the years following World War II, Canadian artist and author James Archibald Houston, with the assistance of the Hudson’s Bay Company, was instrumental in the promotion and sale of Inuit art. Public policy has continued to encourage the development of Inuit traditions in arts and crafts—including stone carvings, weavings, and prints—providing an important supplementary source of income in some Inuit communities and making Inuit culture familiar to collectors worldwide. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the musical career of Inuit singer and lyricist Susan Aglukark also promoted greater understanding and appreciation of Inuit cultural life in a modern context.
Sports and recreation
Winter sports, such as hockey and curling, are popular in Nunavut, as are dogsled and snowmobile racing and traditional Arctic games. Outdoor activities, including hunting, fishing, hiking, and kayaking, attract visitors to the territory. Large areas of the territory are set aside as protected areas, including Quttinirpaaq National Park on Ellesmere Island; Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island; Sirmilik National Park on northern Baffin Island and Bylot Island; Ukkusiksalik National Park on the mainland; Queen Maud Gulf Migratory Bird Sanctuary, also on the mainland; and Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary, shared with the Northwest Territories.
By the mid-20th century most Inuit of the region, then a part of the Northwest Territories, had replaced their seminomadic hunting, fishing, and trapping lifestyle with a more sedentary style of living in settled communities, where dependence on government welfare support became the norm. Nutrition and health care improved, but there also were serious social problems related to alcohol and other substance abuse, unemployment, and crime. Dissatisfaction with those conditions and the wish to participate more directly in the processes of resource development led the Inuit to exert pressure on the federal and territorial governments to grant them greater control over the administration of their own affairs. In the mid-1970s the Inuit began negotiations to settle land claims and proposed the creation of a separate Inuit territory.
A plebiscite in the Northwest Territories in 1992 approved the division of the territories. With that mandate, the Inuit and representatives of the federal government reached an agreement that produced two acts of the Canadian Parliament in 1993. The first, the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act, settled Inuit land claims against the government by giving the Inuit outright control of more than 135,000 square miles (350,000 square km) of territory and providing cash payments from the federal government over a 14-year period; the second, the Nunavut Act, established the territory of Nunavut out of the eastern portion of the Northwest Territories. Following a transitional period, Nunavut came into being on April 1, 1999.
