Illustrator, cartoonist, poet, and essayist born in Nuvuqquq (Nunavut) in 1951 – died in Ottawa (Ontario) in 2007.
Alootook Ipellie was born in 1951 in Nuvuqquq, a hunting camp located on Baffin Island, in present-day Nunavut. The son of Napachie and Joanassie, he was also the grandson of a well-known sculptor, Inutsiaq (also known as Ennutsiaq). Alootook Ipellie had a half-sister, Elisapie, who died in infancy, and a half-brother, Joanassie. During Alootook Ipellie’s early childhood, his family was nomadic. When he was four years old, his father died in a hunting accident, and the family moved to Iqaluit (Nunavut), where Alootook Ipellie lived with his mother and his stepfather. He contracted tuberculosis at the age of five and was sent to the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton (Ontario), where he learned English. He spent his summers in hunting camps, where his grandfather Inutsiaq told him many traditional stories. Alootook Ipellie experienced first-hand the shift from the nomadic to the sedentary lifestyle that shaped Inuit society in the 1950s. Owing to his stepfather’s alcoholism, Alootook Ipellie left home and went to live with his uncle, who became a mentor on the same level as his grandfather Inutsiaq. He completed his secondary education in Yellowknife (Northwest Territories) and in Ottawa (Ontario) in 1967. Uprooted from his culture and unable to pursue the artistic career he dreamed of, he returned to the Arctic, where he worked a brief stint for CBC Iqaluit as an host and a producer. He then resumed his studies in Ottawa in 1973. There, he also attended the High School of Commerce and worked as a translator from English to Inuktitut.
Alootook Ipellie’s career in journalism allowed him to revisit the fields of visual arts and literature. In 1973, he was hired as a journalist and reporter by Inuit Monthly / Inuit Uplumi, a bilingual (English, Inuktitut) periodical founded in 1971 by the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (literally: “Inuit Brotherhood of Canada”; now Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, literally: “Inuit are united in Canada”), an organization based in Ottawa. This periodical, intended for a readership of both Inuit as well as non-Inuit interested in the North, gave Alootook Ipellie the opportunity to publish an ink drawing. This first publication then developed into the satirical cartoon series Ice Box. This cartoon, which depicted the Nook family, ran from 1974 to 1982 and explored the life of contemporary Inuit communities in a changing Arctic. From 1993 to 1997, Alootook Ipellie published another cartoon series, “Nuna and Vut,” in Nunatsiaq News, an Iqaluit-based newspaper aimed at Inuit living in Canada’s Eastern Arctic. Alootook Ipellie’s interest in visual art was not limited to drawing: he also wrote the script for the animated film Legends and Life of the Inuit (1980), which was produced by National Film Board of Canada.
Alootook Ipellie’s work as a journalist also allowed him to begin writing essays and short stories. From 1974 to 1976, he had a regular column, “Those Were the Days,” in Inuit Today (formerly Inuit Monthly). He was also a columnist for Nunatsiaq News from 1996 and 1997. In his column, “Ipellie’s Shadow,” he expressed his opinion on various subjects relating to the daily lives of the Inuit. Beginning in the 1970s, Alootook Ipellie’s short stories and essays, often autobiographical, were published in Inuit Today. Among these texts are “An Alcoholic Life Will Not Do” (1976) and “We are Cold” (1978), which tackle social issues in the Arctic in the context of colonization. Several of Alootook Ipellie’s short stories were selected for anthologies such as Daniel Davis Moses and Terry Goldie’s An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (1992, 1998), Penny Petrone’s Northern Voices: Inuit Writing in English, (1988, 1992), and Robin Gedalof McGrath’s Paper Stays Put: A Collection of Inuit Writings (1980). Paper Stays Put was the first anthology of Canadian Inuit literature, and Alootook Ipellie also served as its illustrator. Alootook Ipellie’s work became increasingly popular in the 1990s thanks to the publication of his first book, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993). This collection of twenty stories, featuring titles such as “After Brigitte Bardot” and “Summit with Sedna,” seeks to reinterpret Inuit myths through the lens of current events and cultural icons of the South. It brought together both facets of Alootook Ipellie’s creative activity: literature and visual arts. The book, deemed disruptive by certain more traditionally-minded Inuit, was critically acclaimed by the Canadian literary world, generating renewed interest in Alootook Ipellie’s previous work. His drawings and cartoons were well-received by Greenlandic Inuit audiences, as evidenced by three exhibitions in 1983, 1985, and 1988. Later, his illustrations were also exhibited across Canada (in Ottawa in 1989 and 1993, and in Saskatoon [Saskatchewan] in 1997), in Norway (1992), and in the United States (2001).
Alootook Ipellie’s poetry also flourished during his first years in Ottawa. At the beginning of the 1970s, he published several poems in magazines such as North and Tukisivisksat. Among these, “The Dancing Sun,” (1974) published in English and Inuktitut in Inuit Monthly, touches on Inuit traditions, and “The Great and Mysterious Northern Lights” (1974), also published in English and Inuktitut in Inuit Monthly, is a retelling of legends about the northern lights. Robin Gedalof McGrath highlighted Alootook Ipellie’s short stories in her publications Paper Stays Put (1980) and Canadian Inuit Literature (1984), and Michael P. J. Kennedy published an anthology of Alootook Ipellie’s poems in the journal Canadian Literature in 2000.
Alootook Ipellie was also an activist, promoting traditional Inuit culture and advocating in favour of Inuit land claims. At the beginning of the 1990s, he coordinated the Baffin Writers’ Project, with the goal of highlighting literature from this region. In 1990, the group launched a short-lived periodical entitled Kivioq: Inuit Fiction Magazine. Alongside Robin Gedalof McGrath, he worked on the anthology Paper Stays Put and on a projected Inuktitut textbook aimed at schools in Inuit communities; this latter project remained unfinished. He collaborated with two German Inuit literature specialists, Hans Blohm and Hartmut Lutz, in order to illustrate an edition of Abraham Ulrikab’s diary, The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab (2005), which was translated into German under the title Abraham Ulrikab im Zoo: Tagebuch eines Inuk 1880/81 (2007). Finally, he worked with the Tunngavik Federation of Nunavut (now Nunavut Tunngavik), an organisation advocating for the establishment of Nunavut as a territory in the 1980s, illustrating the cover of the Nunavut Land Claim Proposal. Privately, Alootook Ipellie was also involved in initiatives to prevent alcohol abuse in his community in the 1990s and 2000s.
Alootook Ipellie and his wife Deborah had one child, Taina Lee Ipellie, born in 1978. In 2007, Alootook Ipellie died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six. His eulogy in Inuktitut Magazine, published in 2008, was written by John Amagoalik. According to Inuit literature specialists Robin Gedalof McGrath and Michael P. J. Kennedy, Alootook Ipellie’s work did not receive the attention it deserved during his lifetime. This injustice may have been redressed posthumously: in 2018, a retrospective exhibition dedicated to his work, “Alootook Ipellie: Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border,” was curated by art historian Heather Igloliorte at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa. This exhibition, which showcases around 100 illustrations by Alootook Ipellie, has toured Canada and, as of 2020, was set up at the University of Winnipeg (Manitoba). In 2019, Alootook Ipellie was inducted into the Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame. In 2025, Inhabit Media published a reissue of Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. Today, he is considered an important inspiration in Inuit culture. He is also one of the first Inuit people to undertake a survey of Inuit literature, contributing to the development of a literary canon and to the critical discourse necessary to its institutional recognition.