12 Facts About Alootook Ipellie

Alootook Ipellie was an Inuk graphic artist, political and satirical cartoonist, writer, photographer, and Inuktitut translator.

Alootook Ipellie ended up at Ottawa's High School of Commerce where he discovered his artistic ability.

Alootook Ipellie worked as a journalist, cartoonist and editor for Inuit Monthly during the 1970s and 80s.

The Nooks, like Alootook Ipellie himself, were living through a transitional period in the North during which traditional Inuit language, social structure, and means of survival were being superseded by the new social, religious, and political structures of the South.

Alootook Ipellie participated in films like The Owl and the Raven and Legends and Life of the Inuit.

Alootook Ipellie then went on to create the comic strip Nuna and Vut in the 1990s.

Alootook Ipellie made a significant contribution to literature of Canada with the publication of his short story collection " Arctic Dreams and Nightmares," presenting the changes and challenges faced by Inuit.

In 1971, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, published three of then 17-year-old Alootook Ipellie's illustrated poems in their magazine, North.

In 2005, Alootook Ipellie wrote the foreword for the illustrated book entitled The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab: Text and Context, the story of Ulrikab who became an attraction in one of Carl Hagenbeck's ethnographical shows in Hamburg, Germany.

Alootook Ipellie's 2009 illustrated book entitled I Shall Wait and Wait, which was published after he had died, described the traditional Inuit seal hunt.

In 2019, Alootook Ipellie was inducted into the Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame.

Alootook Ipellie died of a heart attack in Ottawa, Ontario at the age 56 and is survived by his daughter, Taina Alootook Ipellie.