Buy Canadian First - Your destination for good shopping

Located in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative has been engaged in the development, production, and marketing of fine arts for over forty years.

Dorset Fine Arts is the wholesale marketing division of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative. It was established in Toronto in 1978 to develop and serve the market for Inuit fine art produced by the artist-members of the Co-operative.


ABOUT CAPE DORSET:
Lying just across the Davis Strait from Greenland, Baffin Island is the largest island in the Arctic Archipelago, in the new Canadian Territory of Nunavut. The community of Cape Dorset is part of the southwest tip of Baffin Island known as the Foxe Peninsula, so-named in 1631 by Captain Luke Foxe, an early British explorer who mapped the region during his unsuccessful quest for the Northwest Passage. Foxe in turn named the cape for his sponsor, Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset and Lord of the Admiralty.

The Inuit inhabitants of the region have always referred to the area as ‘Kinngait’(pronounced King-ite), which describes the high, undulating hills surrounding the bay.

Like most remote communities in the far north, Cape Dorset has grown up around the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. Established in 1913 in the small, protected harbour, the post at Cape Dorset was one of a series built along the south Baffin coast to take advantage of the area’s plentiful game. With the collapse of the fur trade after World War II, Inuit families and camp groups began to move closer to the trading post, and the community began to take shape.

In 1956 Cape Dorset was a tiny community consisting of the few red and white wood-frame Hudson’s Bay Company buildings, a small nursing station and the government day school. The Anglican church, built in 1953, and the Catholic mission house, established in 1938, sat one in each of two valleys flanking the center of town. The few Inuit residents lived in small, prefabricated houses supplied by the government, or in summer tents dotting the shoreline near the trading post or the missions. Over the course of the next decade, more and more families would leave their permanent camps and relocate to the community, drawn toward greater economic security and the first school for their children.

Now, almost 50 years later, Cape Dorset is a thriving community of just under 1300 people, and growing into an administrative centre for the Government of Nunavut. The changes that have taken place are profound, as the region’s Inuit population has left behind their traditional lifestyle. Nevertheless, they strive to retain important elements of their traditional culture – their language, their connection to the land and its resources – while adapting to the new realities of work, school, business and community life.