Abraham Anghik Ruben

The rich vein of coal in the Paulatuk region had been used as fuel by the Inuit, then American whalers and missionaries, who set up their mission in 1938.

Abraham Anghik Ruben (born 1951, in Inuvialuit) is an Inuvialuit Canadian sculptor of Yup'ik descent.

Ruben was born south of the hamlet of Paulatuk in the Inuvik Region east of the Mackenzie River Delta in the Northwest Territories, Canada in 1951.

Ruben was born on November 26, 1951, at his family's winter camp, which was located at the old Catholic coal mine, about 35 miles southeast of Paulatuk.

In 1955, when Ruben was four years old, his older brother, David Ruben Piqtoukun, who was five, and their older sister Martha, were the first of the 14 siblings to be sent to the residential school in Aklavik.

Ruben represented this traumatic 1955 experience through his mother's eyes in his 2001 sculpture entitled The Last Goodbye.

David and Martha did not see their family again until 1958.

Until 1959, Ruben lived the traditional semi-nomadic Inuvialuit lifestyle with a "small band of 10-15 families."

They moved among seasonal fishing and hunting camps, and most of their diet consisted of caribou, moose, muskox, game birds, waterfowl, and sea mammals.

In 1959, Ruben, then 8, his siblings, and cousins were sent to the residential school, Grollier Hall, in Inuvik.

He lived there for the next eleven years, until 1970.

Ruben met Toronto-based artist and art dealer and owner of the Pollock Gallery, Jack Pollock and Eva Quan in the 1970s.

They introduced his work to the Toronto art scene over the next five years.

In the summer of 1971 Ruben began his formal studies in art under the guidance of Ronald (Ron) Senungetuk, an Iñupiaq artist and art educator, who was head of the Native Arts Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

At the university's Centre he "developed the understanding of how to combine traditional material and techniques with the contemporaneous interpretations of many myths and legends."

Ruben returned for a full year to study under Senungetuk from the summer of 1974 to the summer of 1975.

Ruben pursued his artistic career over the next ten years.

Ruben's first solo exhibitions were held in The Pollock Gallery in 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980.

Pollock described Ruben as a contemporary sculptor with Inuit ancestry".

In 1989 Darlene Coward Wight, curator of Inuit art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and a leading Inuit art scholar, curated "Out of Tradition" an exhibition by Abraham Anghik and his brother David Ruben Piqtoukun.

She accompanied a "scaled-down version" of the exhibition across Canada's north for months.

Ruben works with a wide variety of materials including stone and bronze.

His art work reflects and honours the traditional teachings of his Inuvialuit family and friends.

After surviving cancer in late 2004, Ruben's sculpture reflected his interest in the Inuit/Norse Viking "contact period from the early 900s to the 1400s" long before Europeans arrived in North America.

In his biography, Ruben described how he was partly inspired by the story of his maternal aunt, Paniabuluk, who became the Inuit wife of Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson and who assisted him on many of his expeditions.

In the early 20th century other Nordic visitors overwintered in Ruben's ancestral lands.

Since then, Ruben has researched the "cultures of the circumpolar world, including those of Siberia, Scandinavia, Greenland and Iceland" and found resonance between Inuit narratives and myths which is expressed through his art.

In Shaman Beckoning Spirits which was included in the 2010 exhibition "Sanaugavut: Inuit Art from the Canadian Arctic" in Delhi, India, curated by the National Gallery of Canada's Christine Lalonde, Ruben represented how "Christianity changed the status of the Shaman, reducing once powerful leaders to beggars."

Ruben works with a wide variety of materials including whalebone, narwal tusk, "soapstone from British Columbia, Oregon, Brazil and South Africa; alabaster from Utah, Portugal and Italy, Italian Carrara marble" and bronze.

He was inducted into the Order of Canada on November 17, 2016.

Ruben now lives and works on Saltspring Island, British Columbia.

Ruben's mother, Bertha (Thrasher) Ruben, was Yup'ik and of Portuguese-African descent from Alaska.

Ruben's maternal great-grandparents, Apakark and Kagun, were Yup'ik Alaskan shamans from the Bering Sea region.

When the American whaling ships left, Apakark and Kagun moved to the Inuvik Region, along with the families of Ruben's paternal grandfather Ruben Anghik and maternal grandfather Billy Thrasher.

Fifteen of Bertha Ruben's sixteen children survived, which is a very high survival rate in the Arctic.

Bertha raised the children as Christians.

She was a storyteller and also kept traditional teachings alive.

Like most Inuit women, she was a seamstress.

The children's father, William Ruben, also known as Billy Ruben, was named Esoktak in the Inukitut language.

He had Yup'ik and Irish-American ancestors.