I have conflicting feelings regarding some cultural artifacts in museum collections. While I'm fascinated to learn about them and appreciate their aesthetic value, and while they certainly deserve the preservation and prestige that can be offered by a museum, I have some intense dislike for the hidden history behind some acquisitions. This is what empires do: on their way to dominating resources via oppression and attempted genocide, they reduce the resident culture down to its artifacts and then come to possess even those, in museums and private collections.

The Memorial Art Gallery's "Art from the Arctic" exhibition attempts to respectfully celebrate the art of a post-peak Inuit culture in Canada's eastern provinces without getting into the painfully awkward politics surrounding the controversial High Arctic [ahem, forced] Relocation. In provided statements, the gallery explains that "while ivory and stone carvings have been traded with Europeans for centuries, prints have been a major source of livelihood only since the mid-20th century, when the Inuit began resettling in government communities."

That more or less sums up what's mentioned about cultural clashes and injustice. European settlers and their descendents neither entirely eradicated the natives, nor were they successful in comfortably assimilating them into the dominant culture, resulting in a largely ignored, bad state of limbo for the underdog. If you want an education in the realities of "resettlement" experience, read the work of Spokane/Coeur d'Alene American Indian author Sherman Alexie.

The wall facing the gallery entrance holds a map of northern North America, marking pertinent locations on the Hudson Bay and Cape Dorset, north of Rochester by unfathomable distances of ice and wilderness. A framed photo of Cape Dorset in 2004 shows a barren, snowy, mountainous land with a small cluster of plain buildings huddling in the cold.

Scattered signage provides a crash course on how the Inuit turned sparseness into abundance through thorough use of available resources, and the interdependence and respect for each other, the animals, and the land. The ubiquity of stone (as well as the ivory and horn from hunted animals) lead to the carving of not only tools, but also artistic representations of the Inuit experience.

Six glass cases hold 20 palm-sized to tabletop-sized carvings of animals and people, made of smooth-polished dark and pale stones with incised details. The art depicts animals and people capably adapted to an unforgiving environment before the European invasion changed everything. Audia Pee's circa 1969 "Seal" is of green variegated stone; an elegant, gentle, streamlined form, laying down and looking back over its body. Pinnie Nukialuk's mid-20th century sculpture shows a child shaping a block of ice, a sturdy little figure swaddled beneath many layers.

The viewer also learns how, after their traditional modes of living became impossible, Northern Service Officer, artist, and Inuit advocate James Houston recognized the potential and value of Inuit figurines and facilitated the creation of a market for the impoverished First People of the Arctic to sell art to white collectors. Houston helped the Inuit adapt their carving talent into printmaking; the artists carved sheets of stone and used those as plates for printing. For more than 50 years, the Cape Dorset Print Collection and the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative have promoted Inuit art to collectors.

Eleven prints by various artists show diversity in both style and medium, and convey the interconnectedness and respect humans once felt toward wild animals. Kananginak Pootoogook, called the "Audubon of the North" for his detailed bird prints, was one of the first Inuit to be trained as a printmaker. His 1965 etching "Amaulikcommon Elder" portrays the largest duck in the northern hemisphere, whose arrival marks the coming of summer. Kenojuak Ashevak's "Raven Silhouette II" is a stone cut print in smokey-warm, brick-red, and stark black ink, depicting four bird heads radiating from a central face. Googling each artist reveals a richness of talent as well as their own individual stories.

The Inuit artists used their skills to illustrate "the old ways," the gallery tells us: "the hunt, the animals, the legends and the stories. Their art serves as a permanent record for future generations and the world of their own unique story of survival." In the past few years, we have seen gains in the popularity of close-to-earth living (thanks, Mr. Gore), and we suddenly revere the simpler existences that we once mocked as primitive. We crave objects and amazing stories of unlikely survival, enabling us to "live off the land" vicariously, but the exhibit begs the questions: what do the actual people mean to us? What is left for them now? Since museums typically do not take political sides, it's up to the viewers to look through the surface of the objects and recognize the implications of a show such as this.

Pootagook Kingswatsiak's 1965 "Fish in a Pool" is a two-color stone cut print of too many fish tumbling over one another in a tight implied square, hinting at an invisible boundary, on otherwise blank paper. Many people see native art as simply depicting only the struggles and joys of everyday life lived close to nature. You don't have to look hard at this one to discern a symbol for life on the reservation.