Qapik Attagutsiak

Attagutsiak was born on 11 June 1920^[2] at Siuraq, near Chesterfield Inlet (Igluligaarjuk) and Coral Harbour, in the Keewatin Region of the Northwest Territories, now the Kivalliq Region of Nunavut, Canada.^[2] Her father, Quliktalik, was a hunter, and her mother, Pakak, was a seamstress.^[2] She began to learn midwifery from her mother when she was 10 years old, becoming a midwife when she was 18, and subsequently working as a seamstress.^[2] She married a man named Attagutsiak, who became one of the first members of the Canadian Rangers in 1947.^[2] Qapik had 14 children with her husband Attagutsiak, the first of whom was born in 1939, and she adopted two more after her husband's death in 1984.^[2]

Attagutsiak was 20 years old when news of World War II reached her community in 1940, and she was the last known surviving member of the Inuit wartime efforts during World War II.^[3] During World War II, the Government of Canada and the Department of Munitions and Supply instituted the National Resources Mobilization Act,^[2] encouraging citizens to salvage as much waste as possible, with the goal of repurposing used materials like metal, rubber, and paper into wartime munitions.^[4][5] Because these materials were not abundant in the Canadian Arctic, instead Inuit communities began to collect animal bones and carcasses to be shipped down to industrial cities and ports for use in the ongoing munitions drive.^[4] One centre of the bone and carcass collection efforts was a springtime hunting camp on an island called Qaipsunik, near Igloolik in today's Nunavut.^[6] The members of the camp collected about three bags of animal bones and carcasses per day from 1940 through 1945,^[6] with each bag weighing about 57 kg (125 lb).^[2] The bags were packaged by older members of the community, and then existing Hudson's Bay Company shipping routes were used^[2] to transport the bags to southern Canadian ports in cities like Montreal and Halifax where the materials were processed into ammunition, glue for aircraft, or fertilizer for the Canadian war effort.^[6]