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.

Click here for photographs by Tessa Macintosh.

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Click here for photographs by John Reeves