1950 Canadian caribou famine

The 1950 Canadian caribou famine happened when a change in caribou migration patterns caused widespread death in the southern interior of the Kivalliq Region in the west of Canada's Hudson Bay.[1] The resulting famine wiped out half of the impacted Caribou Inuit communities.

In the early 1950s the Canadian media reported the starvation deaths of 60 Caribou Inuit.[2] The government was slow to act but in 1959 moved the surviving 60, of around the 120 that were alive in 1950, to settlements such as Baker Lake and Eskimo Point.[2] This set off an Arctic settlement push by the Canadian government where those First Nations living in the North were encouraged to abandon their traditional way of life and settle in villages and outposts of the Canadian North.[2] It was this time that a Richard Harrington took his iconic photo of an starving Inuit mother, pressing her nose and lips to those of her youngest child.[3] On February 8, 1950 a few days before Harrington wrote in his journal:

Came upon the tiniest igloo yet. Outside lay a single, mangy dog, motionless, starving ... Inside, a small woman in clumsy clothes, large hood, with baby. She sat in darkness, without heat. She speaks to me. I believe she said they were starving. We left some tea, matches, kerosene, biscuits. And went on.[3]