THE STORY OF CANADA'S 1975 TWO-DOLLAR BILL

In the early 1970s, real people appeared in the vignettes on Canadian bank notes for the first time? — including Joseph Idlout and his relatives.

The hunter was Joseph Idlout. In the early 1950s, he was the leader of a small community of families, a summer hunting camp called Aulatsiivik on northern Baffin Island. At 38, Idlout was a man who had been brought up in the ancient hunting traditions of the High Arctic—a master of his craft. Everyone at the camp was part of the same traditions—except for one: documentary filmmaker, Doug Wilkinson.

Although Wilkinson was an outsider, he was nevertheless welcomed into the community. He lived among them as he filmed what would become a documentary for the National Film Board, Land of the Long Day. Wilkinson didn’t want his film to be a re-creation of pre-contact Inuit life. Instead, he sought to document Idlout and his community as they functioned at the time: a mixture of Western technologies and traditional practices. As he followed the families and their hunting activities through the brief Arctic summers, he and Idlout formed a strong friendship.

Wilkinson shot a lot of film, with both still and movie cameras. And from that treasure trove, some 23 years later, a single photograph was chosen to be made into a bank note engraving.

To read the complete article, see:
Joseph Idlout and the 1975 two-dollar bill (https://www.bankofcanadamuseum.ca/2020/10/the-story-behind-the-engraving/)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web