Jessie Oonark, one of the most celebrated Inuit artists of the twentieth century, is primarily known for her bold textile works and graphic drawings that synthesized traditional Inuit cosmology with a modern visual language. Yet a lesser-known, though no less significant, dimension of her oeuvre lies in her involvement with beaded parkas—garments that combine function, ceremony, and intricate handcraft into wearable masterpieces. The beaded parkas associated with Oonark are not simply outerwear for survival in Arctic conditions; they are acts of cultural affirmation, works of personal and communal expression, and physical embodiments of a visual language deeply rooted in Inuit identity and spiritual life.
Born in 1906 in the Back River area of what is now Nunavut, Oonark came of age in a nomadic lifestyle, living in igloos and tents and following the rhythms of hunting seasons with her family. She was immersed in a world where clothing was not just protective but symbolic and deeply personal. Parkas were essential garments, often made from caribou hide or sealskin, designed to insulate the body in subzero temperatures. But for Inuit women like Oonark, a parka was also a canvas. Embellishing parkas with beads—particularly for special occasions or as gifts—was a tradition passed through generations, often rich with talismanic, familial, or even narrative significance.
Jessie Oonark’s beaded parka designs, which were executed either by her own hand or collaboratively with family and community members, stand apart for their graphic strength and symbolic density. Her designs utilized glass seed beads sewn onto duffle or skin in elaborate compositions that mirrored the symmetrical, spiritual balance seen in her later textile wall hangings. Each bead was meticulously hand-sewn, typically using sinew or durable thread, and arranged in repeating motifs of birds, ulu knives, suns, antlers, or facial forms—imagery central to Inuit spiritual cosmology. These symbols carried protective and ancestral meaning, serving both as identity markers and guardians for the wearer.
Her beaded patterns often extended beyond the parka’s chest and hood to cover sleeves and hemlines, creating a continuous field of visual storytelling. The parkas she designed were not everyday wear, but were created for ceremonial occasions, seasonal festivals, or familial rites of passage such as betrothals or childbirth. In these contexts, the beaded parka became a visual document of the community’s beliefs, the maker’s skill, and the wearer’s place within a living web of kinship and mythology.
One distinguishing characteristic of Oonark’s approach to beadwork was her embrace of abstraction. While traditional Inuit beadwork often employed floral or geometric patterns passed down through generations, Oonark’s designs moved into more radical visual territory. Her compositions frequently utilized negative space, contrasting dense beadwork with stretches of unadorned hide to draw attention to form and symmetry. In one surviving example attributed to her early period, a parka bears a central motif of a split circle, each half mirrored on either side of the chest—a form that recurs throughout her prints and textiles, often interpreted as the duality of life and death, or land and sky. These symbols were never arbitrary. For Oonark, every beaded line, curve, and color choice carried a weight of intention.
Color, too, was treated with a painter’s eye. While many northern beaders of the time relied on trade beads in primary or pastel colors, Oonark selected hues with conceptual precision—burnt orange, ice blue, matte white, and coal black to echo the palette of the tundra, the hunt, and the shifting Arctic light. The beads themselves were often bartered from southern traders or repurposed from broken items, reinforcing the ingenuity and resourcefulness that marked much of Inuit material culture. These color schemes were never simply decorative; they created emotional tones and spiritual resonances that shaped how the garments were received within the community.
As Oonark’s reputation grew in the 1960s and 70s through her involvement with the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Cape Dorset, her beadwork legacy was simultaneously being carried forward by her daughters and relatives. Several of her daughters, including Victoria Mamnguqsualuk and Janet Kigusiuq, became accomplished artists in their own right, and incorporated similar graphic motifs into their own beaded garments and artworks. In this way, the influence of Oonark’s beaded parka aesthetics spread across generations, functioning as both artistic lineage and cultural heritage.
What remains most compelling about Jessie Oonark’s beaded parkas is how they expand the definition of what constitutes art. In Western art history, textiles and beadwork were often relegated to the category of craft or ethnography. But Oonark’s work challenges that division, asserting that beadwork, especially in the context of Inuit life, is a medium of profound visual intelligence and cultural specificity. Her parkas are as intellectually rigorous as her prints, as visually rich as any painting, and as spiritually resonant as oral storytelling.
Today, surviving examples of her beadwork are rare and fiercely protected by families and institutions. They are not merely garments; they are repositories of cultural memory. When viewed in museums, they often hold space with an aura similar to that of religious vestments or sacred scrolls—textiles that speak, that contain embedded prayers and lineages, that continue to breathe meaning into the present.
In Jessie Oonark’s beaded parkas, the Arctic landscape is not only worn but remembered. Each stitch echoes the rhythm of seasons, each motif holds a fragment of worldview, and each garment testifies to a life lived within the intricacies of tradition, imagination, and transformation. Through beads, she encoded the North—not as something remote or frozen, but as radiant, rhythmic, and wholly alive.