In Inuit legend, the caribou originate from the ground. A long time ago, a spirit married a human woman. The spirit did not need to eat and was not used to hunting. In order to provide for his wife, he left the village and created a hole in the ground from which a caribou jumped out. He killed the caribou and brought it home for his wife. The next time the spirit went to get food for his wife, another villager followed him. The man hid and spied on the spirit as he opened the hole, caught a caribou, and closed the hole. After the spirit left, the man reopened the hole, but did not close it fast enough and all the caribou escaped from the ground, free to roam the earth.

George Swinton moved to Winnipeg in 1954 to serve on the faculty of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. He had emigrated from Vienna in 1937; studied at the Art Students League in New York; was artist-in-residence at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario; and worked as a curator at the National Gallery of Canada and the Saskatoon Art Centre. He had bought his first Inuit carving when in Montreal in 1950, and this early interest soon lead to him assisting the Hudson Bay Company with assessing carvings after they arrived in Winnipeg in crates from the company’s Arctic trading posts. His passion for Inuit art was reinforced by his first trip to the arctic, to Inukjuak, in 1957. He wrote two books that are known to every student and collector of Inuit art: Eskimo Sculpture/Sculpture esquimaude (1965) and Sculpture of the Eskimo (1972).

In 1960 the Gallery made a serious commitment to collecting Inuit art when it purchased 139 major sculptures from Swinton. In 1976 the WAG purchased a second collection from George Swinton consisting of over 900 sculptures, prints, and drawings. An exhibition of the Swinton Collection was held several years later, in 1987, with an accompanying catalogue. In 1989, a further collection of 85 artworks was donated to the gallery.