Piqtoukun, David Ruben

David Ruben Piqtoukun (b.1950) lived with his parents and 14 siblings in camps along the Arctic coast north of the Mackenzie River Delta. His parents named him Piqtou (“gusty wind”) in honor of a family friend. The family lived a traditional migratory life until 1967 when it moved into the community of Paulatuk. At the age of five, he was among eight children local priests sent by airplane to a Catholic residential school in Aklavik. There, he received a uniform, a new name (David) and was forbidden to speak Inuvialuktun, his native language. It would be several years before he saw his parents again. Memories of residential school and a sense of lost language and culture are expressed in many of his sculptures.

Piqtoukun was introduced to stone carving in 1972 by his brother, Abraham Anghik Ruben, who had studied carving and design at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Training continued with an apprenticeship at the New World Jade company in Vancouver. Since 1974 his work has been represented in many national and international group exhibitions. In 1989, his work was shown in the WAG exhibition Out of Tradition: Abraham Anghik and David Ruben Piqtoukun, the first museum exhibition to show his work. In 1996, the WAG organized the solo exhibition, Between Two Worlds: Sculpture by David Ruben which later toured to The Museum of History, Gatineau, and the R. McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa. Piqtoukun’s work has taken him around the globe to locales as far-flung as Argentina, China, Russia and the Ivory Coast.