Adventure Canada guests and expedition team members gather on board in orange shirts to mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and honour residential school Survivors, their families, and the children who never returned home.
Adventure Canada commissioned Inuk artist Andrew Qappik to create a T-shirt design for Orange Shirt Day and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. In a mother bear and cub, he offers an image of care, separation, remembrance, and the responsibility to keep learning.
By
Dennis Minty
|
August 17, 2026
A Life Shaped by Line, Land, and Story
Andrew Qappik’s art often feels alive with relationships. A person stands in a print shop, surrounded by tools and images. Seals turn beneath the ice. A hunter bends over a fishing hole as a child watches closely. Mountains, water, animals, families, and working hands recur across his images. Relationships are everywhere.
Andrew is an Inuk artist, printmaker, and graphic designer from Panniqtuuq, Nunavut, a community long recognized as a centre of Inuit printmaking. Born near Panniqtuuq at the summer fishing camp of Nunataq, he is known for work rooted in Inuit life, land, history, and oral storytelling. As he once told the Inuit Art Foundation, “My ideas are mostly of my culture and our history.”
Inuk artist, printmaker, and graphic designer Andrew Qappik of Panniqtuuq, Nunavut, whose work draws deeply from Inuit life, land, history, and storytelling.
From the Print Shop
“My teacher, Miss Neil, gave an art class,” Andrew recalls. “She liked my drawings, and I kept sketching even when it wasn’t art class.”
Art was also close to home. His uncle Solomonie was a sculptor, and Andrew later learned he had also been a printmaker. Another uncle, Imoona Karpik, was connected to the print shop. When the shop held a drawing competition, Andrew entered. His work came in second place.
“I got my first income when I was thirteen,” he says. “They made it into a print when I was fourteen. Every year after that, they wanted to acquire my work.”
As a student, Andrew was asked to spend time in a workplace to experience a working environment. He went to the print shop, where his first task was simple: cleaning brushes. Soon, his uncle began teaching him stonecut printmaking.
“They were impressed,” he says. “They asked me if I wanted to become a printmaker. I was still in school, so I told my parents they wanted to hire me. I had to think about it, and I accepted. I was eighteen.”
That decision led Andrew into a life of image-making shaped by observation, skill, and inheritance. He grew up in his parents’ camps, hunting wildlife and spending time on traditional lands, where knowledge was carried through tools, weather, animals, and practice. He studied the gear used for hunting not as objects apart from life, but as part of how people lived with the land.
In Andrew's prints, Inuit homelands are rarely just background. They are active, shaping presences. His images often reveal the relationships between people, animals, tools, weather, ice, and land. A viewer might notice the careful handling of a kakivak, or fishing spear; the way a child watches an adult at work; the humour and vitality of animals; the sweep of sea ice; the rhythm of seasonal life.
Andrew Qappik’s mother bear and cub, commissioned by Adventure Canada for Orange Shirt Day and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The bond between mother and young reflects the separation of children from their families through the residential school system.
When Adventure Canada invited Andrew to create an orange T-shirt design for Orange Shirt Day and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, he began not with an emblem, but with a relationship.
“When asked to do a portrayal of truth and reconciliation,” he says, “I sketched and made a mother bear with a cub.”
The image is direct, but its meaning is layered. Andrew turns to the relationship between a cub and its mother to speak about children taken from their families through the residential school system.
“You see a young bear couldn’t survive without a mother,” he explains. “[That was also true when] a young child was taken away from a mother’s care.”
The breaking ice adds another layer of meaning. Qappik explains that its cycles of fracture and renewal mirror the shifting Arctic environment while also evoking the upheaval residential schools inflicted on family life. The mother and cub are not separated from a passive landscape; their world is splintering around them. Although the ice will eventually form again, its renewal does not erase the disruption that came before.
Orange Shirt Day, observed on September 30, honours Survivors of residential schools and remembers the children who never returned home. It is now marked alongside the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Andrew’s image approaches that history through something immediate and recognizable: a young animal dependent upon its mother.
Wearing the Work with Care
For Adventure Canada guests, many of whom travel through Inuit homelands and other Indigenous places, the shirt carries Andrew’s image beyond September 30. Wearing it means carrying an artwork created by an Inuk artist from his own understanding of family, separation, and the histories the day commemorates.
Andrew’s broader body of work gives the image further context. His art often shows life in relation: people teaching and learning, animals moving through their environments, and culture carried through practice. The mother bear and cub belong within that larger visual world.
A polar bear nurses her cub in the Canadian Arctic—a brief glimpse of the intimate bond between mother and young that Andrew draws upon in his design.
After September 30
September 30 gives Andrew’s image a particular context, but the relationship at its centre remains after the day has passed: a mother bear and her cub, one dependent upon the other.
In Andrew’s own words: “I hope the stories of students who were taken away, who have been going through healing, are remembered,” he says. “I hope people think about getting back a family—and about those who never came home.”
If there’s a corner of the map Adventure Canada visits, chances are Dennis Minty has been there—with camera in hand, a story to tell, and an Adventure Canada cap on his head. Since 2002, Dennis has shared his passion for nature, photography, and lifelong learning as a naturalist, photographer, and now Senior Advisor, helping shape the company’s voice and mentoring staff.
Dennis’s roots run deep in Newfoundland and Labrador, where he began his career with Salmonier Nature Park. His work has spanned decades in conservation and education, both locally and abroad. At home in Clarke’s Beach, he enjoys country life with his wife, Antje Springmann, and their two dogs, cherishing time with his children and grandchildren.
