Tookoolito (Portrait of Inuit Guide Taqulittuq, c. 1838 - 1876). Thomas William Smillie. Date unknown. Glass negative. 8 x 10 cm. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Acc. 11-006, Box 005. Image No. MAH-2816

Taqulittuq was well known in her lifetime as “Hannah’”and “Tookoolito”.  Born about 1838 on Nuvuttiq in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, she was Inuluapik’s younger sister by about eighteen years. At the age of fifteen a whaling captain brought her, her husband Ipirvik (also known as Ebieribing or Joe) and an unrelated young boy to England where together they were exhibited in ethnological displays, a popular, colonialist form of “educational” entertainment at the time. On her more than two-year travels in Britain, she met Queen Victoria and lunched with Prince Albert, and became fluent in English. Upon her return to her home on Qikiqtaaluk she became a sought-after interpreter and guide.  In 1860 she met the American explorer Charles Francis Hall and worked as his interpreter and guide throughout his searches for the Franklin expedition and for the Elizabethan Frobisher expedition in the region of Kangiqtualuk and Iqaluit.  She survived drifting on an ice floe that had separated off from the ship Polaris on an expedition, led by Hall and funded by the U.S. Congress, to reach the North Pole. She and eighteen others including her husband and baby drifted for 1,800 miles and for six months before being rescued. Ipirvik and another Inuit man were essential to the survival of the others, hunting to provide food, and making shelter. Taqulittuq’s skills in translation and diplomacy were also crucial for this mixed and desperate community.  

During the expedition, Charles Hall died under suspicious circumstances, probably poisoned.  A federal enquiry ensued, and Taqlittuq and Ipirvik had to return to the United States to give evidence concerning the circumstances of his death.  They knew Hall better than anyone examined, had both been with him at the time of his death and in his confidence, but their evidence was discounted.  

After this weary legal and bureaucratic ordeal, following close after the physical ordeal on the drifting ice floe, Taqlittuq, Ipirvik and their adopted daughter Panik lived in a small house that had been taken for them by Charles Hall and Captain Sidney Budington in Groton, Connecticut. Ipirvik soon returned to Arctic guiding work, while Taqlittuq stayed in Groton, working as a seamstress, and raising her daughter Panik. Perhaps the deprivations of those months on the drifting ice had told too much on the health of the little girl: although a lively Groton schoolchild, she died of pneumonia at the age of nine. She was the third of their children to die in childhood. A grief-stricken Taqlittuq fell ill and died just over nine months after Panik, on the 31st December 1876. She is buried near her daughter in the Starr Burying Ground in Groton, Connecticut. 

Essay by Sophie Gilmartin