This sculpture depicts a true event in the artist’s young life, where members of a community he was part of were shipwrecked on the eastern Hudson Bay coast. The group was subsequently stranded on an ice floe, which broke off from its attachment to land. The stranded group used sealskin, wood and rope in their immediate possession to construct a umiaq (skin boat). The umiaq full of people made it to land after many days; some perished. The incident inspired Joe Talirunili to carve <em>The Migration</em> around 1965. In 2012, the sculpture fetched $290,000 at auction.
