

First, she looked to tradition, immersing herself in the Inuit customs of mitten and parka-making. Next, Victoria Kakuktinniq sought out the contemporary, heading south to train in fashion design before returning home to Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory.

The result is a fashion line that marries modern design with tradition – captured in a first collection that includes four sealskin winter coats – and which has established Kakuktinniq’s place among the cadre of designers and seamstresses in Canada’s north working to reclaim sealskin’s place in haute couture.

“It’s part of my culture,” said Kakuktinniq, 27, who launched Victoria’s Arctic Fashion in 2013. “The Inuit are really trying our best to promote our culture and show our way of life and how our ancestors lived.”

It is a way of life that has increasingly come under attack in recent decades. Opposition to seal hunting gathered force in the 1960s and 70s, with graphic campaigns that featured fluffy seal pups being bludgeoned by hunters. It soon snowballed into a global, celebrity-studded movement that saw the US and European Union ban the import of virtually all seal products.

But little thought was given to the impact these anti-sealing campaigns would have on Inuit, said the film-maker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril. “When you totally erase Inuit from the picture, it can appear as a black and white issue,” she said. “But we’re the people of the seal, we’re hunters.”

Starting in the 1950s, the slaughter of hundreds, if not thousands, of sled dogs by the Royal Canadian mounted police left many Inuit with few options but to abandon the semi-nomadic lifestyle of their ancestors and settle into permanent communities.

Other Inuit were forcibly relocated north by a Canadian government keen to claim sovereignty over the high reaches of the Arctic. Some Inuit were also sent away to residential schools, described by a truth commission as a church-run tool of cultural genocide and rife with abuse.

Rannva Simonsen, a luxury fur outerwear designer in Iqaluit, models one of her looks. Photograph: Ashifa Kassam/The Guardian

Throughout these turbulent years, the seal hunt acted as an anchor, providing a stable source of food and a reliable income as Inuit struggled to transition from the ways of their ancestors and into sedentary lives in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

Then came the bans. “The prices of sealskin just crashed,” said Arnaquq-Baril, whose film Angry Inuk delves into the devastating effects anti-sealing activism has had on the Inuit.

Inuit communities were exempted from the ban, but much of the market for sealskin evaporated, making the exemptions meaningless. “Communities lost 90% of their income, in some cases,” said Arnaquq-Baril.

It’s not just an attack on our ability to survive, it’s an attack on who we are and our worth as people Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, film-maker

Poverty became the new normal in Nunavut, sending the already high suicide rates soaring and leaving about seven out of 10 Inuit children going hungry to school.

The campaigns proved lucrative for animal rights activists, often raising tremendous amounts of money for the organisations. But many Inuit felt vilified by the movement, which at times implied that the seal populations hunted by Inuit were endangered.

“It’s not just an attack on our ability to survive, it’s an attack on who we are and our worth as people,” said Arnaquq-Baril. “It’s very frustrating when the organisations that are putting us in this position live in some of the richest parts of the world, with the richest farmland in the world, and the easiest temperatures to live in – those are the people running the campaigns that affect us.”

In 1985, Greenpeace Canada issued an apology to Inuit over its 1976 anti-sealing campaign, which went global. “By some standards, it was a successful campaign,” Joanna Kerr, the executive director of Greenpeace Canada, noted in a 2014 blog post. “But in one major way, it failed very, very badly.”

The campaign, she noted, “hurt many, both economically and culturally”. The organisation has since made efforts to mend its relationship with indigenous peoples, Kerr added.

Footwear by the designer Nicole Camphaug, who adds sealskin to high heels and dress shoes. Photograph: Ashifa Kassam/The Guardian

Some who point to the lingering cultural and economic impacts of the campaigns have called for more than an apology. “After all the money that was generated by Greenpeace over the years, they [should] compensate each Inuit $1m,” Aaju Peter, a sealskin seamstress in Iqaluit, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last year.

Others are doing all they can to revive the slumping market. The designer Nicole Camphaug began experimenting with layering sealskin on high heels and dress shoes several years ago, envisioning the combination as another way of showcasing Inuit culture. “I always think it’s so important to get sealskin out there,” she said.

Soon afterward, she launched a small side business out of her Iqaluit home, capitalising on social media to reach customers across Canada and as far away as Greenland.

So far, the grassroots push by designers does seem to be making some difference, said Rannva Simonsen, a luxury fur outerwear designer in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut. “The attitude has changed,” she said, pointing to a growing number of orders she had received in recent years from Toronto. “Sealskin is actually being more and more accepted by Canadians.”

Originally from the Faroe Islands, Simonsen moved to Nunavut in 1997, launching her company shortly afterward. She was quick to embrace sealskin – which she calls the “local cow” – describing it as a humane source of food and income in a region with few other options.

Since then, she has watched as Inuit wage a David and Goliath battle against animal rights campaigners in a bid to keep the slumping industry alive – a battle whose roots overlook the Inuit’s deep reverence for the land that surrounds them. “I find it’s cultural bullying when people from the bigger society crush the small little culture,” she said. “Instead they should learn from the Inuit’s connectedness and respect for nature.”