A Canadian gin company has apologised after its advertising campaigns and branding involving cartoon Inuit characters and young women wearing parka costumes sparked complaints about cultural appropriation

Ungava, founded in Quebec in 2010, makes a gin infused with botanicals harvested from Canada’s north, and was recently sold to a Toronto-based company for C$12m.

A marketing video from 2013, titled “Discovering the Inuit”, showed cartoon Inuit characters paddling a First Nations canoe past igloos and polar bears while a man’s voice mimics the style of Inuit throat singers and chants “Ungava”.

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Earlier this month, the video came to the attention of Ossie Michelin, an Inuk freelance journalist, who was rankled by the use of Inuit imagery, and some glaring inaccuracies. “If you know the slightest thing about Inuit it’s that we use kayaks,” he said. “And throat singing is a woman’s thing.” The video has since been removed from the company’s YouTube page.

Michelin joined a growing chorus of voices online taking aim at the company’s use of Inuit culture to sell its product. “It’s like the marketing department for this company was like, you know what, we need a shorthand to say north and cold and nature and we can’t be bothered to come up with our own recognisable symbols, so we’re just going to rip off somebody else,” he said.

There have also been complaints that attempts to market the drink in bars by employing women in parka costumes equated to sexualising Inuit to sell alcohol.

Writing on Twitter, throat-singer Tanya Tagaq said the company was “mocking us and profiting off of us”.

Ungava has been accused of sexualising Inuit women. Photograph: PR

Franco Buscemi, who lives in Iqaluit, the capital of Canada’s Nunavut territory, criticised the company’s “Inuit Survival Guide”, saying: “Here’s a tip … Don’t use Inuit as mascots to sell your product.”

In a statement, Ungava founder and president Charles Crawford, said: “We are truly sorry that we’ve offended the Inuit community, as this was never our intent, nor does it align with our corporate values and beliefs. We are deeply sorry and we will do better.”

The aim, he said, had been to pay tribute to northern tip of Quebec where the gin is made. “Ungava is proud of our ties to the Canadian Arctic, and our brand identity is intended to celebrate the individuality of the region.” He added that in the future the company will seek to gather feedback on its use of Inuit symbols.

Some of the problem lies in the seemingly one-way relationship between the company and Nunavik, the Quebec Inuit territory where the botanicals, from cloudberries to juniper, are harvested, said Stephen Puskas, an Inuk visual artist based in Montreal. “How do Nunavimmiut [Nunavik residents] benefit from the plants harvested on their land and their identity and language used to sell this alcohol?” Puskas recently asked on Facebook.

Puskas pointed to a 2013 interview in which Crawford said that each year the company hires the same two people in the region to handpick its botanicals. The interview noted Crawford wasn’t sure of the two men’s names.

When approached by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for comment, Crawford said it was the first criticism he had heard of the company’s use of Inuit imagery. He called Puskas’s comments a “one-off”.

Days later, the company offered its full apology, which Michelin described as a nice first step, though he questioned whether it would lead to any concrete change. “I think it would be so amazing if companies actually came to indigenous communities and established real and meaningful partnerships and used that as part of their branding.”

Until that happens, he remained sceptical. “This kind of stuff just keeps happening again and again,” he said. “We get portrayed as these mythical creatures of the north as opposed to real human beings that have a real culture and would like to have some sort of say in how we are portrayed.”