With a decline in fur trades, Inuit have had to find another method of generating an income in order to buy southern commodities that they have come accustomed too.  This new means of income came with the production of extraordinary artworks to be sold in the European and North American markets.  The most popular form of art in the market is soapstone sculptures.  Sculpting soapstone is relatively new with in the past fifty years as an Inuit art form (National Museum of Man, 22).  Carving however is not new, Inuit have had the skills to carve for thousands of years on other materials.  There are properties to soapstone that make it ideal for carving.  However not all soapstones are the same, it depends on where it comes from.  In Inuit townships the type of sculpture may depend heavily on where that town gets its stone.

Above the Arctic circle, during the summer months, the Inuit will travel vast distances by land and boat to get their soapstone quarries (Gustavison 1999, 69).  The summer is the prime period to extract the stone because the top of the perma-frost is thawed and digging is done much more easily.  The rock will then be transported back to the community and distributed among the carvers and co-ops.  The winter is one of the better times to carve the stone.  While not hunting and preparing materials for winter survival, they can sit down and begin chipping away and shaping the stone while telling stories to others.  Carvers can chip away at the stone at their own pace and it does not matter about the weather or season, like the hunting does.  "Carving as a livelihood was less dangerious and more reliable than hunting" (Lipton, 55).

There are basically two kinds of soapstone; serpentinite, and steatite. Each type of soapstone is found in certain areas.  For instance, serpentinite which has a greenish colour to it is found on Baffin Island and the Kitikmeot region.  The serpentinite is ideal for carving as it is soft and polishes to a jade like green.  Steatite is found in the Keewatin Region.    This rock is usually harder than serpentinite and is of a dark grey to black colour (Gustavison 1999, 70, 116, 156).  The softness and hardness of the stone can depict the amount of detail found in the sculptures.  The harder steatite tends to be more brittle and thus less detail may be found in the sculptures.
(Click on the maps to the the right to see where some soapstone quarries are in relation to where major towns are located).

The carvings tend to depict images of ancestral ways prior to contact with Europeans.  These are carvings of hunters with ivory harpoons and spears, large dogsled teams and actions of dance with seal skin drums.  Through their art, the Inuit keep their traditional cultures alive (Hessel, 21).  The sculptures are usually seen as pristine in nature.  Rarely will you ever find a sculpture of a snowmobile or a modern camp or house.  The carvers also sculpt images of animals such as the polar bear, caribou, walrus, seal, arctic seagull, loon, fish, and narwhale.  Some sculptures believe that if they produce a good carving of an animal, that animal will give itself for the hunt.  Another type of image created in the sculptures is of the spirit worlds.  These sculptures may depict shamans doing their rituals or depict figures that are unknown only found in the dreams of the carver.