Reimagining the Iglu: Modernity and the Challenge of the Eighteenth Century Labrador Inuit Winter House

The Inuit sod winter house or iglu has undergone a host of alterations over the past millennium, as housing styles were accommodated to changing local milieus during the colonization of the Eastern Arctic. Many of these changes relate to subtle shifts in gendered work and household social relations, and in Labrador from the eighteenth century some appear to reflect engagements with a more or less hostile European discourse on architectural modernity. Far from a static form subjected to convulsive contact-era transformations, however, dwellings were gradually remade in the context of a long-running Inuit effort to house work and sociality within a meaningful space.