In the early 1970s, real people appeared in the vignettes on Canadian bank notes for the first time? - including Joseph Idlout and his relatives.

The hunter was Joseph Idlout. In the early 1950s, he was the leader of a small community of families, a summer hunting camp called Aulatsiivik on northern Baffin Island. At 38, Idlout was a man who had been brought up in the ancient hunting traditions of the High Arctic-a master of his craft. Everyone at the camp was part of the same traditions-except for one: documentary filmmaker, Doug Wilkinson.

Although Wilkinson was an outsider, he was nevertheless welcomed into the community. He lived among them as he filmed what would become a documentary for the National Film Board, Land of the Long Day. Wilkinson didn't want his film to be a re-creation of pre-contact Inuit life. Instead, he sought to document Idlout and his community as they functioned at the time: a mixture of Western technologies and traditional practices. As he followed the families and their hunting activities through the brief Arctic summers, he and Idlout formed a strong friendship.

Wilkinson shot a lot of film, with both still and movie cameras. And from that treasure trove, some 23 years later, a single photograph was chosen to be made into a bank note engraving.

To read the complete article, see:
Joseph Idlout and the 1975 two-dollar bill(https://www.bankofcanadamuseum.ca/2020/10/the-story-behind-the-engraving/)