“The coat of the age”: the Kul-e-Tuk brand parka, Inuit cultural appropriation and the commercialization of settler Canadian identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose In 1959, the Kul-e-Tuk brand parka made its debut on the Canadian mass-market and was a near-instant commercial success. Promoted as a quintessentially Canadian winter style, the Kul-e-Tuk was in fact appropriated from traditional parkas of Western Arctic Inuit. This study, a general review, aims to delve into the Kul-e-Tuk’s complicated history, the matrix of mid-20th century socio-political and economic factors and settler Canadian identity projects that contributed to it becoming, as the Hudson’s Bay Company (The Star Phoenix, 1959) called: “the coat of the age.” Design/methodology/approach The methodology for this paper includes: archival research focusing on manufacturer and department store advertisements and promotional articles published in newspapers and magazines; object-based study of garments held by Montreal’s McCord Stewart Museum’s Indigenous Cultures and Dress, Fashion and Textiles collections, including extant Kul-e-Tuk brand parkas, sourced and collected by the author from 2020 to 2024 and traditional Inuit parkas; a survey of appropriated Inuit-style outerwear found on vintage resale websites; contemporary research sources to support contextualization and critical analysis. Findings Tracing the complicated history of the Kul-e-Tuk brand and its marketing to consumers reveals that in settler colonial states like Canada, the appropriation of land and cultural belongings function in tandem to eradicate Indigenous people while simultaneously transferring their identity onto, and their resource rich territories into, the hands of settler Canadians. Originality/value This decolonial research broadens understandings of both Canada’s colonial processes at work and the creation of appropriated settler Canadian identity through nationalistic branding practices and the marketing of winter fashion with Indigenous origins during the mid-20th century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.030 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".