The 1950 Canadian caribou famine happened when a change in caribou migration patterns caused widespread death in the southern interior of the District of Keewatin, Northwest Territories, now the Kivalliq Region, Nunavut, in the west of Canada's Hudson Bay.

Due to overhunting and a combination of changing migration patterns and herd distribution, the population of caribou in this region declined vastly.

In the early 1950s the Canadian media reported the starvation deaths of 60 Caribou Inuit.

[4] The government was slow to act but in 1959 moved the surviving 60, of around the 120 that were alive in 1950, to settlements such as Baker Lake and Eskimo Point, now Arviat.

[4] It was this time that in the former community of Padlei Richard Harrington took his iconic photo of a starving Inuit mother, pressing her nose and lips to those of her youngest child.