[2] Directed by William V. Mong and produced by Selig Polyscope Company, this "photoplay" was based on a love story written by Columbia Eneutseak, a young Inuk woman who was born in the United States in 1893, in the "Esquimaux Village" exhibition at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

[3][4][a] She, fellow Inuk performer Zacharias Zad, and William Mong costarred in the film with a supporting cast that included members of Columbia's immediate family and other Inuit players.

[10][11] Her mother, Esther, was among a group of Inuit men, women, and children from the Davis Inlet area of Labrador who were brought to Chicago to build and inhabit an Eskimo Village or "human ethnic exhibit" during the exposition's six-month run.

Much later, in 1910, after traveling for years and demonstrating various aspects of Eskimo culture at other expositions and special events, Columbia's family and some of their fellow Inuit performers met Seilig director William Mong.

[5][d] Then, acting on Columbia's proposed screen story, Mong produced The Way of the Eskimo, which trade publications described at the time of its release in July 1911 as "the first of a series of pictures made by Selig in the far north last winter".

[11] In reality, however, the Eskimo one-reeler was not filmed in either the Arctic or along the northern coast of Labrador; it was shot much farther south in the United States, in Escanaba, Michigan, located about 300 miles due north of Selig's corporate headquarters in Chicago.

Situated next to the Little Bay de Noc linked to Lake Michigan, Escanaba with its heavy winter snows and ice-bound shoreline was a more convenient, visually credible alternative to filming in far-off Labrador.

To enhance the "Arctic" realism of filming in Michigan, Monk staged a hunting expedition and killing of a nonindigenous polar bear in Escabana, an event documented among the photographs held today by the noted historical society.

In its July 1911 issue, the Chicago-based trade journal Motography states, "A valuable polar bear is slain in one of these far north plays and an Eskimo is seen killing the wary walrus by his primitive methods.

Unfortunately, the images featured on this page are among the few that survive in available 1911 trade publications, although the noted photographs preserved at the Delta County Historical Society in Escanaba do provide some visual documentation of Mong's location work there.