[4] The co-operative was established in 1959 by James Houston and Kananginak Pootoogook as an effort to encourage art making as an income stream for local residents.
[9][10] In the late 1940s the printmaker James Archibald Houston was working in the western part of Baffin Island and became enamoured by the sculptures being produced by some of its residents.
[11][12] Following his return to Montreal, he became a "roving crafts officer" for the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, representing Inuit artworks to southern audiences.
[11] In 1954, following the decline of the local fur trade,[12] the Canadian government sent Houston to Kinngait, then called Cape Dorset, to start a printmaking studio as an alternate source of income for its residents.
[15] The same year, they founded the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative as a business entity for local Inuit artists whose work was gaining in popularity at the time.