Schematic harvesting scenes incised on tools are a stock variety of both precontact and historical Inuit graphic art. They sometimes seem to depict specific events, which they effectively commemorate, and have real (sometimes precise) informational content that must have been important for the dissemination of technical harvesting knowledge among a hunter’s peers, and its inter-generational transfer. However, the harvesting setups – a boatload of hunters on the verge of harpooning a whale, an archer about to release an arrow toward a caribou – are rather conventional, even repetitive, suggesting that these depictions also acted to discursively stabilize particular sorts of relations among people, things, the environment, and nonhuman animals. This may have been an intended function, along the lines of a hunting amulet, or it may have been an unconscious effect achieved through the eidetic citation of an idealized turn of events. Although scenes of harvesting walrus, seals, caribou, birds, and other species occur in this idiom, bowhead whaling was clearly the object of a special fascination. Whaling scenes are the most conventional of all, condensing these various functions – historical, educational, and symbolic – as whales were engaged in a discourse on human–animal relations that embraced ritual, belief, memory, social relations, technology, and economy.