Nanook

← Encyclopedia

In a corner of the iglu, set apart from the sleeping platform and the seal-oil lamp, a bear’s hide hangs for several days. Beside it hang gifts, chosen by the sex of the animal the skin came from: for a male bear, a man’s hunting weapons and tools; for a female, a woman’s needle case, her scrapers for fleshing hides, her knives. The hunter who killed the bear put them there and left them. He is not displaying a trophy. He is settling an account and lodging a guest — because the bear, in this world, gave itself to him, and the souls of these tools will travel with it into the country of the dead.

The bear’s name is Nanuq. In Inuktitut it is written ᓇᓄᖅ, and it is simply the word for the polar bear itself. But the name holds two beings at once. One is the greatest of the land animals, the white bear that stands taller than a man on the sea ice. The other is the master-spirit who governs the whole kind — the one who decides whether a hunter deserves a bear at all, and who remembers a slight. Two figures answer to the name, and this entry keeps them apart. There is the honored soul, hung in its corner and told to speak well of the man who killed it. And there is a hunter named Allakariallak, filmed in 1922 through the sawn-open wall of a half-built iglu and directed to drop his rifle, whom a fur company’s motion picture renamed “Nanook” and sent out to speak, silently, for a people it did not represent.

The bear that is also its master

Among the Inuit, the world is not divided the way a modern eye divides it, into persons on one side and animals on the other. The seal, the caribou, the walrus, and the bear are other-than-human persons — sentient, willed, and answerable, no lesser than the humans who hunt them. And the most important of the animals do not simply exist in numbers on the land; each kind has a master, a governing spirit who holds its bodies and decides when to release them. This is the structure of the Inuit sacred world, and Nanook is one of its rulers.

He does not rule alone. Out on the sea floor sits Sedna, the mother of the sea, mistress of the seals and the walruses and the whales, who withholds the sea-mammals from the people when a taboo is broken and must be soothed by the angakkuq — the shaman — who travels down to comb the tangles from her hair. Inland, where some groups kept no sea-deity at all, the caribou and the weather answer to other powers: to Sila, the vast reason and air of the world, and to Pinga, who watches over the hunt and the caribou herds. And the bears answer to Nanook. As the summary of Inuit belief records, he is “the master of polar bears,” which means “he decided if hunters deserved success in finding and hunting bears and punished violations of taboos.” Every hunt is a transaction with him. No hunter takes a bear that Nanook has not consented to give.

The bear stands close to the human in this world — closer than any other animal. It walks upright; it is cunning; it hunts the seal at the breathing-hole with a patience the Inuit hunter recognized as his own. In the wider corpus of Inuit tale and in the soapstone and ivory of Inuit carvers, the boundary between bear and man is repeatedly shown to be thin: the angakkuq who takes the polar bear as his helping spirit, the most powerful of all the spirits an angakkuq can command, and in the carvings the figure caught in mid-transformation, half shaman and half bear. Some tellings, uneven from region to region, go further — the bear that removes its skin at the door of a house and lives inside as a man. That last motif belongs to the deep tale-tradition and the carving, not to any single canonical myth; the plain account of Nanook the master-spirit does not carry it, and it is best held as one variant among many rather than fixed doctrine. What is constant across the region is the nearness itself. The bear is the animal that is almost a person, ruled by a master who is almost a man.

A female polar bear on the sea ice near Barter Island, Alaska. In the Inuit sacred world the white bear is an other-than-human person, and its whole kind answers to the master-spirit Nanook. Alan Wilson, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The guest who gives himself

The teaching carried in Nanook is an ethic of the hunt, and it is not an ethic of conquest. A bear is not taken; a bear consents to be taken, giving its body to a hunter it judges worthy. What the hunter owes in return is not gratitude in the abstract but a precise sequence of respect, owed to the soul of the killed animal, so that the soul departs contented and carries a good report back to the living bears. This is the logic that the hide in the corner of the iglu makes visible.

The rite, as it reaches the record, is exact. The hunter hangs the bear’s hide in a special section of his iglu, where it stays for several days. With it he hangs offerings, and the offerings are chosen by the bear’s sex — for a male bear, weapons and hunting tools; for a female, needle cases, scrapers for fleshing hides, and knives, the instruments of a woman’s work. The reason given is startling and precise. Native people held that “polar bears allowed themselves to be killed in order to obtain the souls of the tools (tatkoit), which they would take with them into the hereafter.” The offering is not payment to the hunter’s own conscience. It is a thing the bear wanted — the soul-substance of the tools, the tatkoit, which the bear came to collect and will carry with it into the afterlife. The kill and the gift are two halves of a single exchange the bear entered willingly.

And then the bear reports. If the dead bear has been treated properly, it tells the other bears how well it was used, so that they in turn will be eager to give themselves to the same hunter. A bear that was slighted tells its kin the opposite, and the bears withdraw from that hunter and shun him. This is the sanction behind the whole system, and it is why the corner of the iglu matters as much as the harpoon: a hunter’s future depends not only on his skill but on his standing among the bears, which is a matter of reputation, carried by the dead back to the living. The taboo is not superstition laid over a practical craft. In this world it is the practical craft, because the animal has a will and a memory and a voice.

Behind the specific rite lies the general vision that the Iglulik angakkuq Aua once put to the ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, in a sentence that has become the most-quoted line in all of Inuit religion: “The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls.” To eat, in the Arctic, is to kill persons — seals, caribou, bears — and to live is therefore to stand in perpetual moral debt to the beings one consumes. The elaborate courtesies owed to the dead bear are one settlement of that debt. They are described here at the distance of the public record, as a structure of meaning rather than a set of instructions; the interior of the rite belongs to those who kept it.

The circumpolar bear

The honoring of the slain bear is not peculiar to the Inuit. It is one local dialect of a grammar spoken in a broad belt across the top of the world, from the sub-Arctic forests of North America eastward through Siberia to northern Scandinavia — what anthropology came to call circumpolar bear ceremonialism. The pattern was first drawn together as a single phenomenon by the American anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell, whose 1926 study Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere gathered the scattered accounts of how northern peoples killed, addressed, and disposed of the bear. Everywhere the elements rhyme: the bear treated as a guest of high rank, killed with apology or ceremony, its remains handled so that its spirit is not offended, its soul released or “sent” so that it will return and give itself again.

Far to the east, among the Ainu of Hokkaido and Sakhalin, the same conviction produced the iyomante, the bear-sending ceremony, in which a brown-bear cub is raised for a year or two as a member of the household, honored, fed, and loaded with gifts, and then ritually killed so that its spirit — a kamuy, a god wearing a bear’s shape — may return to the divine country and tell the other gods how well it was treated on earth. In the Finnish and Karelian north the slain bear was met with the peijaiset, a memorial feast held for it as for an honored guest, with feigned mourning and rejoicing and rites to send its spirit back to the forest that gave it. The Inuit corner-of-the-iglu, the Ainu banquet, the Karelian feast: three tongues of one language, in which the bear is a person who lends its body and must be repaid in kind, and whose good word secures the next hunt.

It was out of exactly this material that Hallowell later drew the phrase that reshaped how outsiders understood such worlds. Reflecting on the Ojibwe, he named the beings they lived among — bears among them — as “other-than-human persons,” and in doing so made the point that these were not quaint beliefs about animals but a coherent ontology in which personhood was never the exclusive property of humankind. Nanook is a ruler in precisely that kind of world. The bear is not a resource. It is a neighbor with a will, and the hunt is a negotiation between persons.

The other Nanook

The name that most of the world knows is not the master of bears. It is a marketing invention, and it belongs to one of the most influential — and most falsified — films ever made.

In 1922 the American explorer and prospector Robert J. Flaherty released Nanook of the North, a silent picture he had shot, written, directed, edited, and produced himself among the Inuit of the Inukjuak region on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay. Flaherty had lost an earlier version of the footage to a nitrate fire in 1916, and spent roughly four years raising money to return; the funding finally came from the French fur house Revillon Frères, a rival of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had an interest in romantic images of the fur country. Released on June 11, 1922, the film was a sensation. It is remembered as the first feature-length documentary to achieve commercial success — the picture that proved the form could pay — and in 1989 it was chosen among the very first twenty-five titles inducted into the United States National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

The 1922 promotional poster for Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. The “Nanook” of the film was not the bear-spirit but the hunter Allakariallak, renamed for the screen and directed through staged scenes of a “pre-contact” life that no longer existed. Robert J. Flaherty / Pathe Pictures, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

But “Nanook” was neither the bear nor a bear-spirit, and he was not, in the ordinary sense, a documentary subject. The man on the screen was a celebrated hunter named Allakariallak, of the Itivimuit, whom Flaherty renamed “Nanook” because he judged the word more marketable. The woman billed as Nanook’s wife, “Nyla,” was Maggie Nujarluktuk — a real person cast in a fictional role, and one of the Inuit women with whom Flaherty had a relationship; she later bore his son. These were living people performing invented characters in scenes their director arranged.

And the arrangements went deep. The famous interior shots — the family waking, dressing, moving in the round house — could not be filmed inside a real iglu, because Flaherty’s bulky camera needed light; so a special iglu was built with one wall sawn away and left open, an iglu that was three walls and a stage. The celebrated scene in which “Nanook” bites a gramophone record in childlike wonder was scripted playacting: Allakariallak knew perfectly well what a gramophone was. The men were directed to hunt seal and walrus with the harpoon and spear, though they ordinarily used rifles, so that the film could stage a “pre-contact” purity that had not existed in that country for generations. What the audience took for a window onto an untouched people was a careful reconstruction of a past, performed by present-day Inuit who lived in a world of trading posts, firearms, and wage labor — a world the camera was instructed to hide.

Flaherty completed the effect with a caption about the hero’s death. Allakariallak, the film’s later publicity claimed, had starved to death on the ice less than two years after the shooting — a tragic seal on the story’s authenticity. He had not. Allakariallak died at home, most likely of tuberculosis. The ending, like the gramophone and the sawn-open iglu, was a fiction in the service of a feeling.

So Nanook of the North is a landmark, and it is a fabrication, and it is both at once. It founded a genre and it fixed a template — the ethnographic gaze that loves its subject and erases him in the same motion, filming a living people as a vanished one. It belongs to this entry strictly as reception: as evidence of how the outside world imagined the Inuit, and of nothing whatever about Nanook the master of bears or the people who honored him. The bear-spirit’s Nanook is asked to speak well of the hunter who used it kindly. Flaherty’s Nanook was made to speak for a whole people, and the speech was not theirs.

The name recast and the name sold

The bear’s master was not the only Arctic power to be seized and remade by outsiders, and the mirror-image case belongs beside the film. In Greenland and Labrador the greatest of the spirits was Torngarsuk, chief of the tornat, the helping spirits, and master of the whales and seals — a being visible only to the angakkuit, appearing as a bear, or a one-armed man, or a great form like a single finger of a hand. When the Danish-Norwegian mission reached Greenland under Hans Egede from 1721, the missionaries needed a name for the adversary of their God, and they took Torngarsuk. The master of the helping spirits was mapped onto the Christian Devil, the old cosmology was named “the devil’s work,” and the word for a shaman’s spirit slid, in the missionary mouth, toward “demon.” By the nineteenth century the transformation was complete enough that a European catalog of hell, the Dictionnaire Infernal, could list Torngarsuk among its fiends. The demotion is a historiographic fact to be named, not a description to be adopted: within the tradition Torngarsuk is no devil but a master of spirits, and the naming of him as a demon records what the missionaries did, not what he is.

That is the older half of the reception. The newer half is commercial rather than theological, and gentler on its surface, but it works a related transformation — turning sacred and functional forms into signs and souvenirs. The inuksuk, the stone figure the Inuit built across the tundra to mark a route, a cache, or a caribou drive, has become a logo: it stands on the flag of Nunavut, and a stylized human-shaped variant, “Ilanaaq,” was the emblem of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver — a choice some Inuit leaders criticized, since the human-figure form is properly an inunnguaq, not a true inuksuk. The tupilaq, once the secret and dangerous made-thing an angakkuq sent through the sea to kill an enemy, survives now mainly as carved art, sold in curio shops in forms no one would dare to animate. And Flaherty’s staged Nanook sits in this company too, as the most famous instance of all: an Inuit sacred word, and an Inuit face, converted into an image for sale.

None of this is the end of the tradition, and it is important not to file the Inuit under the past tense. The Inuit are a living people; the Yup’ik of southwest Alaska are a living people; the angakkuit tradition, the animal-masters, the masks, and the languages endure and are being renewed. Nunavut became a territory governed by the Inuit in 1999; Greenland won self-rule in 2009; the old names are taught again to children who also know the rifle and the snowmobile. The bear still walks the sea ice off the same coasts, and the ethic that met it — the bear as a person, the kill as a debt, the soul to be repaid and sent home speaking well — is not a curiosity retrieved from a colonial film reel. It is the older and truer of the two Nanooks, the one that was never for sale: the guest hung in his corner of the house, gathering the souls of a woman’s needles or a man’s harpoon to carry with him, and asked only to tell the others that here, at least, a bear was well received.

→ Related: Sedna · Torngarsuk · Sila · Tupilaq · The Inuit · The Yupik · The Dorset Culture · Inuksuk Point · Qajartalik · Nunalleq · Aasivissuit Nipisat