Sila

← Encyclopedia

In Central Alaskan Yup’ik there is a word, ella, that a dictionary is forced to translate twice. It means the weather — the state of the sky, whether it is calm or blowing, the outdoors a hunter steps into. And it means awareness: sense, mind, the faculty by which a person knows anything at all. The same syllables carry the storm and the consciousness that watches the storm. An elder can use the word for the air outside the house and for the reason inside the head without changing it, because in this way of thinking the two are not separate substances that happen to share a name. They are one thing, met in two places. The Inuit cognate is sila, and the pattern holds the whole width of the language family: the weather is the mind of the world, and the mind is a little of the world’s weather, breathed in.

That is why, when Knud Rasmussen stood in the wind of the Foxe Basin in the early 1920s and asked an Iglulik angakkuq — a shaman — named Aua what his people believed, the answer was not a doctrine. Aua walked him out to where the cold and the hunger and the dead were, and said, in the phrasing Rasmussen carried back, “We do not believe, we fear.” And near the head of the list of what the Inuit fear stood the plainest and largest of the powers: Sila. Here the weather is the moral order. Not a symbol of it — the thing itself. To understand Sila is to understand a world in which the sky is listening, and answers.

The word that means air and mind

Sila (Inuktitut sila, ᓯᓚ) is at its root a common noun: the air, the breath, the weather outside, the sky, the surrounding world. From that base it stretches, without apparent effort, to mean the universe as a whole, and then further inward, to intellect, reason, wisdom, and consciousness. The Silap Inua of the fuller, personified form — Silap Inua, ᓯᓚᑉ ᐃᓄᐊ, glossed as the inhabitant or possessor of the air — names not a body in the sky but the indweller of that whole diffuse expanse: the person, if the word can be stretched that far, of the air and the weather and the reason in things.

The word survives across the entire family with the double sense intact. In Iñupiaq of northern Alaska it is siḷa, with siḷam iñua for the indweller. In Central Alaskan Yup’ik it is ella, and the indweller is ellam yua, “the person of the universe.” In West Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) it is again sila, the ordinary word for weather and the learned word for sense. Among the Netsilik and Copper Inuit of the central Canadian Arctic the sound shifts to hila, with hillap inua for its inhabitant. One morpheme, carried thousands of kilometers of coast and tundra, everywhere holding the same fusion of the outside-weather and the inside-mind.

This is the reason Sila does not behave like the other great powers of the Inuit sacred world, and the reason ethnographers have reached, one after another, for Western comparisons rather than a portrait. Sila has been likened to Polynesian mana, to the old physicists’ luminiferous ether, to the logos of the pre-Socratics, to the world-soul, even to Emerson’s Over-Soul — precisely because it is not a figure. It has no face, no house, no adventures worth telling. As the surveys of the material put it, there are very few myths in which Sila is a character, because it is not thought to have the personality that a character requires. Where Sedna is a woman with a story — a girl who would not marry, whose fingers became the seals — and Nanook is a bear who governs bears, Sila is closer to a condition of the whole. It is what the others move within.

The distinction matters, and the tradition keeps it. The Inuit world is thick with inue (singular inua): the indwellers, owners, or masters of things and domains. Sedna — Takannakapsaaluk, Nuliajuk, Nerrivik, by region — is the inua of the sea, holder of the seals and walruses and whales at the ocean floor. Nanuq is the master of the bears. Torngarsuk is the great spirit of the Greenland and Labrador coast, master of the helping-spirits an angakkuq commands. These are persons: they want, they withhold, they can be offended and appeased. Sila stands apart from them as the nearest thing in Inuit thought to a single, abstract, all-pervading order — a good comparand for the diffuse “great mysteries” of other Indigenous cosmologies, the Lakota Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka or the Andean pacha, rather than for a throned god on a mountain. A few tellings do try to give Sila a body. In one Netsilik narrative it is a giant orphaned baby, its parents killed fighting other giants; in some accounts it takes on a darker cast, luring children away onto the tundra never to return. But even the sources that record these note how little personality clings to the name. The concept is philosophical before it is anything else.

And it must be said at once how this reaches us. The Inuit and Yup’ik kept no pre-contact writing. Almost everything in the paragraphs above is reconstructed from early-twentieth- century ethnography — above all Rasmussen’s Fifth Thule Expedition of 1921–24 — outsider work, filtered through the anthropology of its moment, read here with that distance kept in view. The living languages still carry sila and ella in daily speech; the elaborated metaphysics of Silap Inua is a scholarly composite, and its edges are soft.

The aurora over interior Alaska, the sky itself as a moving presence. United States Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

When the weather is the moral order

Because Sila is at once the physical weather and the intelligence of the world, the Inuit cosmos does not run two separate systems — one for nature, one for right and wrong. It runs one. A broken taboo does not merely offend some spirit off in its own domain; it disturbs Sila directly, and the disturbance comes back as weather. A storm, a blizzard that pins a camp for days, a fog that swallows the sea ice, the game that thins and vanishes — these are not bad luck laid over a moral failure. They are the moral failure, felt on the skin. Bad weather is the shape a breach takes when it returns.

The rules whose breach does this are the pittailiniq, the great web of things to be avoided and done: how the meat of land animals and sea animals must be kept apart, how a woman must observe her days around birth and death, how the caught seal must be given water, how the bones must be handled. To keep them is not superstition within the frame; it is to keep the world in the temper that lets the people live. Rasmussen’s Aua understood exactly this, and gave it its most quoted expression. Asked what he believed, he answered — in the record of the Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos — that belief was the wrong word. “We do not believe, we fear.” Then he named the fears, and they are worth setting down in his order, because the order is an argument:

We fear the weather spirit of earth, that we must fight against to wrest our food from land and sea. We fear Sila. We fear dearth and hunger in the cold snow huts. We fear Takánakapsâluk, the great woman down at the bottom of the sea, that rules over all the beasts of the sea. We fear the sickness that we meet with daily all around us… We fear the souls of dead human beings and of the animals we have killed.

Sila stands second, right after the weather it is nearly indistinguishable from, and before even the sea-woman. Aua’s list is not a creed to be affirmed but a map of exposure. What the Inuit have is not a god to love but a set of powers to reckon with, and observance — not worship — is the reckoning. This is the Inuit sacred order stated by one of its own, though stated to an outsider, in an outsider’s language, and it should be weighed as such: Aua was a brilliant informant performing his world for a sympathetic foreigner, and Rasmussen was an interested recorder. The passage is real and traceable. It is also a translation across a gulf.

Sila is not only the weather without. It is also the breath within. In the Inuit reckoning of the soul, the animating principle is bound up with respiration — the life-wind in the body is of a piece with the air-power of the world. The Caribou Inuit, the Inuit of the barren grounds west of Hudson Bay, drew the distinction finely: the soul tied to breath they called umaffia, “the place of life,” the seat of respiration; the personal soul, the one that carried the name and could be reborn in a child who received it, they called tarneq. To be alive is to hold a little of Sila inside the chest; to die is, in part, to give the wind back. Among the Copper Inuit an angakkuq could draw shamanic power directly from this air-power, from what has been rendered the “Wind Indweller,” and even the helping-spirits at a shaman’s call might be named silap inue — the indwellers of the air. The line the tradition draws around the outside and the inside, around the sky and the self, is not a firm one. It is the same wind, measured in two places.

The angakkuq is the one who works this order when it goes wrong. When a hidden breach fouls the sea-woman’s hair and she closes her hand over the seals, it is the angakkuq who travels in trance to the bottom of the sea to comb the tangles from Sedna’s hair and win the animals back. That journey belongs to the same fabric as Sila: the felt lack — the empty hunt, the wrong weather — is a moral fact needing moral repair, and the shaman is the one who can read and mend it. What the séance is, and what it means, can be described. How it is done — the operative technique of the spirit-flight — is not something the ethnographic record opens, and it is not opened here. It is named at the distance at which Rasmussen and the museums hold it: a real practice, described from outside, not a procedure to be worked.

The devil’s work, and the long afterlife

The outside came to the Inuit world with a book and a verdict. When the Norwegian-Danish missionary Hans Egede reached the west coast of Greenland in 1721, and the Moravian Brethren followed — their Greenland missions running from 1733 into the twentieth century — they did not, on the whole, argue that the old powers were unreal. They argued that they were evil. The great spirit Torngarsuk was mapped directly onto the Christian Devil; the tuurngait, the helping-spirits, became demons; the angakkuit were condemned as sorcerers and their practice named devil-worship, to be broken. The mapping was crude and, in its details, contested — the sources disagree on what Torngarsuk had ever been, and the tidy equation Torngarsuk-equals-Satan was as much a missionary construction as a discovery. But the suppression was real and largely effective. What is striking is how much of the old vocabulary the new religion swallowed: Torngarsuk and tuurngaq survive inside Christian Greenlandic and Inuktitut, the demonized names now doing service in the very faith that demonized them.

Sila fared differently, and the difference is telling. Because it was never a figure to be dethroned — no idol, no personal spirit to be recast as a demon — the diffuse air-and-reason of the world could not be so easily condemned. It simply went on being the word for weather and the word for sense, in the mouths of Christian and non-Christian speakers alike. A power with no face is hard to burn.

The colonial record did not end at the mission, and within the frame of a living people it must be named soberly and in the present. Across the twentieth century the Inuit met the residential and day schools that took children and languages; the “disc number” system that stamped a person with an E-number in place of a name; the 1953 High Arctic relocations that moved Inukjuak families north to Grise Fiord and Resolute as, in effect, human flagpoles for Canadian sovereignty, into a dark and a cold they had not been prepared for; the RCMP killings of the qimmiit, the sled dogs, through the 1950s and 1960s, that took from families their means of travel and hunt; and the sealing and whaling bans that gutted Inuit economies from the outside in the name of southern sentiment. These are not the misty backdrop of a vanished world. They happened to the grandparents and parents of people now living, and Canada apologized for the Qikiqtani injuries in 2019, with a settlement to the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. The Inuit are a present people. Nunavut has governed itself from within since 1 April 1999; Greenland moved into Self-Rule in 2009; the languages that carry sila and ella are being taught and revived.

Two once-sacred forms have meanwhile become global commodities, and the tension is better held than resolved. The inuksuk, the stone marker a traveler raises to stand in for a human presence — to say a route, a cache, a crossing — was chosen as the emblem on the flag of Nunavut in 1999, and then, more awkwardly, as Ilanaaq (“friend”), the multicolored figure of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, which many Inuit criticized as a flattened, de-sacralized, and technically wrong version of the thing it borrowed. The tupilaq — once a secret, perishable avenging construct an angakkuq made and destroyed unseen, so that no early European ever laid eyes on one — survives now almost entirely as carved art in narwhal and walrus ivory, bone, antler, and wood: the first such carvings were made expressly so that outsiders could see what a tupilaq “looked like,” and the object is today a signature Kalaallit art form and souvenir. What was invisible on principle is now sold in a shop window.

A Yup’ik ceremonial mask, an object in which the yua — the indwelling person of an animal or of the world — is given a face. User:FA2010, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The most famous image of this world remains a lie about it. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, premiered in 1922, is called the founding feature documentary, and it staged nearly everything it showed. The hunter it named “Nanook” was a Inuk man, Allakariallak, given a fictional family for the camera and directed to hunt with a harpoon rather than the rifle he actually carried; an iglu was sawn open so the interior could be lit and filmed. The film presented the Inuit as more primitive, more sealed off from the modern century, than they were — and it has remained, ever since, both a landmark and a byword for the ethnographic misrepresentation that the whole outside record of this world carries in some measure. It is the same problem as Rasmussen’s, only with a camera and a market: the Inuit world reaching the outside almost entirely through outsiders’ hands.

Sila outlasts all of it, quietly, because it was never the kind of thing that could be dethroned or sold. It is still the word a Yup’ik or Inuit speaker uses for the sky that turned bad this morning and for the sense a person is expected to keep. The metaphysics that Rasmussen’s generation built out of it may be a composite, and its far reaches uncertain. But the core is not exotic and never was: that the air a person breathes and the reason by which they judge are the same substance, drawn from one source; that the weather is not indifferent; and that when the sky closes down over a camp, it may be worth asking not only what the pressure systems are doing, but what has been done. The wind, in this world, has been paying attention all along.

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