The Inuit

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A girl clings to the side of a skin boat with both hands, and her father lifts an axe and cuts. The first joints of her fingers fall into the sea and become the ringed seals. The next joints become the bearded seals and the walruses. The last become the great whales. The girl sinks after them to the floor of the ocean, and there she settles into a house and becomes the mother and mistress of every animal a hunter will ever take. It is the single most consequential thing that happens in the Inuit world — the moment the sea is stocked — and it hangs on a family quarrel that no two communities remember the same way.

In Igloolik she is Takannaaluk, and it was her own father who threw her over. Around Coronation Gulf, among the Copper Inuit, she is Arnapkapfaaluk, the Big Bad Woman, terrible in her own right. In Greenland she is Arnaqquassaaq, or Sassuma Arnaa, the Mother of the Deep. In one telling she was a giant with a monstrous hunger; in another a woman married to a dog, or to a bird-spirit who wore a hunter’s face; in the Netsilik country she was a mistreated orphan the villagers tried to drown. The reasons differ, the names differ, and yet the hand goes into the water every time and the seals come out of it. On this one severed hand the whole larder of the Arctic depends. And because she rules the game she also, when wronged, withholds it — a logic of taking-back that runs from the myth straight into the twentieth century, when other hands would withhold from the Inuit their dogs, their names, and their villages in turn.

The people who came with the whale

The Inuit call themselves, simply, the people. Inuit is the plural; Inuk is one person; the word belongs to the family of closely related tongues, Inuktut and Inuktitut and Kalaallisut and Inupiaq, that the Inuit speak in an unbroken arc from the Bering Strait to the east coast of Greenland. Their homeland has a name of its own — Inuit Nunangat, the land, water, and ice the Inuit hold together as one country regardless of the national borders drawn across it. It runs from the Yup’ik and Inupiat coasts of Alaska, across the whole top of Canada, to Kalaallit Nunaat, Greenland, the largest and most fully Inuit of all their lands.

They did not always hold it. The Inuit are the descendants of a specific, datable people: the Thule culture, a maritime whale-hunting society that took shape in the Bering Strait region of Alaska and, by roughly 1000 CE, possessed a technology no earlier Arctic people had matched. The heart of it was the toggling harpoon — a head that turned crosswise under the skin of a struck animal and would not pull free — rigged to inflated sealskin floats that tired and drowned even the largest sea mammals in open water. With it went the umiaq, the big open skin boat, and the qajaq, the closed one-man hunting kayak, and the dog sled drawn by teams of qimmiit. This gear let the Thule hunt the bowhead whale itself, and the surplus of a single whale could carry a community through a winter. During a warm climatic window their descendants spread east across Arctic Canada with startling speed, reaching the central Arctic by about 1200 and Greenland by the thirteenth century.

As they came, they replaced an older people. The Dorset — whom the Inuit remember as the Tuniit, a strong, shy, half-giant folk of the deep past — had held this country for two thousand years and more, and within a few centuries of the Thule arrival they were gone, absorbed or displaced or simply outlasted; whether the newcomers killed them, married them, or merely took the best hunting grounds is a question the archaeology still argues over, and it is treated here as genuinely unsettled. The Dorset carved miniature faces in ivory and antler and are the subject of their own long account; they are not the Inuit, and the sober archaeological record keeps the Dorset and their vanishing separate from the living people who came after. When the Little Ice Age closed in after about 1400, the open-water whaling of the Thule golden age contracted, and many groups turned harder toward the ringed seal at its breathing hole, the caribou on its inland migration, and the char in the rivers — the seasonal round that the ethnographers would later find.

Europe arrived by sea and by increments. Martin Frobisher’s ships reached Baffin Island in 1576, hunting a northwest passage and finding worthless ore and a people he did not understand; the deeper rupture came in Greenland, where in 1721 the Danish-Norwegian mission of Hans Egede put ashore to begin the long work of conversion and colonization. Today something over 150,000 Inuit live across four countries. Canada counted 70,540 in the 2021 census, of whom 30,865 live in Nunavut, with the balance in Nunavik in Arctic Quebec, the Inuvialuit region of the western Arctic, and Nunatsiavut in Labrador; Greenland holds close to 50,000 Kalaallit; and the Inuit Circumpolar Council, the pan-Arctic body first convened in 1977 at Utqiagvik in Alaska by the Inupiaq leader Eben Hopson, speaks internationally for some 180,000 Inuit and Yupik across the United States, Canada, Greenland, and Chukotka in Russia. The exonym once fixed to all of them — Eskimo — is rejected across Canada and Greenland as an outsiders’ word; the peoples’ own names are the ones that belong to them: Inuit, Inuk, Kalaallit, Inupiat, and Tuniit for the Dorset dead.

The sea-mother’s larder and the reason in the world

To live in Inuit Nunangat was to live inside a web of persons, most of whom were not human. In this world a seal has a soul, and so does a bear, a walrus, the wind, a stone, a name, and the dead. The word for the indwelling person of a thing is inua, its owner or inhabitant — the sense in which a place, an animal, or a force has someone home inside it. The living do not stand over this world and use it; they stand inside it and keep faith with it, and the whole difficulty of being alive is the difficulty of keeping the many kinds of person in their proper relation.

The instrument of that relation is the taboo — pittailiniq, the things one must not do. Its great labor is to keep separate what must not touch. Above all it keeps the land apart from the sea: the caribou of the high country and the seal of the ocean floor answer to different powers and must not be worked in the same season, sewn with the same needle, or eaten across the same fire, on pain of fouling both. A woman’s sewing of caribou skins is finished before the sea-ice hunting begins; blood and birth and death each carry their own long lists of prohibitions. None of this is arbitrary etiquette. In a world where the game gives itself to the worthy and withholds itself from the fouled, the taboo is the technology of survival — as load-bearing as the harpoon, and harder to keep.

At the base of the sea sits the power the taboo most directly serves. She is best known to the outside world as Sedna, though that is a latinized rendering of one Baffin telling; across the Arctic she is Nuliajuk, “the ever-copulating one” and mother of the beasts, or Takannaaluk at Igloolik, or Arnapkapfaaluk in the Copper country, or Arnaqquassaaq in Greenland. The tellings, as the comparative record makes plain, are a genuine family and not a single scripture. But their core holds firm: her severed finger-joints became the sea mammals, and she keeps them. When people break their taboos, the filth of the broken taboos gathers and mats in her long, unbraided hair, and because she has no fingers she cannot comb it out. In her disgust and her helplessness she shuts the animals away in her house, and above her on the ice the hunters find the seal holes empty and the people begin to starve.

There is one remedy, and it belongs to the angakkuq — the shaman, plural angakkuit — the man or woman whose helping-spirits let them go where others cannot. In the classic account the angakkuq falls into trance while the community waits in the dark, and sends the soul down through the sea floor to the sea-woman’s house, past her guardians, to do the one thing her own hands cannot: comb and braid the fouled hair and lift the filth of the people’s wrongdoing out of it. Placated, she loosens her grip, and the seals swim back to the breathing holes. The séance is described here exactly as the ethnographers and the Inuit themselves have set it down — a thing done, by those with the power to do it — and not as any kind of instruction; its inner workings are not a procedure to be handed on. What the angakkuq also does, in the plainer daylight version, is diagnose: sickness and hunger are read backward to the concealed taboo that caused them, and the cure begins with confession.

Over and around all of this lies Sila, and Sila is not weather, though the missionaries and the first translators reached for that word. Sila is the air and the sky and the breath in the lungs; it is the encompassing life-force of the world and, at once, the reason and intelligence in it — the order of things, which a broken taboo disturbs so that the storms come and the world turns hostile. The Netsilik shaman Aua, giving the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen the nearest thing to a creed the tradition offers, spoke not of belief but of fear: fear of the weather, of the sea-woman, of the souls of the animals killed. It is a religion less of doctrine than of a right way to move through a dangerous and populated world.

Set against these powers stands the material genius that let the Inuit live where they live at all, and it should never be mistaken for its opposite. The snow house, the iglu, raised in an hour from blocks cut with a knife, its spiral courses self-supporting and its inner glaze of ice sealing out the wind. The skin-covered qajaq, fitted to its hunter like a garment. The dog team and the sled. The bone snow-goggles slit against the blinding glare off spring ice. The layered caribou-skin clothing, air trapped in the hollow hairs, that outperformed anything Europe brought north for three centuries. This was not the leftover simplicity of a people who had not advanced but an integrated Arctic technology, tuned across a thousand years, in which the powers of the sea and the sky were part of the same system as the harpoon.

An inuksuk of stacked stone on the Foxe Peninsula of Baffin Island, Nunavut — a standing human presence built to guide travelers and turn the caribou across empty tundra. Ansgar Walk, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.5.

Devil’s work, dogs, and names

What came from outside did not meet this world so much as try to overwrite it, and the first and most telling stroke was an act of translation. When Hans Egede landed in Greenland on 3 July 1721 and set about converting the Kalaallit, he found among the powers of their cosmos a great spirit called Torngarsuk — in some tellings the mightiest of the helping-spirits an angakkuq could command, master of the sea-animals, glimpsed as a giant bear or a one-armed man, in others a being of a wholly different and disputed nature. Egede did not try to understand him. He identified Torngarsuk with the Christian Devil, named the whole living order of the sea-mother and the tornait “the devil’s work,” and set out to break the angakkuit who served it — with sermons, with painted images of hell, and with threat. It is an almost diagrammatic case of a colonial category swallowing a sacred one, and it is set down here as precisely that: a thing done to this world, never a truth about it. The template — demonize the shaman, criminalize the drum-dance, replace the cosmology with a catechism — would be repeated across the Arctic for two centuries, and in Canada it hardened into residential and day schools that took children from the land and the language and returned many of them to neither.

The colonial record does not stop at the mission, and its later chapters were bureaucratic rather than theological, which did not make them lighter. In 1953 the Canadian government carried out the High Arctic relocation, moving Inuit families from Inukjuak in Nunavik more than a thousand miles north to Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island and Resolute on Cornwallis Island — in part, as the documented history records, to anchor Canadian sovereignty over the disputed islands with a human presence. Told they could come home in two years, they could not; the promise went unkept, and in the first winters, in a place darker and stranger than the one they knew, they suffered real privation. Canada apologized in 2010.

Around the same years came the killing of the dogs. Between roughly 1950 and 1970, in settlements across the eastern Arctic, the RCMP and other authorities shot Inuit sled dogs — the qimmiit — in an event the Inuit name qimmiijaqtauniq, the taking-away of the dogs. A dog team was not a convenience but the means of hunting, of travel, of survival itself, and a family whose dogs were shot was pinned to the settlement and the ration. The numbers are contested and the contest matters: the RCMP’s own review found no coordinated plan, while the Inuit-led Qikiqtani Truth Commission, hearing some 350 witnesses, documented deep and lasting harm and rejected the self-exoneration; estimates of the dogs killed run from about 1,200 to as high as 20,000. Both the divergence and the harm are named here rather than smoothed away.

There was, too, the matter of the names. Finding Inuktut names hard to record and spell, the Canadian administration for decades cataloged Inuit not by name at all but by number, issued on a small fiber or leather disc — an “Eskimo Identification” tag, in the government’s own now-rejected word — stamped with an E for the eastern or W for the western Arctic and a personal number, worn or sewn into clothing, a person reduced to a serial. Only in 1970 did the Inuk leader Abe Okpik begin Project Surname, traveling the Arctic to record chosen family names in place of the discs; the Northwest Territories retired the disc system in 1972, Quebec in 1978. Layered over all of it, in the late twentieth century, the anti-sealing campaigns of the outside world collapsed the price of the one resource the land reliably gave, gutting Inuit hunting economies from a distance, in the name of animals the Inuit had lived in relation to for a thousand years.

Two objects of this world followed the opposite arc, out of secrecy and into the global marketplace, and both deserve watching closely. The inuksuk — the figure of piled stone that guides a traveler across featureless tundra, marks a cache, and in the drive-lines helped turn the caribou — became, in 1999, the emblem at the center of the flag and coat of arms of Nunavut. Eleven years later a human-shaped variant, an inunnguaq named “Ilanaaq” — Inuktitut for “friend,” designed by Elena Rivera MacGregor and Gonzalo Alatorre — was chosen as the logo of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, and drew objections from Inuit including the former Nunavut commissioner Peter Irniq, who noted that a human-form inunnguaq is precisely not a true inuksuk. The tupilaq traveled further still. Once a secret and lethal thing — an avenging creature an angakkuq was said to assemble from scraps of animal and human remains, animate, and send through the sea to kill an enemy, at the risk that a stronger victim could turn it back on its maker — it is today a celebrated genre of Greenlandic carved art, worked in tooth, bone, antler, and walrus tusk and sold the world over, its killing function gone and its form remaining. The made revenge-monster has become a collectible; the transformation is worth neither hiding nor mistaking for continuity.

The most famous image of all was a fiction. Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, released in 1922 and often called the first commercially successful feature documentary, starred an Itivimuit hunter named Allakariallak and sold the world a window onto a timeless people that was, in fact, a set. The clothing had largely gone out of use; the harpoon hunting had given way to the rifle; the iglu was built oversized and cut open so the interior could be lit; and in one scene the man the film called Nanook was directed to puzzle at a gramophone he understood perfectly well. What the film sold as a people outside of history was a costume drama of the primitive — a habit of looking at Arctic peoples as figures from before the present, which they never were. Much of what the outside world knows of the older tradition rests, in fact, on a narrow and interested record: the Greenlandic fieldwork of William Thalbitzer at Ammassalik in 1905 and 1906, and above all Knud Rasmussen’s Thule Expeditions, whose Netsilik and Iglulik material remains the most-cited source there is — outsiders’ notebooks, filtered through the anthropology of their moment.

None of this belongs to the past tense. The Inuit are a living people, their heritage now deeply Christianized and syncretic and no less continuous for that. Nunavut became Canada’s newest territory on 1 April 1999, an Inuit-majority jurisdiction the size of western Europe governing itself. Greenland’s Home Rule Act took effect on 1 May 1979, and the Act on Greenland Self-Government came into force on 21 June 2009, after a referendum the year before carried by roughly three-quarters of the vote, recognizing the Kalaallit as a people with the right, when they choose it, to full independence. Inuktut is being taught back to children who lost it; the drum-dance and the throat-song are performed, not exhumed. And on the ocean floor, in the telling that a Greenlander and an Iglulingmiut would still disagree about, the sea-woman keeps her animals and waits to see whether the people will keep faith — the oldest bargain in the Arctic, and the one the century of withholdings never managed to cancel.

The theatrical poster for Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the staged and celebrated film that fixed a false image of a timeless Arctic in the world’s imagination. Robert J. Flaherty / Pathe Pictures, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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