Inuit Religion

Inuit tradition holds that animals, weather, places and some objects possess an inua, an indwelling person or owner. The word is built on the root for person, and the concept is closer to saying that the thing has an inside that can be addressed than to saying it has a soul in the Christian sense. A seal is a person of a different kind, and it is aware of how it is handled.

This is the basis of the large body of rules that governed Inuit life, usually described in English as taboos. Sea animals and land animals were kept apart: caribou and seal were not to be sewn or eaten together, and work on caribou skins was forbidden while sea-mammal hunting was underway. Fresh water was offered to a killed seal, because the animal was understood to thirst. The rules were numerous, regionally variable and taken with great seriousness, because the consequence of breaking them was not personal guilt but collective hunger: offended animals withdraw, and everyone starves.

The best known figure is the woman at the bottom of the sea, called Sedna in the literature and Nuliajuk or Takannaaluk among others in Inuit usage. The narrative varies but commonly runs that a girl was thrown from a boat by her father, clung to the gunwale, had her fingers cut off, and sank, and that her severed fingers became the seals, whales and walrus. She holds the sea animals, and when human wrongdoing accumulates it tangles and fouls her hair, which she cannot comb because she has no fingers. The animals stay with her and the hunt fails.

Sila is a wider and harder concept: air, weather, the outside, and something like the intelligence of the world. The moon is a male figure paired in narrative with the sun, his sister, and is associated with game and with the dead. Naming ties this together: a child given the name of a recently dead relative carries something of that person, and is addressed by the kin term appropriate to the namesake rather than to the child. That practice is widespread among Inuit today.

The angakkuq, plural angakkuit, was the specialist who dealt with the powers when rules failed. The office was not hereditary and not administrative: it came through a calling, through instruction from an older angakkuq, and through an initiation. Those who held it worked with helping spirits, tuurngait, and were understood to perceive what others could not.

The omission is deliberate. It is the rule this atlas applies to Lakota ceremony, to Aboriginal restricted knowledge and to the kanzo of Haitian Vodou, and there is no exception in it for peoples who have not issued a declaration. That the material sits in libraries is not a clearance, the less so here, where it was taken during the collapse of the practice, from a small number of named individuals, in the wake of missions that had set out to end it.

What the work was for can be said plainly. The commonest purposes were to find game, to cure sickness, and to establish why the animals had gone. The last of these routinely ended in confession: the angakkuq named the broken rule, the person responsible admitted it before the group, and only then were the animals expected to return.

The social function is visible in that outcome. In small camps entirely dependent on cooperation, with no police, courts or chiefs, the angakkuq was a mechanism for surfacing grievance, assigning fault, and restoring cooperation without exile or killing. That is not an argument that the practice was merely social, but it explains why it could not be removed without leaving a gap.

Angakkuit were also feared. They could be accused of causing sickness as well as curing it, and rivalry between them could be lethal. Missionaries treated them as the principal obstacle to conversion, and by the twentieth century the office had largely gone underground or ceased in most communities. Where this entry rests on a record it prefers the one Inuit have made themselves, the Nunavut Arctic College elders' projects and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known to Be True, to the expedition ethnography written about them.

Almost everything written about pre-Christian Inuit religion was recorded after Christianity had already arrived, and often by people committed to replacing it. That is the central problem with the evidence.

Christianisation began in Greenland in 1721 with the Lutheran Hans Egede, who set out explicitly to suppress the angakkuit, and continued with Moravian stations from 1733; by about 1810 essentially the whole west Greenlandic population was baptised. Moravians reached Labrador in 1771. Anglican and Catholic missions worked the Canadian Arctic later, reaching some central Arctic groups only in the early twentieth century, which is why the fullest ethnographic descriptions come from those regions.

The single most important body of material is the Fifth Thule Expedition of 1921 to 1924, on which Knud Rasmussen, Greenlandic-speaking and himself of Inuit descent, crossed from Greenland to Alaska and recorded at length from Iglulik, Netsilik, Caribou, Copper and Mackenzie Inuit, including extended conversations with the angakkuit Aua and Igjugarjuk. Franz Boas had worked earlier on Baffin Island. The material is unusually good for its period and is still the foundation of the subject. It is also a record taken during collapse, from a small number of named individuals, and generalising it across the Arctic is a known hazard.

Twentieth-century administration did further damage in Canada: relocation of families to assert sovereignty in the High Arctic, the killing of sled dogs during settlement, and residential schools, on which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada reported in 2015 with a volume on the Inuit and northern experience.

Nearly all Inuit today are Christian, predominantly Lutheran in Greenland and Anglican or Catholic in Canada, and that is not a veneer. The older framework nonetheless persists in ways easy to miss: naming practice, respect toward killed animals, and the authority of elders. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, the body of Inuit knowledge written into the governance of Nunavut since 1999, carries much of it into public institutions under a secular heading. Elders interview projects run by Nunavut Arctic College since the 1990s have published Inuit accounts of cosmology and shamanic practice, the first time much of this material has been set down by Inuit rather than about them.