Almost everything in the outside record about Inuit religion was collected in a compressed period, by expeditions, from communities that were in the middle of substantial change.
The most important body of material came out of ethnographic expeditions across the Arctic in the early twentieth century, whose collectors worked in Inuit languages and recorded songs, narratives and the accounts of individual practitioners at length. The result is detailed, is often in the words of named people, and remains the foundation of the subject.
It is also the record of one moment. Missionary activity and administrative pressure were already reshaping practice, and in places the specialists who were interviewed were describing a system they had themselves stopped operating. What was collected was in part what people chose to hand to a departing expedition.
There is a further problem specific to this entry, and the atlas has recorded it against itself: material about initiation and about what practitioners did in seance was published in this corpus at a level of detail that comparable traditions elsewhere in the atlas are not subjected to. That inconsistency is a defect in the record rather than a difference between the traditions.
Contemporary Inuit scholarship, oral history programmes run by Inuit organisations, and community control over research have changed both what is documented and who decides. The atlas describes the structure and does not elaborate what the communities hold.