Inuit

Inuit tradition distributes power widely and locates almost none of it in a ruler. There is no divine king and no assembly of gods, and the beings that matter most are those on which survival depends.

The best known is the woman at the bottom of the sea, called Sedna in some regions and by other names elsewhere, from whose severed fingers the sea mammals came and who withholds them when human conduct has offended. This is the pattern that runs through the tradition: the animals give themselves, the giving is conditional, and the condition is observance. Rules about hunting, about the treatment of a carcass, about what may not be done in what season, are the substance of the religion rather than a supplement to it.

Alongside her are the powers of the air and weather, the moon, and a great many named and unnamed spirits attached to places, animals and objects.

There is no creator who made the world and rules it. The world is there, and the narratives explain how particular features of it came about rather than deriving the whole from an act.

Names and personal spirits connect the living and the dead, and a child given the name of someone who has died carries something of them.

Inuit religion is listed by this atlas as a restricted tradition, and the material held by communities is not elaborated here.

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.