Inuit and Yupik

Inuit and Yup'ik today

Inuit and Yup'ik keep distinct languages across a homeland from Alaska to Greenland

Inuit and Yup'ik are distinct peoples with distinct languages. The Alaska Native Language Center places Iñupiaq with the Inuit dialects of Canada and Greenland, and marks that whole group as separate from Yupik. (ANLC)

Alaska is home to about 13,500 Inupiat, of whom about 3,000 speak Iñupiaq, most of them over the age of 40. Central Alaskan Yup'ik has about 10,000 speakers within a population of about 21,000, and children still grow up speaking it first in 17 of 68 Yup'ik villages. (ANLC)

In Canada, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami describes Inuit Nunangat as the Inuit homeland: 51 communities across four regions, covering 40 percent of Canada's land area and 72 percent of its coastline. These are contemporary nations with their own governments, health systems, and language authorities. (Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami)

Sila

The word that holds the weather and the mind at once

Sila sits at the center of the recorded Inuit cosmology. Rasmussen called it "very difficult to define, or even to translate," then gave three meanings in one entry: the universe, the weather, and a mixture of common sense, intelligence and wisdom. (Rasmussen, 1927)

Silap Inua is the owner or person of sila. The 1929 Iglulik volume describes sila as a power that reaches people through wind and sea, fog, rain and snowstorm. Among the Iglulingmiut and Aivilingmiut, Rasmussen records, the ordinary words for snowstorm and wind often stand in its place. (Rasmussen, 1929)

The word is in daily use. Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic is an Iñupiat organization in Alaska. It gives siḷa as weather in its literal sense, and states that traditional knowledge holds it to be "the breath of life that connects us all". (SILA)

Air outside a body, air inside a body, and the awareness of whoever is doing the breathing take one term. That is a claim about how a person and a place are joined, and it arrives already built into the grammar.

Ella in Yup'ik

How's the weather and how are you feeling share a word

The Yup'ik counterpart is ella. Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, a Yupiaq scholar at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, wrote that ella "epitomizes the philosophy of the Yupiat" and can be made to mean weather, awareness, world, Creative Force, universe, and sky. (Kawagley, 1995)

In the same book he set two questions side by side. Qaill' ella auqa? means "How's the weather?" Qaill' ellan auqa? means "How are you feeling?" One suffix stands between the state of the world and the state of the person. Kawagley named the governing sense himself: "The key word is awareness, or consciousness."

Ellam Yua, the person of the universe, appears in his examples as Ellagpiim yua. Sila and ella belong to two separate languages, and both carry weather, breath, and awareness in a single term. A tradition that cannot say one without implying the other is asserting that a person and the surrounding world form one system.

The angakkuq and the angalkuq

One office covered the sick and the sky

The healer is the angakkuq in the Inuit languages and the angalkuq in Yup'ik. Rasmussen's 1929 account opens its list of the office's duties with medicine: "they must be physicians, curing the sick". The second entry is weather forecasting. The rest of the list belongs to the cosmology, including journeys to recover a soul that has strayed or been taken. (Rasmussen, 1929)

Training was long and its standard was public. Rasmussen recorded the name of the angakkuq's own faculty as qaumaneq, a light the healer feels "inside his head, within the brain". A community that trusted one person with its crises expected a demonstrated apprenticeship first.

The same volume records qilaneq, in which a question is put and the answer read in whether a lifted weight comes up heavy or light. Rasmussen classes it as the simplest method of consulting the spirits, notes that it did not require an angakkuq, and says it was used as a rule in cases of slight illness. Qilaneq is divination, and it belongs to the cosmology rather than to the practical treatment of bodies.

The rules of life

A rule system built to head off harm before it arrives

Aua, the Iglulik angakkuq who supplied most of Rasmussen's material, explained the taboo system in one sentence. "We do not know how, we cannot say why, but we keep those rules in order that we may live untroubled". He called them "the old rules of life which are based on the experience and wisdom of generations." (Rasmussen, 1929)

He made the argument by walking Rasmussen through his village in a blizzard. Hunters came in from the breathing holes after a full day with nothing in tow. A lamp burned low in a cold house with children shivering under skin rugs. His sister Natseq lay alone in a small snow hut with a cough far down in the lungs. Three times Aua asked why, and got no answer.

Those rules are a forecasting instrument. They are inherited across generations, kept without a stated mechanism, and spent daily against a harm that has not happened yet. They store what went wrong before and act on the present in anticipation.

Tarniq

The part that gives life and is also where sickness enters

Aua divided the soul in two for Rasmussen. One part, inusia, he described as one with the spirit of life, anerneq, the breath. The other is the tarniq, written tarninga in the text, and he called it the most powerful and most mysterious part. (Rasmussen, 1929)

The tarniq "gives life and health," and it is at the same time "the site of disease, or the spot where any sickness enters in". Health and illness are two conditions of one thing in that account. Illness is a change in what was already there and already working.

The Iglulik account of the earliest times, recorded in the same volume, holds that before there were angakkuit a sick person was treated with breath. Wind and breath together were understood to combine the power inside a body, and by that account everyone was a physician. Breath is the lever the person can drive without help, and it is the first one the tradition names. (Rasmussen, 1929)

The limits of the archive

Who wrote this down, and under what pressure

The Fifth Thule material was gathered between 1921 and 1924, in translation, by a Danish expedition, at the point where Christian missions were displacing the practices being described. Rasmussen wrote the expectation into his own closing pages in 1927. "Before many years are past, their religion will be extinct." (Rasmussen, 1927)

Rasmussen described his questions as "intended to make them react" so that his hosts would produce an inspired explanation. His footing was better than most visitors managed, and he wrote that he could work at all because he spoke the language and already knew its Greenland relatives. The archive is still a set of answers shaped by a European's agenda. (Rasmussen, 1929)

Inuit institutions hold that ground now. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit is the recognized body of Inuit knowledge in Nunavut, defined by the territorial government as knowledge of the environment and of "the Inuit interrelationship with the elements, animals, people and family". The Nunavut Impact Review Board requires project proponents to build it into environmental assessments and monitoring plans. (NIRB)

The snow goggle

Preventive medicine carved out of walrus ivory

Spring light doubled off snow burns the eye. The Canadian Museum of History describes snow blindness as "a painful condition likened to a sunburn on the eyes," and describes snow goggles as working like sunglasses against sunlight reflecting off ice and snow. (Canadian Museum of History)

Inuit and Yup'ik makers cut goggles from ivory, bone, and other materials, pierced with narrow slits that admit a blade of light. The museum holds a walrus ivory pair found in an early Inuit house on Baffin Island, dated 1000 to 1600 CE, made to protect the wearer while hunting or traveling on spring ice.

The goggle identifies an environmental cause of injury and removes the cause rather than treating the eye afterward. The prevention is a manufactured device, carried on the face, in a place where a blind hunter endangers everyone he feeds.

The hands that remain

Tribal doctors work inside Alaska's health system now

Della Keats was born in 1907 at Usualak on the upper Noatak River and worked as an Iñupiaq healer and midwife until her death in 1986. The National Park Service records her methods as "massage, cold and hot therapy, manipulation of the aorta and organs, and local medicinal plants like sarġiq (wormwood)". She served as a midwife around Kotzebue for thirty years. (National Park Service)

She was largely self-taught, drawing her methods from other healers, from stories, and from her own inheritance. The University of Alaska Anchorage gave her an honorary doctorate in health sciences in 1983, and Maniilaq Health Center in Kotzebue marks Della Keats Day each year.

The Southcentral Foundation, an Alaska Native owned health system in Anchorage, runs a Traditional Healing department where tribal doctors work with people of all ages. It describes healing hands as "a physical modality in which practitioners perform body work using varied hands-on pressure". In June 2011 the clinic took the Indian Health Service Director's Special Recognition Award for showing how "tribal doctors, elders, and traditional healing practices can work side-by-side with Western medicine." (NLM Native Voices)

Common questions

Frequently asked