Inuit TraditionCreature
Ijiraq
- shape-shifts, often into caribou
- hides people and makes them forget
- cannot be seen directly, only from the corner of the eye
A shape-shifting being of the Kivalliq and Iglulik regions that can take the form of a caribou or a person and leads travellers and children astray, so that they cannot find their way home.
About Ijiraq
Shape-shifters of the land
Ijirait (singular ijiraq) are beings of the land in the traditions of the Kivalliq (west of Hudson Bay) and Iglulik regions of Nunavut. They can appear as caribou or as people, and are said to be hard to look at directly: you may glimpse one from the corner of your eye, but when you turn, it is gone. Their faces, in some tellings, are sideways.
Losing the way
Ijirait are known for leading people astray. A hunter may follow a caribou that is really an ijiraq and find himself lost; children who wander from camp may be taken by ijirait and hidden, and forget where they came from. Stories tell of lost people who find their way back by recognising an inuksuk, a stone marker, or by the help of others.
Told today
Ijirait appear in Nunavut Arctic College elders' volumes and in books from Inuit-owned publishers, and remain part of how children are taught caution on the land. The name has also been given to a moon of Saturn, Ijiraq, named alongside other Inuit-named moons.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Interviewing Inuit Elders, vol. 4: Cosmology and Shamanism (ed. Bernard Saladin d'Anglure; Nunavut Arctic College)
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
The danger rating is an editorial shorthand for how the myths portray the creature, not a claim made by the sources.