The Arctic, from northern Alaska across Canada to Greenland
Inuit Tradition
A living Arctic tradition whose powers go by different names from region to region: the Sea Woman who keeps the sea animals (Sedna, Nuliajuk, Takannaaluk, Sassuma Arnaa), the Moon Man and Sun Woman, and Sila, the breath of the world, told by Inuit from Alaska to Greenland.
History and context
One people, many regions, many names
Inuit live across the Arctic: in Inuit Nunangat in Canada (the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Nunavut, Nunavik, and Nunatsiavut), in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), and, as Iñupiat, in northern Alaska. They share a language family and a great deal of story, but not a single scripture or standardised mythology. The same figure goes by different names from one region to the next, and the stories told about her differ too. The Sea Woman whom Franz Boas recorded as Sedna in Cumberland Sound on Baffin Island in the 1880s is Nuliajuk among the Netsilingmiut, Takannaaluk or Uinigumasuittuq in Iglulik tellings, and Sassuma Arnaa, "mother of the deep", in West Greenland. "Sedna" has become the name the wider world knows, even giving its name to a distant dwarf planet, but it is one regional name among many, and this site gives the others alongside it wherever they are known.
A living tradition
These are not the beliefs of a vanished people. Inuit elders, storytellers, artists, and publishers tell these stories today, in Inuktitut and other Inuit languages as well as in English, Danish, and French. Many Inuit are also Christian, and communities and families hold a wide range of views about the old powers and about the angakkuit (shamans) who once dealt with them. The dates attached to this entry reflect archaeology, not the age of any story: the ancestors of today's Inuit, known to archaeologists as the Thule people, spread east from Alaska across the Arctic from roughly 1000 to 1300 CE, meeting the earlier Arctic people whom Inuit tradition remembers as the Tuniit.
Sources and their limits
Much of what outsiders know comes from ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Franz Boas's The Central Eskimo (1888), Hinrich Rink's Greenland collections, and above all the reports of the Fifth Thule Expedition (1921-24) led by Knud Rasmussen, who was himself of Greenlandic Inuit and Danish descent and recorded the words of named Inuit speakers such as Aua in Iglulik and Orpingalik among the Netsilingmiut. These books preserve invaluable testimony, but they also use terms, including "Eskimo", that many Inuit now reject, and they reflect the interests of their compilers. This site recommends reading them alongside Inuit-authored and community-led work: the Nunavut Arctic College series Interviewing Inuit Elders, in which Inuit students interviewed elders about their own knowledge; the books of Inhabit Media, an Inuit-owned publisher in Iqaluit; and the films of Isuma and other Inuit filmmakers.
What this site includes
The stories here are ones that Inuit elders and Inuit-led publishers have made public and that appear in published sources. They are summarised, not presented as authoritative scripts, and details that concern the practice of angakkuuniq (shamanism) are described only in general terms. Where a story differs by region, the differences are the point, not an obstacle to be smoothed away.
Cosmology
Sky, Land, Sea, and the Lands of the Dead
Inuit tradition as recorded in several regions places the moon's house and a land of the dead in the sky, people on the land and ice, the Sea Woman's house at the bottom of the sea, and Adlivun beneath; Sila, the air and world, surrounds all.
The sky
AboveThe sky and the moon's house
Where the sun sister and the moon brother travel, where the Moon Spirit has his house, and, in Boas's Baffin account, where Qudlivun, a happy land of the dead, lies for those who died by violence; the northern lights are often described as the dead at play.
Sila
The air, weather, and surrounding world, and the power that dwells in them.
The land and the ice
MiddleNuna, the land
Where people live, hunt, and travel, and where beings such as the ijirait lead the careless astray.
Visit Tikiġaq (Point Hope)
The sea
WatersThe Sea Woman's house
At the bottom of the sea, where the Sea Woman keeps the seals, walrus, and whales, and where an angakkuq may travel to comb her hair.
Visit Igloolik (Iglulik)
Adlivun
BelowAdlivun
In Boas's Baffin Island account, the land beneath where Sedna is mistress and to which her father Anguta carries the dead.
Visit Cumberland Sound (Kangiqtualuk)
Malina (the Sun Woman)
Anningan (the Moon Man)
Pinga
Sila
Tornarsuk
Tulunigraq (Raven Man)
Ijiraq
Sedna (the Sea Woman)
Qalupalik
Tupilaq
AngutaSources
Works cited
Franz Boas, The Central Eskimo (Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology)
Franz Boas
Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos (Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, vol. 7, no. 1)
Knud Rasmussen
Knud Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture (Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, vol. 8, nos. 1-2)
Knud Rasmussen
Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos (Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, vol. 7, no. 2)
Knud Rasmussen
Interviewing Inuit Elders, vol. 4: Cosmology and Shamanism (ed. Bernard Saladin d'Anglure; Nunavut Arctic College)
Mariano Aupilaarjuk, Lucassie Nutaraaluk, Rose Iqallijuq, Johanasi Ujarak, Isidore Ijituuq, Michel Kupaaq; ed. Bernard Saladin d'Anglure
About this guide
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 catalog period is the span of the sources this atlas draws on, not the age of the tradition itself. Many traditions are older than their first written record, and many are still practised.
8 in the atlas
Spirits & Powers
4 retold
Stories and myths
The Sea Woman: Sedna, Nuliajuk, TakannaalukoriginAcross the Inuit Arctic a young woman is wronged, thrown into the sea, and maimed, and becomes the keeper of the sea animals; the details, and even her name, change from region to region.
The Sun Sister and the Moon BrotheroriginA young woman discovers that the visitor who comes to her in the dark is her own brother; she flees with a blazing torch and becomes the sun, and he follows with a torch burned down to embers and becomes the moon.
Kiviuq's JourneysheroAfter a storm raised to avenge a mistreated orphan drowns the kayakers who mocked him, Kiviuq alone survives and begins a journey of many lifetimes, meeting a murderous woman, giant snapping shells, a fox-wife, and a goose-wife.
Raven Man and the Land of TikiġaqcreationIn the Iñupiaq tradition of Point Hope, Alaska, Tulunigraq, the Raven Man, harpoons a great creature of the sea whose body becomes the land of Tikiġaq, where the whaling village stands.
4 in the atlas
