Inuit

Inuit religious life was governed less by worship than by observance. The relation between people and the animals they killed carried obligations on both sides, and the rules, often rendered in English as taboos, covered how a carcass was handled, which land and sea foods could be worked or eaten together, and what a person had to do after a death or a birth. Breaking them was understood to be felt by the animals, who would then withhold themselves, so hunger was a moral condition before it was a meteorological one.

The figure who enforces this most directly is the sea woman, called Sedna in one region and Nuliajuk or Takannaaluk in others, who holds the sea mammals and withdraws them when offences accumulate. Sila, translated sometimes as air or weather and sometimes as the ordering intelligence of the world, is the wider power, less a person than a condition it is possible to be out of step with.

The angakkuq, the specialist who dealt with such breaches, was called on when hunting failed or illness persisted, and worked by locating the fault. The atlas describes that office and does not set out the initiation or the conduct of a seance, which are not published here. Bernard Saladin d'Anglure's work records a further dimension of the same system, in which naming, rebirth and a recognised third gender position run together.

Inuit are the peoples of the Arctic from Greenland across northern Canada to Alaska, speaking closely related languages within one continuum, and their history since contact is largely a history of institutions arriving faster than consent. Whaling stations, then Anglican and Catholic missions from the later nineteenth century, then federal administration, residential schools and forced relocations reshaped settlement patterns within two generations.

Conversion was extensive, and it did not simply delete what preceded it. Church membership sits alongside continued observance concerning animals, naming and the dead in ways that vary by community, and prophetic and revival movements have appeared repeatedly on the boundary between the two.

The term Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, what Inuit have always known to be true, was formulated in the late twentieth century as Nunavut was being negotiated, and the volume edited by Joe Karetak, Frank Tester and Shirley Tagalik presents it as a working body of law and ethics rather than as folklore: principles of relationship, of decision by consensus and of obligation to others, intended for use in schools, courts and government. Nunavut was created in 1999, and the Greenland home rule and self government arrangements of 1979 and 2009 rest on the same claim, that a people's own knowledge is a basis for administration and not only a heritage.