Worldviews of the Greenlanders: An Inuit Arctic Perspective

WORLDVIEWS OF THE GREENLANDERS

An Inuit Arctic Perspective

Birgitte Sonne

UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS

Text © 2017 University of Alaska Press

Published by

University of Alaska Press

P.O. Box 756240

Fairbanks, AK 99775-6240

Cover design by UA Press.

Interior design by Rachel Fudge.

Author photo by Zsuzsanna Willkan.

This publication is supported by the Velux Foundation.

Figures 1–8 redrawn by Lisa Devenish for printing.

Cover and endsheet images: Imaneq’s conversion to Christianity, watercolor by Aron.

1. Imaneq is encountered and cut up by the smiling giant, Qungussutariaq.

2. Reassembled and supported by his grandparents, Imaneq rides or glides on his kayak sitting-skin towards land. He is blinded/enveloped by his bladder float.

3. Imaneq is saved and brought back to life by Southerners, who know the correct ritual procedure.

4. Back home Imaneq dreams about the life and light of heaven. Notice that the hunting bladder and the light from heaven are painted in the same yellow, luminous color.

Source: J. Meldgaard (1982: 10–13), Greenland National Museum and Archives

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sonne, Birgitte.

Title: Worldviews of the Greenlanders : an Inuit Arctic perspective / by Birgitte Sonne.

Description: Fairbanks : University of Alaska Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017007893 (print) | LCCN 2017033908 (ebook) | ISBN 9781602233393 (ebook)| ISBN 9781602233386 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Inuit—Greenland—History. | Inuit—Greenland—Social life and customs. | Greenland—History. | Greenland—Social life and customs. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General. Classification: LCC E99.E7 (ebook) | LCC E99.E7 S6425 2017 (print) | DDC 998.2004/9712dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007893

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

A Note on Terminology

Introduction

Greenland: Regions and Place-names

Greenlanders, Kalaallit, Inuit

Traditional and Static versus Movement and Development

Worldview and Method

Recent Research on Inuit Worldviews, Methods, and Applicability

The Inuit/Yupiit Field: Pre- and Early Contact History

Thule and Late Dorset

Histories of Contact in Inuit/Yupiit Canada and Alaska

Evaluation of the Essential Sources: Descriptions, Statements, and Stories

West Greenland

East Greenland

Southeast and South Greenland

Northwest Greenland

Avanersuaq

The Stories

Theory

Contents: An Overview

Chapter 1: Space and Time

Orientation

Balance

Human Foreigners and Powers of the Sea and the Land

Chapter 2: Seasonal Rituals and Rituals of Crisis

Chapter 3: The Other World(s) and Its Beings

Chapter 4: Angakkut (Shamans)

Angakkuuneq

Ilisiinneq

Angakkussarneq (Apprenticeship)

Initiations

Traveling Abilities

Saqqummerneq, Initiation in Public

Chapter 5: Angakkoq Puulik (Shaman with a Bag)

1. Space and Time

Introduction

Being in Sila

The Other World, Asia or Silam Aappaa

Biocultural Time

Orientation

The Way of the World in Time and Space

Perceptions of Space and Land

Being in Space

The Coastal Center

Right and Left in East Greenland

Making a Living from Land and Sea

Summary

Balance

The Earth Is a Disk

Primordial Events

Primordial Events Strike Back

Earthquakes in East Greenland

The Threat or Boon of Gales

Gales and the Support of Heaven

The Earth Is a Tilting Disk

Somersaults

The Balanced Upright Human Being

Kayak Dizziness

Sila and Raven as Mediators of Transition

A Balanced Body = A Clear Mind: Sorcery and Insanity

Sila as Balance of Mind and Body

Human Foreigners and Powers of the Sea

Encircle the World and Circumnavigate Greenland

Across the Sea to Akilineq

Traditional Qilaatuaq

Acculturated Variants of Qilaatuaq

Reconsidering Hendrik and the Akilinermiut

Kivioq

Reflections on Real Threats and Imagined Beings of the Sea

The Land, the Hinterland, and Heaven

Travels Across the Land

Into the Land

Analysis of Kaassassuk’s Pinnga Forces

Pinnga and Rasmussen

The Kaassassuk Story

Kaassassuk Variants

Growing Nostrils, No Social Name, the Power-Imparting Inuat

Boulders and Pebbles

Forces of Spring and Playing with the Pillar of Support

Pillars Raised or Strengthened?

Kaassassuk’s Own Balance

Aspects of Silap Inua and Similar Figures in Ritual and Myth

Summary of Sea and Land Forces

2. Seasonal Rituals and Rituals of Crisis

Introduction

New Year Celebrations

West Greenland: Wife Exchange and Feasting

East Greenland: Masked Dances, Wife Exchange, and Feasting

Comparisons

The Fate of the Uaajeerneq Masks

Shamans’ Travels to and Fighting Visitors from Heaven at New Year

Ilimmarneq to the Northern Lights

Fighting Back Moon in Actual Ritual

The Acculturative Fate of Moon and Nalikkatteeq in Oral Lore

Summary of New Year or Winter Festivals

Rituals of Spring, Summer, and Autumn

Aqajarormiorsiorpua and Moon

Asiaq

Visits to Sea Woman: Sassuma Arnaa, Sedna/Nuliayuk, Nerrivik, or Ni-givik

Sea Woman and Whaling

Other Possible Ritual Figures of the Deep Sea

Moving In

Life Cycle Rites of Transition

The Multitude of Taboos

Birth, Puberty, and Death

Naming and Ritual Firsts

Marriage

Comparisons of Life-Cycle Rites in Societies with and without Ranking

Mental Development

Greenlandic Animal Cult

Conclusions

3. The Other World(s) and Its Beings

Introduction: Transitional Aspects of Sila

Silam Aappaa and Asia

Environment in Changing Perspectives

The Routes to the Realms Above and Below

Exploring the Realms of Death

Temporal Aspects of Otherworldly Life

Dyadic Relations

Remaking Cosmology on Christian Terms

The Times of Mythic Events

The Earliest Recordings of Inuit Origin Myths

Timeless Myths of Origin in Chronological Sequences

Main Conclusions

Inuat and Perspectivism

Inua, Tarneq, and Perspectivism

The Transmigrating Essence of Life

The Language of the Others

Perspectivism Summarized

4. Angakkut (Shamans)

Introduction

Short Outline of East Greenlandic Apprenticeship and Initiations

The First and Consecutive Performances

Terms and Key Symbols of Shamanism

Discourses in Research on Shamanism

Some Definitions

The East Greenlandic Shaman, Emically Defined

Research into Greenlandic Shamans

Testing Main Issues of Western Research in Shamanism on East Greenlandic Sources

Possession and Trance

Mentally Deviant?

Unavoidable Calling?

Artificial Start

Motivations

Conclusion about Greenlandic Attitudes to Becoming a Shaman

Social Aspects of Ranking and Gender of Shamans

Ranking

Male Shamans as Hunters

Female Shamans

Female Shamans and the Moon

A Third Sex?

Shamans and the Third Sex

Sipineq

Cross-Gendered Upbringing

Piaaqqusiat, Children Raised in Odd Clothing

Preferring Boys to Girls

Preferring Children

Male Dominance?

Women and Men at the Margin of Society: Accusations of Sorcery

Third Sex Summarized

The Art of Ilisiinneq

Early Statements on Sorcery in Context

The Balancing of Shamanic and Sorcerous Means

Summary

Apprenticeship (Angakkussarneq)

Generalizations on East Greenlandic Apprenticeship in Research

Instruction and Syllabus

In Search of Future Helping Spirits

Social Conditions for Pupils’ and Shamans’ Relations with Spirits

Sexual Relations with Spirits

Individual Property of Spirits and Catches

Summary

Initiations

In Theory

Shaman’s Light (Qaamaneq)

Light, Movement, Attraction, and Heat

The Experience of Change in Vision

Initiations through Death and Revival

Initiation by Individual Deceased Humans

The Northern Lights, Moon, and Nalikkatteeq

Being Devoured by Moon’s Freshwater Bear

Being Sucked Out

Symbolism of Being Devoured and Regurgitated

Entering and Leaving the Liminal Phase

Uersaq, as the Spirit of Public Initiation

Summary

Additional Research in Greenlandic Initiating Spirits

Toornaarsuk

Concluding Remarks on the East Greenlandic Toornaarsuit

The Ululoo-Calling Toornaq

Achieving Travel Powers

Ilimmarneq

Gliding

A More Direct Way Upwards?

Dress Codes for Flying versus Gliding

Public Initiations

Prelude to Disclosure: Ueerineq (Delivery) and Niilerneq (Wolfing Down)

Saqqummerneq, Coming Forward

Concluding Summary of Ueerineq and Saqqummerneq

Enhancing Reputation

Degrees of Nakedness

5. Angakkoq Puulik (Shaman with a Bag)

Pooq, a Multitude of Meanings

Pooq Combining This with the Other World

Initiation to Angakkoq Puulik

The East Greenlandic Puulik Initiations in Ritual and Myth

Akku’s Successful Puulik Initiation

The Puulik Myth

Karraq, Missuarniannga, and Tuttu’s Wife

Gains

The Puulik Myth’s Polar Bear and Walrus

Polar Bear and Walrus in Cosmology

Qilaatuaq

Aloruttaq

Characteristics of Polar Bear and Walrus

Polar Bear and Walrus in Heaven

Other Inuit Shamans with Angakkoq Puulik Qualities

Protection by Invisibility

Caul, Ikiaq, First Clothing

Performing in Ikiaq

Bearded Seal in Everyday Use, Ritual Practice, and as a Metaphor

The Bogey of New Year Festivals

Anautalik, the Father of Sea Woman?

Armed Figures in Inuit and Yupiit Ritual and Myth

Angakkut Puullit and Sea Woman

Summary of Bearded Seal Issues

The Making of Cosmology: Acculturative Potential of the Puulik Tradition

The Child of the Moon

Tunutoorajik

Paraphrase of Tunutoorajik

Interpretation of Tunutoorajik

Baptism in the Light of Pooq

A Prominent Acculturative Pooq: Tricksteresque Qivaaqiarsuk

Paraphrase of Qivaaqiarsuk

Analysis

The Tuneq of Aron’s Qivaaqiarsuk

Acculturative Trickster

Pooq in the Making of Cosmologies: Summary and Discussion

6. Conclusion

Being at the Balancing Center of the World

Rituals at Points of Transitions in Time

At the Center of Society: Naming

Relations of Sex and Gender

Others, Foreigners, and Boundaries

Social Obligations of Relations with Game Animals

Shamans—Socially

Beyond Relative Boundaries

Asymmetrical Dyadic Relations

Air, Drinking Water, and Light: The Basics of Life

The Mediating Twilight of Outside versus Inside

Pooq

Bearded Seal as a Pooq Animal

Acculturating Puuat

Inuit/Yupiit Perspectivism Reconsidered

Cover

Essences

Coda

Reference List

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Illustrations

Imaneq’s conversion to Christianity

1. Regions of Greenland

2. The Thule pioneers

3. Pre- and early colonial trade routes

4. Colonies and Moravian missions

5. Three phases of the Thule culture in Greenland

6. Population movements after 1650 AD

7. The mirror effect of localizers on the west coast

8. The mirror effect of localizers on the east coast

9. Longhouse in Ammassalik/Tasiilaq, 1885

10. Members of a household on the move by umiak and kayak

11. Spring camp at Qinngeq, Ammassalik

12. Teemiartissaq practicing qilaneq

13. Qilaaqutserneq/divination covered by a skin carpet

14. Shaman’s séance with assistants

15–17. Rites of passage

18. The two main East Greenlandic shaman initiations

19. The freshwater bear ready to consume the unconscious pupil

20. Shaman’s séance

21. Married couple drilling fire

22. Flying helping spirit

23. East Greenlandic ikiaq (gutskin anorak)

24. The giant falcon catches the son of Tunutoorajik and Ittuku

25. The boulder is annihilated by the wry-mouthed kayaker or fulmar spirit, equngasoq

26. Recovery of an angerlartussiaq

Preface

Having studied Greenland, Arctic Canada, and Alaska for most of my adult life, my primary focus has been on the precolonial Greenlandic worldview, its key symbols, and changes brought about by early colonial trade and Christian missions. As no such exploration of the topic has been conducted since William Thalbitzer and Knud Rasmussen made their contributions almost a century ago and because fairly recent publications about the cosmologies of Canadian Inuit and Alaska Iñupiat and Yupiit call for a Greenland companion, I feel that the time has come for a thorough presentation of the Greenlandic material. While some authors who write about Alaska and Canada make stray references to Greenlandic sources in English, German, and French translations, the extensive corpus in Danish and Greenlandic remains a closed book to most foreigners. These rich and revealing sources invite study, comparisons, and contemplation.

A Note on Terminology

Inuit in Greenland, Arctic Canada, and northern Alaska speak the Inuit languages or, rather, dialects, because they form a linguistic continuum (Michael Fortescue pers. comm.). The older Yup’ik languages are spoken by the Yupiit in Southwest Alaska, from Unalakleet in the north to Kodiak Island in the south, in the north on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait, and by a very few native speakers among the Yupiit on the Chukotka Peninsula in northeast Siberia. The Aleut language is the oldest related language (Krauss 1988) and is probably mixed with a now-extinct Indian language (Fortescue 1998). The term Inuit has been established as a politically correct term for these people, but because not all Yupiit are thrilled to be called Inuit, I use Inuit/Yupiit—both in the plural—as a common term. The recent ban on using Eskimo is thus followed (except of course in quotations from older sources). Yup’ik in the singular is today the accepted term used for cultural characteristics of the Yupiit in Alaska (Yupik refers Chukotka and St. Lawrence Island). I rarely refer to the Unangan (Aleut Islanders), because they were not affected by the same Thule Culture influences that reached all the other Inuit and Yupiit in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. The term Eastern Inuit credits striking cultural differences between Inuit west and east of the Mackenzie River in Canada (Burch 1988b; Lantis pers. comm.). The Eastern Inuit thus include the vast majority of Canadian Inuit plus Greenlanders. In late historic times, however, the dividing line moved slightly east due to the immigration of western Inuit from northern Alaska (Usher 1971). Ethnic names of Canadian Inuit groups are used except for those of the Labrador Inuit (Nunavimmiut of the Nunatsiavut agreement 2005) and South Baffin Island (the southern Nunavummiut of the Nunavut agreement 1995). My distinctions between Greenland group names, outlined below, follow historic-linguistic criteria.

Introduction

This introduction opens with a survey of regional names. Next it takes the reader through relevant points in prehistoric and historic times of Greenland’s changing inhabitants, climatic changes, and exchanges within the region and with foreigners such as whalers, colonial traders, and missionaries. I discuss the term worldview and describe my method in comparison with those employed in recent research on Inuit and Yupiit worldviews. My method is similar to the Anthropological Field Study (AFS) method, which covers an entire field of related cultures (e.g., of Inuit and Yupiit). But because I also consider ethnohistorical issues, an outline of the contact histories of Arctic Canada and Inuit/Yupiit Alaska ends the section on method. The following evaluation of the sources, a longtime necessity in the Danish humanities, pays particular attention to the stepwise colonization of Greenland, region by region, from 1721 to its completion in 1894 and 1910 with the establishment of trade and mission in Ammassalik (East Greenland) and Avanersuaq (Thule), respectively (see fig. 4, p. 9). Thus the impacts of trade, mission, and colonial administration differ according to time and place as do the discourses of the authors. Together such differences offer knowledge about changes in Greenlandic worldviews.

Then I will present my chosen theories—those of practice, perception, and perspectivism—and finally make content summaries of chapters 1–5.

Greenland: Regions and Place-names

Two hurdles must first be overcome by new readers of Greenland’s history and prehistory: the name Thule and the varying premises for changes in regional names.

Thule is the name of both a region and a culture. The region Thule is north of Melville Bay, which is now called Avanersuaq. The name Thule was indirectly given to the region by Knud Rasmussen, who in vain tried to persuade the Danish government to colonize this northernmost part of the country with mission and trade. He took on the responsibility himself, obtained funding, and in 1910 named his trading post the Thule station.

The Thule culture developed along the Arctic coast in northern Alaska and northwest Arctic Canada. It started to spread eastward about 1000 AD and reached northern Greenland by 1200. The members of this culture became the Inuit ancestors of present-day Greenlanders. The Thule culture was named in compliment to Rasmussen, because the first artifacts were excavated at Cape York (Comer’s Midden) during Rasmussen’s Second Thule Expedition (1916–18). The actual naming and first thorough description of the Thule culture, however, was done by Therkel Mathiassen based on his rich findings at Naujan, Repulse Bay, during the Fifth Thule Expedition (Gulløv 2016: 148–51). I shall reserve the name Thule for the culture and use Avanersuaq to describe the region.

On the official map of Greenland, or Kalaallit Nunaat, the country consists of three parts: Avannaa (North Greenland), Kitaa (West Greenland), and Tunu (Backside, or East Greenland). The Danish colonization of Kitaa started in 1721, close to Nuuk, and was by and large accomplished by about 1800; Tunu (Ammassalik and Ittoqqortoormiit) followed in 1894 and 1925, and Rasmussen’s Thule station in Avannaa in 1910. From the very beginning of colonization, the Royal Mission College was tied to the colonies (roughly the cities of today) located all along the coast. The German Moravians, who got permission to missionize from 1733 to 1900, extended southwards from Nuuk to Friedrichsthal/Narsamijiit in competition with the Danish Royal Mission.

For nearly 200 years, from 1782 to 1953, the colonies of the west coast were divided into two provinces: South Greenland stretched from Sisimiut to the southernmost trading annex near Cape Farewell, and North Greenland extended north from Sisimiut to Melville Bay, including Upernavik. Apart from references to H. J. Rink, the superintendent of South Greenland from 1855 to 1868, my references to this division in provinces are scarce.¹ The transformation of the colonies into municipalities (beginning in 1911 and still changing) is largely beyond the scope of this book.

Greenlanders, Kalaallit, Inuit

Within Nordic history, the Western term Greenlanders used to be the appellation conferred on Norse settlers, who also gave Greenland its name (Nørlund 1967: 10; Arneborg 1997: 43).² The vanguard arrived from Iceland about 985 AD, settled in the south (Eastern Settlement) and moved consecutively farther north into the fjords east of today’s Nuuk (Western Settlement). They remained for 400 to 500 years, abandoning first the Western Settlement and then, in about 1450, the Eastern Settlement.³ The term Kalaallit (Kalaaleq in the singular), as the present Greenlanders call themselves, most probably derives from exchanges between the Norse settlers and the vanguard Inuit along the west coast.⁴

The Norse and the Inuit no doubt met. They did fight at times and they may have mixed to some degree. Be that as it may—except perhaps for the change in self-appellation from Inuit to Kalaallit—the Norse did not demonstrably change the Inuit worldview. The Greenlanders’ own stories about the Norse cannot be trusted as historical testimony. They make sense only in contemporary colonial contexts, and I shall treat them accordingly. In modern Greenland, the term Inuit has been revived for political reasons several times in order to promote the achievement of rights of autonomy. The first political party of 1963, the Inuit Party, did not succeed. But the term still makes sense in the name of the radical political party known since 1976 as Inuit Ataqatigiit, in the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), and in ongoing discussions of identity that take place on the internet. Some Inuit advocates also prefer Nunarput, which means our land and is the name of the national anthem,⁵ to the formal name Kalaallit Nunaat, the land of the Greenlanders. From their perspective, Inuit signifies traditional self-sufficiency while Kalaallit implies dependence on the Qallunaat (Danes/Europeans).

As I am not bound to the ethnopolitical issue of identity, I shall use the Western term Greenlanders instead of Kalaallit or Inuit. By Inuit, I refer to the prehistorical Thule culture people including their present descendants in Canada and North Alaska. By Inuit/Yupiit, I refer to Greenlanders, Inuit and Yupiit alike. For dialectal-historical reasons,⁶ within Greenland I distinguish between the following populations: the Inughuit or Polar Inuit of Avanersuaq; the Northwest Greenlanders of the Upernavik region; the West Greenlanders; the Southwest Greenlanders (Nuuk-Nanortalik); the Southerners (Qavat or Qavanngarnisat) of the Nanortalik–Cape Farewell region; the Southeast Greenlanders south of Ammassalik (depopulated by 1900); and the East Greenlanders of the Ammassalik region.⁷ The East Greenlanders of Ittoqqortoormiit/Scoresbysund, which was established in 1925 north of Ammassalik/Tasiilaq, are rarely mentioned due to a minimal number of relevant sources.

Traditional and Static versus Movement and Development: Precolonial and Early Colonial History of the Greenland Inuit

Since I find the adjectives precontact and precolonial clumsy, I often resort to the much-debated term traditional to refer to precontact ways of thinking, such as idioms reflected in statements and stories. The concept came under discussion in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s introduction to their book Invention of Tradition (1963). As the term traditional fell into disrepute, it became necessary for scholars to define that term if they used it (e.g., Brimnes 2004).⁸ Several definitions appeared until the term became relativized according to the ways people put traditions into use, inventing, reinventing, invoking, or simply unconsciously repeating them (e.g., Fienup-Riordan 1990). My usage of the term traditional refers to neither original nor static. Like other people, the Greenlanders took a considered, creative part in the ongoing changes, a fact to which both prehistory and their oral lore also give strong testimonies.

With regard to former connotations of traditional, stagnant, static, and original, the development and expansion of the Inuit Thule culture, the culture of the Greenlanders’ Inuit ancestors, speaks to the contrary (e.g., Gulløv ed. 2004; Morrison 2001). Continuous development has been documented in Alaska from circa 3000 BC (Denbigh, Arctic Small Tool cultures) via the Old Bering Sea and Ipiutak cultures to 1000 AD (Punuk and Birnirk Thule cultures) (Gulløv 1999; Morrison 2001). Nor would static be a correct characterization of the immigrant Thule Inuit’s subsequent adaptations to the climatic changes in Arctic Canada and Greenland from their arrival about 1200 AD and on. The Little Ice Age (peaking about 1650) caused a decline in Inuit whaling, the main source of subsistence for the immigrating Inuit. Whaling remained possible only along the middle part of the west coast (McGhee 1984; Birket-Smith 1959; Gulløv 1997) and to a minimal degree in East Greenland.⁹ The impossibility of whaling in South Greenland created a dependency on the baleen used for deep-sea fishing rods because halibut was the main resource in that region. Travels thus became urgent to whaling grounds at Amerloq (close to Sisimiut) and Disko Bay. Similarly, soapstone deposits for lamps and pots were limited to a few areas; caribou were not equally accessible everywhere (Gulløv 1986a; 1987), and neither were beluga, lumpsucker, guillemots, or halibut. The animals’ seasonal arrivals in big numbers at certain limited locales drew people from near and far. Consequently, the Greenlanders were connected in a long line of places of assembly arranged like a string of pearls, which grew in importance with the annual visits of European skipper merchants in the 17th century and whalers in the 18th century. These travels to places of assembly led to intermarriages across territorial boundaries and long-distance partnerships. All in all, the term static would not suit the cultural changes and movements of the traditional Greenlanders.

Changes brought about by trade and mission can be followed as soon as written sources are at hand. The European skippers and whalers, Dutch in particular, arrived every summer, caught whales, traded with the West Greenlanders, and returned in autumn.

This traffic was a main reason why Danish colonization, from its onset in 1721, immediately met with economic difficulties. The commodities offered by the Danes could not compete, and since the trade was supposed to finance missionary activity, the entire project was on the verge of being abandoned. Missionary Hans Egede petitioned the king of Denmark, which brought about a change in politics, and gradually, from 1734 to 1797, colonies were established along the entire west coast.

The competition in trade and whaling came to a halt in 1777, when the Dutch whalers suffered a devastating shipwreck on their way home. After that, the monopoly enjoyed by Den Kongelige Grønlandske Handel (KGH, the Royal Greenland Trading Department) prevented unlicensed foreign entrepreneurs from settling or participating in Greenlandic production and trade until 1953, when Greenland was opened up by law. From 1810 to the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1814, however, Greenland and the Faroe Islands came under the patronage of Great Britain. Supplies were to pass via Leith, and British whalers, who hunted off the Greenland west coast, apparently continued to do so annually right into the 20th century. Individual Greenlanders’ contacts and trade with these whalers are well documented, as are larger-scale festive summertime gatherings (e.g., Sonne 2005: ID 443, 869, 1897, 1952, 1953; Gad 1984: 202; Giescke 1910). Indeed, kalattuut—quick hybrids of British dances—have survived as a vivid symbol of Greenlandic legacy and identity. Otherwise, the Danes (and, until the 1814 treaty of Kiel, also Norwegians) were the only foreigners to impact Greenlandic views and ways of life—and they did so thoroughly.¹⁰

At first, Hans Egede, who led the colonization efforts, planned to convert the remaining Norse settlers from popish Catholicism to Danish Lutheranism. However, he met with no Norse, only pagan Inuit, upon whom he turned his zeal. In compliance with Luther’s ideas, the Lutheran church demanded literacy as a ticket to baptism. The language had to be Greenlandic, which Hans Egede never came to master, but after a couple of years he managed to convert the main articles of faith into some intelligible written Greenlandic (H. Egede 1925: 132–42). His son Poul, who was 12 in 1721, became eloquent and helpful. By 1800 the majority of Southwestern and Western Greenlanders could read, and some could write.

Hans Egede first met with strong opposition from the Greenlanders, mostly from men and shamans, but after a decade he also faced competition from the German Moravians. These nonacademic craftsmen got royal permission to assist Hans Egede in 1733, but the intended cooperation ended in bitter strife on theological matters. On their side, the Moravians also learned and used Greenlandic and taught literacy. They attracted predominantly Southerners to their station Noorliit at Nuuk, first those who passed by on their travels to the whaling grounds and later, when the region became largely depopulated by a 1733–34 smallpox epidemic, a good number of immigrant families. The island of Kangeq, off Nuuk, also became predominantly populated by Southerners. The Moravians expanded southward with additional stations (Akunnat/Lichtenau in 1758; Alluitsoq/Lichtenfels in 1774) right on to Cape Farewell (Friedrichsthal/Narsaq Kujalleq/Narssarmijit in 1824), and in 1861 and 1864 they added two annexes, one at Uummannaq in the eastern interior of the Nuuk fjords an one at Illorpaat (not marked on fig. 4) north of Narsaq Kujalleq/Narssarmijit, respectively.

As Danish colonization extended into settled trading posts, travel between neighboring colonies declined, whereas outlying posts remained attractive to those without such opportunities. Depopulation of the southeast coast, starting in the 18th century and completed in the year 1900, was the most impressive migration. Similarly, after the repopulation of Avanersuaq in the 18th century by the Inughuit (Polar Inuit), they received a few families originating from Southeast Baffin Island in 1863.

Colonization of East Greenland and Avanersuaq in the far north lagged behind until 1894 and 1910, respectively.

Movements from East to South and Southwest Greenland left the Ammassalimmiut isolated from their former Southeast Greenlandic trading partners and waiting for a trading station to be established. They were promised one in the near future when visited in 1884–85 by Gustav Holm’s Konebådsekspedition (Women’s Boat Expedition). But the promise was not immediately fulfilled. In the meantime, the Ammassalik region’s population was reduced by nearly one-third (from 413 to 294 persons) in 1892. The decline has been interpreted in various ways, but a complete repopulation enumerated in 1896 points to the attraction exerted by the eventual establishment of the trading station in 1894.¹¹ The second missionary to Ammassalik, the West Greenlander catechist Christian Rosing, was highly effective. He arrived in 1904, and he baptized the last pagan East Greenlander in 1921.

The Polar Inuit of Avanersuaq had been offered Western commodities in trade by the explorer Robert Peary, who from 1891 time and again went in search of the North Pole. In 1909, when he claimed to have finally reached it, he stopped his expeditions north and also ceased trade with the Polar Inuit. By that point the Danish government was reluctant to colonize the region, so first Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, leader of the 1902–4 Literary Expedition, and after his death his traveling companion, Knud Rasmussen, took the initiative (Michelsen 2014). He raised the money and established a mission in 1909 and a trade station in 1910. In 1937, four years after Rasmussen’s death, the Danish state eventually took over.

In the evaluation of the sources below, as well as throughout the book, I will add several details will to this short outline of Greenland prehistory and colonial history.

Worldview and Method

In my attempt to relate precolonial Greenlandic ideas about their way of life and its conditions to the cosmologies of the other Inuit and the Yupiit, I use as my point of departure the extensive and fairly recent spread of the Inuit Thule culture to the entire area. I look for orientation in space, in time reckoning, for meanings of rituals, myths, stories, key words, symbols, and body analogies. And I look for changes—remakings of cosmologies (Barth)—in treating my selected issues.

Worldview has long been in dispute as an anthropological term along with the related folk models and cultural models. Half a century ago, Ong strongly advocated the thesis that people of oral cultures conceived of the world as something dynamic and relatively unpredictable, an event-world rather than an object-world, highly personal, overtly polemic, fostering sound-oriented traditionalist personality structures. Worldviews are thus produced exclusively by literate cultures (Ong 1969: 634; 1982). Boyer partly follows suit, attacking the anthropological (mis)conviction that repetitive behavior (religious rituals in particular) presupposes static traditions based on a coherent worldview. Rejecting the descriptor "static, Boyer admits that a worldview may exist but not as the base for people’s communication. Instead, people think using concrete situations, not by employing general abstractions or symbols. Rituals are repeated not in order to uphold ideas but because precise repetitions are considered decisive (our ancestors told us to do so; we always did it that way). In everyday communication, people exchange not ideas but events, which can narrate a myth or elicit ritual guidelines. However, nobody interprets the myth or explains why the ritual should follow those lines. The sequence of ritual events is remembered, and in case anybody should cherish lofty ideas about the aim of the ritual—for example, that the knowledge conferred in puberty rites is comprehended by the young—the discrepancy between ideology and practice is astounding (Boyer 1990).

Obviously, both Ong and Boyer are right in rejecting the existence of a conscious, coherent worldview in oral or small-scale (and by most people in large-scale) societies. The unconscious worldview that Boyer grants such illiterates must be based, he maintains, on common practice following certain grammatical and syntactic rules like those of a language. Analyzing practice, the most salient verbal and bodily acts, as both stereotypes and in contexts, must be the method of coming to know that worldview (Boyer 1990). Using that method on the implicit Greenlandic worldview would necessitate conducting fieldwork in the past.

Keesing’s view is less rigid. Rather than favoring noncontradictory models he sees a folk model as representing a set of opening strategies for using cultural knowledge in the world; they comprise sets of shortcuts, idealizations, and simplifying paradigms that work just well enough yet need not fit together without contradiction into global systems of coherent knowledge. These sets can hardly be considered constituents for cultural knowledge; rather, they appear only as its surface manifestations. On the other hand, Keesing does not deny people the drive and tendency to consider things and think through rules, although such rules may be the outcome of the conversations between informant and anthropologist (Keesing 1987).

Tim Ingold, whose goal is to combine anthropology with biology, accepts neither rules nor the term worldview in reference to small-scale, oral societies like premodern hunter-gatherers. They do not make a view of the world but take up a view in it. They relate to space from the inside as if existing within a sphere, not from the outside as if looking upon a globe. Their life-world, Ingold’s preferred term, is not a matter of transmitted constructions. It is not like a cognitive schema of collective representations ordering an otherwise chaotic mess of perceptions, transmitted through the generations and available for application independently of one’s bodily activity in the world. It is not a worldview (Ingold 2000: 225). By contrast, life-world is a matter of engagement in the environment, where people dwell, sense, and act in relationships with its other beings, humans and nonhumans alike. They achieve their skills, capabilities, and knowledge in learning by doing, imitating the movements of those who know how. Through coming to know by body-mind, they grow their skills. People grow with one another, continuously, from infancy right into very old age. Perception, activity, bodily movement (including those of one’s eyes in seeing), awareness, the inseparability of mind and body: those are the key words of Ingold’s theory of agency-in-the-world. He quotes Bourdieu, of course, whose habitus, the embodied dispositions and knowledge of one’s society’s way of life, can be likened to the skills of Ingold. Yet Ingold further includes the skilled knowledge of one’s whole environment, which is comprised of land, tasks, and relationships. Knowledge, he stresses, is gained through revelation—that is, experientially, for example by staying aware of any movement and change in one’s environment. This is in contrast to gaining knowledge through the control over nature that is sought and apparently accomplished by modern Western reason and technology.

Concerning method, the common critique has it that Bourdieu failed to translate his theory of practice into operative variables. The same is noted by Ingold about the phenomenologists on whom he relies, Merleau-Ponty in particular (Ingold 2000: 171). So, what are we to do then, unable as we are to do fieldwork in the past and having to rely upon written statements and stories in our attempt at coming to know or becoming skilled in the oral life-world of the Greenlanders? Ingold himself actually accepts the term worldview in one particular case and the neighboring term cosmology in some others. Worldview passes unquestioned in his quotation of Hallowell’s attempt at understanding the Ojibwa attributes of personhood: [They] form part of a comprehensive worldview that is projected onto reality-as-we-know-it. His [Hallowell’s] concern is to understand the worldview, not the fundamental nature of reality (95). This is exactly my concern with regard to the premodern Greenlanders. Furthermore, cosmology carries a positive value in the following declarations with which I agree: Traditional cosmology places the person at the centre of an ordered universe of meaningful relations . . . [it serves] as a foundation for proper conduct towards the environment (216); pre-modern and non-Western cosmologies are anthropocentric in the strict sense of placing the human beings at the hub of a dwelt-in world, a centre of embodied awareness that reaches out, through the activity of the senses, into its surroundings (218). Still, because (?) the multiple meanings of sila—namely world, space (the outside), weather, reason, and its way, silap ingerlasia—point to view more than to scientific logic, I prefer worldview to a term ending in -logy, such as cosmology. However, in compliance with academics, I use the adjectival form, cosmological.

Culture is another term that suffers a sorry fate in Ingold’s effort to combine biology with anthropology and mind with body and to break down the dichotomy between subject and object. Ingold declares that cultural constructions are prefabricated by the anthropologists, who then attribute them to their objects of research. In treating metaphors and symbols I shall drop the anchor into tangible contexts and strictly follow their associations of practical logic; I will remain on earth but—against Ingold—I will, when flying with the shaman, have to ascend from the dwelt-in hub and adopt the imagined bird’s-eye perspective bestowed on both him and the inua (the being, person, owner, indweller) of the moon (hereafter Moon) in many stories. This perspective must be rooted in the views gained from the local lookout and from climbing the mountains in one’s own environment.

Recent Research on Inuit Worldviews, Methods, and Applicability

For good reason, Ingold draws heavily on Ann Fienup-Riordan’s analysis of the Southwest Alaska Yup’ik cosmology. Apparently, however, these Yupiit do not seem to agree with his theory of living-in-the-world but rather with the possibility to think out rules allowed by Keesing. Having successfully observed and analyzed the structures of practice within the seal parties of the Nelson Islanders in particular, Fienup-Riordan continued asking about practice when she got the job of interviewing the elders about the (traditional) ways of their parents and grandparents: "You kass’at [White people] always want to know about the things we do, but it is the rules that are important" (Fienup-Riordan 1994: xiii). The superior rule, which Fienup-Riordan was taught time and again, both explicitly and through metaphors, concerned passages being opened and closed in the boundaries between the two worlds: those of humans and nonhumans (6f). Eventually, paying heed to this discourse and thus in consonance with more recent anthropology, Fienup-Riordan analyzed practice accordingly. Following that train of thought, all sorts of descriptions and statements made sense on topics like upbringing, rites of passage, the treatment of illness, the ceremonies. Taken together they showed a coherent world with an extensive potential for explaining most occurrences in life. This was a convincing version of the Yup’ik worldview but hardly the only possible one that could be rendered probable, as Fienup-Riordan admits.

The same conscious, superior rule cannot be pursued in the Greenlandic sources. They do mention boundaries set by, or to be overcome by, travelers between this and the Other World that similarly show a clear division between humans and nonhumans. Devices for opening up or overcoming boundaries, as well as involuntarily setting individual new ones, will be discussed in chapter 6, Conclusion. However, other oppositions are also at play, and additional ideas and metaphors have been shown to be more promising in outlining aspects of the Greenlanders’ worldview. One such aspect is balance, although not every relevant issue can be subsumed under this concept. So, neither a complete structure like the one that Fienup-Riordan has described, nor the following system proposed by Saladin d’Anglure, have been achieved with regard to the Greenlandic early colonial worldview.

Academic discussions about the relevance of worldviews in small-scale oral societies apparently never bothered the French anthropologist Saladin d’Anglure. Taking as his point of departure the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss and a lifetime of fieldwork in Arctic Canada, Saladin d’Anglure has explored the traditional world of the Inuit and come up with an impressive result: a schematic outline of Inuit orientation in space and time. It combines the annual round with the life cycles according to the most salient binary oppositions in ritual and myth. Three levels are interconnected by analogy with the fetus in its mother’s womb at the center on the lowest level, the igloo (snow house) on the next, earthly level, and the space beneath the heavenly vault on the third. The annual round of light and darkness, the temporal coming and going of game animals, the prevailing winds that are opposed by gender-associated corners of the world, the imagined worlds above and below the one in the middle—all fit within a space-time outline that reflects the ongoing transformations between the binary oppositions of light and darkness, heat and cold, land and sea, and gender symbolism. Naturally, this outline is not a universal, considering the distinct Arctic conditions of that world; although house = visible space is common to most cultures, the fetus in its womb is not a worldwide analogy.¹² The notion that the fetus receives its skeletal bones from its father’s semen, its blood from its mother, and its flesh from the animals eaten by both parents is probably also culture-specific (Saladin d’Anglure 1986).

Saladin d’Anglure’s outline is inspiring for my analysis insofar as similar oppositions are at work in Greenlandic myth, ritual, and orientation. I do make use of several of its points, especially those that seem to throw new light on otherwise obscure statements and stories. The center of the outline, the fetus in its womb, is particularly revealing with regard to my far-reaching analysis of a certain initiation of East Greenland shamans, the angakkut puullit. But otherwise the Greenlandic sources, belonging to highly differing historical periods as they do, must be analyzed in their historical contexts of transformation. In that regard, J. G. Oosten’s (1945–2016) method comes closer to the one I use.

Starting out with firm structuralist conviction that a worldview is based on an ideological theory (Oosten 1976), Oosten moved away from this belief and on to employing a method including changes over time and covering an extended ethnographic field. Focusing on variations and transformations, he still looks in part for binary oppositions, especially their mediating agencies. The method, called anthropological field studies (AFS), was developed at the University of Leiden and was originally inspired by Marcel Mauss’s way of eliciting the seasonal variations present within the common Inuit and Yupiit sociocultural heritage. The two main features of this shared heritage were those of language and of periods of assembly that intensified ritual life (in contrast to times of dispersal into smaller groups with hardly any religious manifestations at all). Despite flaws in empiricism due to limited sources at that date, Mauss’s idea of focusing on variations and not on identical traits within a cultural field (not to be confused with Bourdieu’s field) has proved fruitful by the Leiden anthropologists in analyzing Indonesian cultures. Oosten uses the method on the Inuit field (e.g., Oosten 2006), covering related people from Chukotka to East Greenland and from the Arctic to the Subarctic in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.

Apart from my particular interest in metaphors, symbols, differences in social organization, and historical issues, agreements between the AFS method and my own (throughout some decades) are striking. Whenever relevant I similarly look for variations all over the Inuit/Yupiit field, and basically, I presuppose that inside the region the data become mutually interpretative (Oosten 2006). Relationship in language and prehistory defines the Inuit/Yupiit area as a field. This means that practices, metaphorical references, motifs, and so on that are found among related groups widely distributed over time and space represent a common substratum. By basically I make a reservation, because the data do not always appear on the same level of explicitness. In many cases they become mutually interpretative only in the way that explicit connotations or meanings in one locale may offer a key to understanding implicit connotations in another. In other words, variation provides a field of data from which, by inference, you can tease out underlying principles. Parallels in themes appear in multiple contexts that inspire interpretations with reference to what else you know about the society, environment, and culture in question. Take for instance this clear statement among the Polar Inuit that observing the taboos¹³ keeps the threatening powers of the world in balance and then the examples they offer of the effects of breaking them: a tsunami may swallow up the houses or an avalanche bury the entire settlement. I see overbalance one or the opposite way implied in these movements. Restoring the balance means that the effect of the breaks must be neutralized. In many other Inuit and Yupiit groups, where the rationale may be less explicitly stated, this was brought about by public confession, a ritual frequently led by a shaman. In South Baffin Island, the confessional ritual was held at the equinoxes, led by a shaman representing a raven figure. The confessions were communicated to the Sea Woman (Nuliayuk or Sedna or Senna, the one down there in front) and were meant to clean the land of hindrances for the coming season’s hunt. Curiously, these points in time, the equinoxes, coincide with the highest tides of the year, symbolized by these Inuit with strong movements: the earth made a somersault. In widely dispersed locales of the Inuit/Yupiit field, somersaults imply renewal of life and good hunting. And since the raven is generally counted as a master of somersaulting, I venture to draw a parallel in meaning between the raven figure’s renewal of the land by leading the confessions, the turning of the earth at high tides, and the havoc the breaks will cause by tipping the balance of the world, one way or another, as stated by the Polar Inuit.

Another parallel can be drawn in regard to variants of cleaning practices: the ritual killing of Sea Woman, done by a shaman in South Baffin Island as a prelude to the winter festival, was explicitly said to clean her and renew her life—that is, implicitly, with the same effect as the shaman’s ritual acts of fighting and combing her hair in West Greenland. The wished-for outcome in Baffin Island was the calming of storms for a solid ice cover of the sea to permit hunting at breathing holes, whereas in West Greenland it was hoped that a storm would rise to break up the ice, thereby giving way to the spring hunt at sea. These removals of disturbing taboo breaks vary and do not have identical effects. But the effect is to balance the powers of sila, which favors a life-saving hunt.

Oosten puts variation in front. Generalizations and basic ideas, the desired outcome of the comparative method, are of secondary importance. True, because it demands identity of compared phenomena. But by focusing on variation, I contend, you may arrive at some basic idea anyhow, like the one above of breaks that disturb the balance of the world and demand ritual restoration. A basic idea may also serve as a rewarding tool for analysis of stories, rituals, sayings, etc. that have the object of your investigation in common. In Oosten and Laugrand’s own illuminating article investigating the connotations of Raven among the Canadian Inuit, the title of the article offers one (or perhaps the basic) idea of that bird: The bringer of light. They conclude the analysis with an outline of the ontological structures at work (Oosten & Laugrand 2006). When I looked to Raven and ravens in the Greenlandic sources, the bringer of light and other connotations were of immediate use. And some more could be added. Nor did structures (explicated in the end) guide my analysis, but they showed an additional outside/inside dimension to the structures pointed out by Oosten and Laugrand. So, connotations in their contexts first, structures later. On the other hand, structures may help support hypothetical findings. Thus, the structural axes of Inuit/Yupiit orientation of the entire field, as uncovered by linguist Michael Fortescue (1988), are very helpful analytical tools in treating stories and statements about movements over land and at sea.

I look for manifold objects for variations: variation in ritual and myth; symbolic meanings of stars; ideas about the powers of land and sea, heaven and underworld; connotations of animals and plants, of life essences and of manufactured objects and ritual paraphernalia. Movements and body movements in particular are of central concern in tracing the connotations of balance, which often simultaneously express mental states. Comparisons of story variants with several episodes in common demand analysis in depth because, despite similarities in course of events, the agendas may vary and thus throw light on variations in meanings of episodes. With regard to selected key words like pooq (bag) and sila (air, world, reason, weather, outdoors), their meanings are restricted in taartaq (mother) and aniivik (exit place), respectively, whereas in daily speech they are both numerous and changing with context.

Regrettably, I do not have sufficient knowledge of Greenlandic to decipher every possible meaning in daily use. Also, some meanings have either fallen into oblivion or been changed at present. Thus, when Karen Langgård asked her students and friends at Ilisimatusarfik at Nuuk about meanings of pooq, she received only a single extraordinary one: a condom. As will be clear from analysis in chapter 5, the main connotation of a protective bag is still valid (Sonne 2017). On the other hand, the paradoxical idea of protection against both death (HIV) and birth (pregnancy) is modern not only because HIV is new but because pregnancy used to be desired. In fine consonance with tradition, however, one of my students, Eleonora Jacobsen, a Southerner, used pooq to mean a pregnant woman, a usage derived from the pre-Christian spirit language (taartaq).

The equally polysemous sila, a root of countless words, has retained its meanings of outdoors, reason, weather, and world. At present, my proposed additional meaning of balance (e.g., Sonne 1984) is a common association that reflects a cosmological order. But today sila rarely calls to mind one of its personifications, the androgynous figure of Nalikkatteeq (Big Crotch). Nevertheless, this figure still provokes artists who look to tradition for inspiration. Thus, a drawing of the world, silarsuaq, combines heaven, earth, sea, and underground in an annual circle, and it has Raven, signifying sila as balance, occupy spring and Nalikkatteeq as autumn (Lauridsen 2015). I have no answer to the placing of Nalikkatteeq.

Since stories constitute a major part of my sources, it would seem appropriate to use methods of interpretation deriving from theories of performance. They consider relations between storyteller and audience, the teller’s intentions, the reactions of the listeners, the competence in communicating the intended message of the story in consonance with the culture of audience, etc.¹⁴ My stories are all written text that allow for next to no application of these theories. In order to demonstrate their limited relevance, let me apply the model of SPEAKING concerning the speech act as proposed by Dell Hymes (1974). It raises more questions than can be answered:

(S) Setting and scene: Most rewarding in this regard is the setting of stories recounted in diaries, where the occasion for telling a story is described as also the points of the following conversation between teller and collector. Otherwise the scene is limited to either the teller writing down his/her own story in the family’s common room, or to teller and collector alone in the same place or in the temporary house of the collector, the school, or some quiet room at the station.

(P) Participants: On rare occasions when listeners are present, their reactions are barely noted. The slow dictation and repetitions of sentences demanded of a collector writing down the story is too boring. If the story is told fluently and in company, the collector resorts to taking notes that will be filled out later. Listeners’ comments are rarely encountered in the manuscripts. If the recording was done by electronic device, listeners were generally unwanted.¹⁵ So, since no reaction from a possible audience is on record, the listeners’ differing understandings of a story cannot be studied (e.g., Nayani 1989: 90ff).

(E) Ends: Sometimes the storyteller’s goals are explicated or can be found out; other times they remain uncertain. One goal is to tell the story completely as heard from another person (some variation can be expected but is rarely checked). Another is merely to tell as much as one remembers, adding that others know the story better. The payment alone may be the teller’s incentive; or perhaps to (unconsciously) gain respect from the collector or just brace oneself. The teller’s positive/negative attitude to the collector’s goal of knowledge, surmised cultural background, and personality may lead to omissions or, to the contrary, additions in order to explain assumed misunderstandings. Is the collector a catechist or a missionary, a Dane or a Greenlander, an old friend or a foreigner, open-minded or narrow-minded, trustworthy or suspicious? Another issue to consider could be the moral lesson to learn from a story, such as the stalking with stories among the Western Apache. Their elders would attack somebody’s indecent behavior by telling a certain well-known story in public with the target present and left for herself to ponder (Basso 1990). This was apparently not common in Greenland. Several stories did of course implicate morals (see, e.g., Kaassassuk, pp. 97ff), but to my knowledge they were not told with similar intentions. Yet the so-called ileqqorsuut, songs about many topics that included reprimands against actual persons, were composed and sung into circulation to a point when the wrongdoer could not avoid realizing the hint (Robert Petersen pers. comm.). More direct moral lessons were taught through accusations of wrongdoings in song duels (see Kleivan 1971a and Rosing 1970).¹⁶ One example is recorded of a sort of collective song duel between people of two locales, the baptized Qasigiannguimmiut and a large group of pagans visiting from the south.¹⁷

(A) Act sequence: Form and order of the event. See (S) and (E) above.

(K) Key and (I) Instrumentalities: Transmission of tone, manner, or spirit of the speech act, such as direct speech, is poorly communicated by dictating a story and better described by both electric recording and the writing down by the teller. Again, the outcome of the latter depends on the writer’s competence in literacy varying from little more than oral sentences to the use of literary grammar, of the orthography introduced in 1860, and the ability to keep track of the unfolding of the story (Thisted 2006).¹⁸

(N) Norms: Social rules governing the event and the participants’ actions and reaction. Stories were not individual or family property, but the teller could pay respect to the person from whom he heard his variant. No rules prevented a person from telling a story anytime, but storytelling with adult listeners usually took place in the evening, especially in winter. In this case the collector without an electronic device was, as mentioned above, obliged to make do with notetaking. He might do the filling in by memory or catch up on the story later without listeners. Sometimes the archival notes will tell the procedure.

(G) Genre: The common Inuit and Yup’ik distinction between oqaluttuat (old stories without known kin relations to its characters) and oqalualaarutit (legends and accounts) is used for categorizing stories in publications and sometimes also in handwritten collections. At present aliortukkat (stories about experiences with ghosts, other beings, and inexplicable events) are still told among friends, on radio, and on TV. As examined by Thisted (1997), the West Greenlanders used to choose among a series of starting words in dating a story: itsarsuaq (a very, very long time ago); itsaq (a long time ago, or more precisely, as the time when nobody was baptized, and the Qallunaat were still strangers, because the whalers were the only Qallunaat to be encountered); itsaalluarsimanngitsoq (once in the not very old days, referring to the period of transition when some were baptized and others remained heathen); or, finally, itsangajaq and itsarsuunngitsoq (not that very long ago, referring to the Christian era). This refined chronology must have been an outcome of colonial time reckoning insofar as similar datings are absent from pre- and early colonial stories taken down in East Greenland and Avanersuaq. The affix -goq (it is told) is the most frequent starter no matter the type of a story (see search for archival references in Sonne 2005 by the words Berthelsen Ammassalik; Holtved 1951, I).

All in all: Performance theory is extremely interesting (e.g., Baumann and Briggs 1990), but apart from stray questions stirred by some of the authors in that field, its applicability is nil.

The Inuit/Yupiit Field: Pre- and Early Contact History

¹⁹

As mentioned above, I also look for ethnohistorical aspects of the variations. They support analysis of changes in worldview and demand knowledge of the movements of prehistoric Thule culture. Transformations due to acculturative changes, be they the outcome of changing intertribal communication and/or colonial impacts, are part of my investigation as well. I consider differences between Greenlandic, Canadian, and Alaska Inuit/Yupiit in social organization, in resources available and used, and in marked documented changes in both trade and rituals of exchange (Burch 1988a; Sonne 1988a). Comparisons are supported by the expansions of the Thule culture to the entire Inuit/Yupiit field.

As far as archaeology goes, the Thule culture developed during the latter half of the first millennium AD through interaction between people on both sides of the Bering Strait and its islands. Improved means of transport and hunting on the open sea, decked-in kayaks, umiat, and collaboration in whaling yielded a surplus of meat for a growing number of dogs harnessed to bigger sledges. Starting in the 11th century, a warmer climate gave impetus to the expansions from North Alaska both south and east to every part of the Inuit/Yupiit world except the Aleuts.

In Alaska, south-going waves pushed the Yupiit south to Unalakleet (at Norton Sound), where their Yup’ik language merged with the Northwest Alaska Iñupiaq language. Embracing the Thule technology, the Yupiit south of Unalakleet pushed farther south and came to dominate the coastal stretches and lower runs of the rivers right on to the Pacific Rim except the Aleutian Islands. Some myths and perhaps ideas followed suit. In this regard, Fortescue et al.’s (1994; 2010) etymological Inuit/Yup’ik dictionary is very informative. Derivatives of proto-Inuit/Yup’ik word roots are listed region by region. Some turn out to be pan-Inuit/Yup’ik and thus most probably old; others are restricted to the Yup’ik languages, some to the Inuit dialects, and some to the Eastern Inuit (east of the MacKenzie River) exclusively.

Among the Thule extensions eastwards, which reached Greenland about 1200 AD, it’s worth noting the pause in immigration that lasted from sometime in the 17th century until the arrival of the Polar Inuit in the 18th century. Until the colonization of Avanersuaq in 1910, very sporadic contacts can be verified between the Polar Inuit and the Northwest Greenlanders, the earlier arrivals situated south of Melville Bay. Therefore, the cultural agreements shown in the sources between Greenlanders and the other Inuit and Yupiit in Canada and Alaska can be considered basically precolonial, whether recognizably transformed in their historical contexts or not.

Of further importance for comparison are two movements inside Greenland, one of some Baffin Islanders into Avanersuaq about 1860 and another of Southeast Greenlanders to South and Southwest Greenland in the 18th and 19th centuries. I shall go into details below.

Thule and Late Dorset

In Arctic Canada and Avanersuaq (but apparently not other parts of Greenland), some of the early Thule immigrants encountered the less mobile Dorset, a pre-Inuit culture developed in Canada from the same technological basis as the forerunner of the Thule culture in North Alaska. The forerunner, the Arctic Small Tool tradition, has been dated to about 3000 BC and has been excavated all over the Inuit/Yupiit region. Named Saqqaq in West Greenland and Independence in the uppermost north of Greenland, no visible development took place during the millennium of their stay until their disappearance from the scene (Grønnow 1991; 1994; 2017). Subsequently, stages of Dorset arrived from Canada into Avanersuaq. They spread, remained, and disappeared, leaving Greenland depopulated for about 500 years until the arrival of the Late Dorset in the 9th century from Arctic Canada to Avanersuaq. These Late Dorset, a thriving culture in Avanersuaq and Ellesmere Island, were probably engaged in trade with the widely traveled Norse at the arrival of the Thule culture people, the Inuit, in the 13th century (Appelt & Gulløv 2009; Appelt, Gulløv & Kapel 1998). One branch of Thule people remained in Avanersuaq and received cultural impacts from the Dorset. Later they expanded east along the north coast and then south along the east coast to Ammassalik. The west coast became populated by the so-called pioneers, who seem to have traveled almost nonstop from Alaska to Avanersuaq and from there south along the west coast. They were most probably attracted to trade with the Norse, whose settlements they took over when the Norse left in the 14th and mid-15th centuries. The expansion continued around Cape Farewell right on to Ammassalik (see also fig. 2), where about 1600 the aforementioned Dorset-impacted immigrants arrived from the north. Back in Avanersuaq, life became intolerable with increasing cold. About 1700 the last (or most; see p. 22) inhabitants moved south across Melville Bay and settled in the Upernavik district (Northwest Greenland). This movement explains the curious correspondence in dialects between the Northwest and East Greenlanders as well as some cultural ideas.

After about 1650, the Southeast Greenlanders, attracted to possibilities of trade, began their new migrations backwards south and west around Cape Farewell into South Greenland. The last Southeast Greenland families arrived at Narsarmijiit/Friedrichstal in 1900 (Appelt & Gulløv 2009; Appelt, Gulløv & Kapel 1998; Gulløv 2012).²⁰ These movements explain the differences in Greenlandic dialects, namely the so-called u-dialect and i-dialect and some mixes.²¹ These last emigrants left Avanersuaq empty until the arrival of the Inughuit sometime in the 18th century. This is how far the archaeologists and linguists have agreed until recently. New finds point to surviving groups (Hastrup 2015: 98, 423–25) whose descendants