Powers Which We Do Not Know: The Gods and Spirits of the Inuit. (book reviews)

This book is meant to be the first comprehensive and comparative study of Eskimo religion since Weyer's The Eskimos (1932). The study's main purpose, however, is to dispute the hypothesis advanced by Sam Gill that "Mother Earth" became a prominent deity in Native North America due to the influence of Western ideas.

Merkur hypothesizes that in early prehistory the Eskimos were devoted to a "Mother Earth." This deity personified the reincarnation of free-souls (human and animal) in an underground realm of death. Although Mother Earth disappeared from most of Alaska ...

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