Recording the spirit world: contemporary Inuit prints and drawings depict the animism at the heart and soul of a lost hunting culture

Natural History, Sept, 2002 by Dorothy Harley Eber

In those days they had no doctors or nurses. Or expert people like zoologists to say why the animals were scarce," recounts Bibian Neeveeovak of Taloyoak, today believed to be the oldest person residing on the coast of the Canadian Arctic Ocean. "Sometimes the sealers couldn't make catches, so some of the shamans would try to see what was holding them back."

In the era before missionaries brought Christianity to the far north, shamans, or angakkuit, were the regulators of the Inuit world, the mediators between humans and the spirit realm. They were said to fly through the air to faraway places, assume animal forms, cure human sickness, and make animals plentiful when people were hungry. Back then, shamans gained their powers either through inheritance or a "calling" or rigorous initiation. While some shamans were good, others were bad. The good shamans were regarded almost as gods.

The Inuit first came in contact with missionaries as early as 1771 on the Labrador coast and as late as the 1950s in parts of the central Arctic, but the arrival of the Reverend E. J. Peck and the establishment of an Anglican mission on Blacklead Island in Cumberland Sound in 1894 began the spread of Christianity above Hudson Strait. The Inuit adopted Christianity enthusiastically, but for a long while after the missionaries came, shamanism and the new religion coexisted. Peck learned much about shamanic practices and, beginning in 1897, shared information with Franz Boas, who was then developing the infant science of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and at Columbia University.

Until recently, much of Peck's data remained unpublished, stored among his letters and papers in the archives of the Anglican Church of Canada. But in the recent book Representing Tuurngait (published by Nunavut Arctic College, on Baffin Island), three anthropologists present excerpts from these papers as well as Peck's list of 347 tuurngait, or spirit helpers, including their names, habitats, and physical descriptions (a list he had apparently worked on for about twenty years). According to an article Peck wrote in 1924, the Inuit "believe that many animals, like human beings, possess souls, and that many inanimate objects, such as rocks, mountains, icebergs, etc. have together with animate objects, what is called their innua, i.e., owner or being.... These spirits, so the magicians say, have power over the souls of animals, and when solicited by the magicians can make such an easy prey for the hunters."

Although much attenuated, the hunting culture persisted into the mid-twentieth century, but during the 1950s and 1960s, disease, famine, and starvation drove the Inuit, with Canadian government encouragement, into settlements. These grew up chiefly around old fur-trading posts, where Inuit trappers had bartered skins for goods. The trappers now had to learn to deal with money. As a way to help support people whose traditional way of life was falling apart, the government encouraged carving and introduced art and handicraft programs. What was not foreseen was the explosion of talent these make-work art programs would bring about.

In 1957, writer and artist James Houston, then the government's northern service officer at Cape Dorset, initiated experiments in graphic arts. He distributed paper and pencils in the settlements and camps and asked the Inuit to try their hand at drawing. Under his enthusiastic tutelage, three Cape Dorset men--Osuitok Ipeelee, Kananginak Pootoogook, and Iyola Kingwatsiak--then began their adventures in printmaking, turning the community's drawings into prints by cutting stencils out of sealskins and making linocuts from floor tiles brought in for the building of Houston's house. As these materials proved difficult to work with, stonecuts and paper stencils were used instead and eventually became the benchmark for Inuit graphics.

Since then, print-making has spread to communities across the Arctic. Cape Dorset, Puvirnituq, some small Nunavik (Arctic Quebec) hamlets, Holman, Baker Lake, Pangnirtung, and Clyde River have all produced annual or periodic catalogs of their collections. Besides doing stonecuts, stencils, and combinations of the two, the printmakers create etchings, engravings, and lithographs. Although there are regional distinctions as well as great stylistic differences between individual artists, the graphics generally celebrate what the Inuit artists call "the old way." In interviews, some prefer not to talk about the old religion or to go into detail about what the artists' images depict; others speak freely, believing that the shamans and the tuurngait deserve to be remembered. Both the stories and the pictures created by the Inuit transport one to an older world.

THE TUURNGAIT--SPIRIT HELPERS

The Reverend E. J. Peck recorded descriptions of many tuurngait in the Baffin Island area, all of them fantastical in appearance. During his historic 1921-24 expeditions across the North American Arctic, explorer and ethnologist Knud Rasmussen got shamans to make simple pencil drawings of their own tuurngait. In contemporary Inuit graphics, the spirits, for the most part, appear in vivid color, as in the work of Simon Tookoome, of Baker Lake, and others. "My mother's stories are coming out through me," Simon says.