Birgitte Sonne - Worldviews of the Greenlanders

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 Iupiat 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 Yupik 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/Yupiitboth in the pluralas a common term. The recent ban on using Eskimo is thus followed (except of course in quotations from older sources). Yupik 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 thatreached 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.