Claude Lévi-Strauss - Inuit stories of being and rebirth : gender, shamanism, and the third sex

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Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth

CONTEMPORARY STUDIES ON THE NORTH

ISSN 1928-1722

CHRIS TROTT, SERIES EDITOR

6 Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex, by Bernard Saladin dAnglure, translated by Peter Frost

5 Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice: Begade Shutagotine and the Sahtu Treaty, by Peter Kulchyski

4 Sanaaq: An Inuit Novel, by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk

3 Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature, by Keavy Martin

2 Settlement, Subsistence, and Change among the Labrador Inuit: The Nunatsiavummiut Experience, edited by David C. Natcher, Lawrence Felt, and Andrea Procter

1 Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut, by Peter Kulchyski

Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth

Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex

Bernard Saladin dAnglure

Translated by Peter Frost

Preface by Claude Lvi-Strauss

Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex

University of Manitoba Press 2018

Originally published as tre et renatre inuit, homme, femme ou chamane ditions GALLIMARD, Paris, 2006

22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system in Canada, without the prior written permission of the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or any other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777.

University of Manitoba Press

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Treaty 1 Territory

uofmpress.ca

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

Contemporary Studies on the North, issn 1928-1722; 6

ISBN 978-0-88755-830-6 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-88755-559-6 (pdf)

ISBN 978-0-88755-557-2 (epub)

Cover design by Marvin Harder

Interior design by Jess Koroscil

Cover art: Pitaloosie Saila, Arctic Madonna. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Reproduced with the permission of Dorset Fine Arts.

Printed in Canada

The University of Manitoba Press acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Department of Sport, Culture, and Heritage, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Manitoba Book Publishing Tax Credit.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canadas Official Languages 20132018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.

Contents

To my Inuit teachers, now departed:

Iqallijuq (d. 2002), who introduced me to the enchanted world of life in the womb and to many other aspects of Inuit symbolism;

Ujarak (d. 1985), who through a shamanic song made me realize that the dome of an igloo could represent the vault of the heavens, and who patiently showed me the social rules of his group;

Kupaaq (d. 1997), a tireless storyteller, who greatly contributed to this book. Facing south, with his arms stretched out wide, he taught me how to identify the time of the spring equinox, for making safely long dog-team journeys on the sea ice.

To all of my other Nunavik and Nunavut friends who agreed to share their knowledge with me.

To Franoise, who braved with me at Igloolik the Arctic cold and night with me during our honeymoon, in order to observe a circumpolar full moon in late December 1990. With affection and intelligence she accompanied the slow progress of this book while bringing me into the movement to defend the rights of Indigenous peoples.

To Guillaume-Iktuksarjuat, my son, who introduced me into the world of Iglooliks young Inuit and who shared my enthusiasm, in January 2006, when we saw four sun dogs in the sky surrounded by a rainbow, at 50C near Igloolik. Through Artcirq he has given new generations of Inuit a renewed confidence in life. May this book have the same effect!

FIGURE 1. Inuit village on Winter Island, part of the Iglulik extended group, winter 18211822. Engraving after a drawing by Captain Lyons, 1824 (Lyon 1824, 110111).

FIGURE 2. The two British Admiralty ships, Fury and Hecla, wintering in the ice near Igloolik Island, 18221823. Engraving after a drawing by Captain Lyons, 1824 (Parry 1824, frontispiece).

FIGURE 3. Map of Igloolik, Nunavut, and Nunavik in the Canadian Arctic, and St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait. Drawn by B. Saladin dAnglure and made by Flix Pharand-Deschnes, 2005.

Preface to the 2006 Edition

BY CLAUDE LVI-STRAUSS

TRANSLATED BY PETER FROST

In Chapter 9 of The Fourth Book of Pantagruel (1684 [1552]), Rabelais recounts Pantagruels visit to the island of Ennasin, whose people addressed each other strangely. For instance, an old man would call a girl father, and she would call him daughter.

A comical invention, undoubtedly. But anyone reading Saladin dAnglure can have fun imagining that Rabelais was simply echoing an account by one of Jacques Cartiers shipmates who had journeyed as far afield as Arctic Quebec. This way of addressing kin has been observed by dAnglure among the Inuit, and his book shows how it functions. It rests on the belief that one can choose, while alive, to reincarnate in a descendant, even someone of the opposite sex, and that the fetus is free to decide its sex at the time of birth, regardless of the sex of the ancestor the fetus is reincarnating. Indeed, and this is what Saladin dAnglure discovered, among the Inuit are people who, without ever having had contact with each other, claim almost in the same terms to remember their life in the womb and describe it in great detail, from conception to birth.

Depending on how one stands in relation to surrounding family members, such an individual lives a life where forms of social conduct and kinship ties are alternately male and female. This gender instability calls for mediation. Inuit society performs this mediation through the shaman, who is seen as the representative of a third sex, which is intermediate between man and woman and which, by transcending how society defines the sexual division of labour, also transcends the other dualities: the human world versus the animal world, and the human world versus the spirit world. This ternary vision of the individualman, woman, or transgenderextends to society and the cosmos. One response to this vision is the title of dAnglures book.

This book presents a selection of myths that the author collected in Inuktitut, a language he understands and speaks fluently. He takes care to compare them with the versions published by his predecessors, first of all those by Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen. These Inuit myths are often similar to myths from other Amerindian peoples, a proof of contacts and exchanges down through the centuries. They differ from these other myths in their intensely poetic expression and a tendency to push the treatment of some themes to an extreme and give the narrative a tragic tone.

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