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Inhuit: Stories and Customs of 'the Real and Great Human Beings'
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11118 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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3 / 1986 |
5,598 Words |
| Author
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Rolf Gilberg
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Along North Greenland's western coast is found a group of the northernmost people on Earth. Usually called "Eskimos," they call themselves INHUIT, which means "the real and great human beings." This ethnic minority, still hunters by profession, has its own dialect and its own subculture. The Inhuit people has survived hundreds of years in the high Arctic environment. They were first visited by the white man in August 1818. Through this visit the Inhuit learned that they were not the only human beings in the world, as they had thought prior to that time.
Until 1950 the Inhuit population of Greenland numbered between 200 and 300 persons. By 1985 they had increased in number to about 700, which is less than one percent of all the Inhuit in the world.
Pre-Christian time for the Inhuit refers to the period up to the first three decades of the twentieth century. Christian missions came to the Inhuit area in 1909, but it took three years to get the first few Inhuit baptized. After twenty-five years all adults were converted to the Danish Lutheran Church, and since then all Inhuits have adhered to that form of Christianity.
This article will describe the beliefs of the pre-Christian Inhuit people, with particular attention to the religious ideas of the traditional Inhuit hunting society.
The Inhuit learned from their ancestors to believe that the Earth was created by soil, stones, mountains, and water falling from the sky. From this Earth the human beings emerged. They multiplied greatly, as in that faraway time there was no knowledge of death. People grew very old, and in the end they could not walk. In that distant past they did not know the sun. The only light they had came from burning water in their soapstone lamps inside the houses. Water could burn then. As the world became too crowded, a flood came and drowned many people. An old woman among the survivors shouted for both death and light, and Inhuit got both. Then they could go hunting. Before that they had to eat off the soil. In the beginning all humans were Inhuit, but at one time a girl married a dog and gave birth to Inhuit, white men, and American Indians.
Every person consisted of a body, a name, and a soul. The word "spirit" might be more apt, for the Inhuit idea of the soul is not quite like the Christian idea. But the word soul will be used throughout this article so as not to confuse the human soul with other spirits. The reader must just be aware that the idea of the soul does not quite correspond to the one normally found in the Western world.
The immortal human soul of Inhuit surrounded the human body as an invisible shadow, but soul and body were inseparable as long as the human was alive and well. The soul could leave the body for a short time, either by external force or by free will, by a person of knowledge (a shaman). If the soul was forced away and did not return, the person would be sick and die. A bad spirit or the unhappy soul of dead person could scare away the human soul. Only a shaman could find and bring back a loose soul, the human soul being invisible to all but the shamans.
Shamans have related that the human soul looked like a human, but was much smaller. As only the shaman could see the soul, he could rob
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