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DOUG HERMAN: Aloha everyone and welcome back to “Stellar
Connections”. Our next speaker is John MacDonald. Now retired, John
MacDonald spent most of his working life in the Canadian Arctic. He for
25 years coordinated the Igloolik Research Center, located in the Inuit
community of Igloolik in Nunavut’s north Baffin Island region and I
can’t believe I got that out of my mouth without blowing it.
Throughout his time in Igloolik he collaborated closely with local Inuit
elders to record and document the oral history and traditional
knowledge of the region. Part of this work included a major study of
Inuit astronomy and cosmology leading to the publication of his wonderful
book The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore, and Legend. Long
interested in contact history between Europeans and the Inuit, John is
currently editing and annotating an unpublished journal documenting early
encounters between the Inuit of the Igloolik area and members of an 1820s
British naval expedition seeking a Northwest passage from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. John’s presentation is entitled after
his book “The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore, and Legend”.
Please welcome John MacDonald. [applause]
JOHN MACDONALD: Thank you Doug. Boy these lights are bright. It’s like
the midnight sun. Again, and also thank you for plugging the book.
It’s available on Amazon by the way. But I should point out that the
proceeds go to two things; the - - Museum and also to support an oral
history project in the community in which I lived all these years. I’m
also grateful to be invited here. It’s many years since I’ve been to
Washington, and the last time I was simply passing through. I’m going to
be here for approximately a week, so because I was brought here so to
speak by the Smithsonian I’m going to hang on and go through the museums as
much as I can, so thanks very much. It’s probably very clear to us all
now that cultural astronomies are about particular people in particular
places. So first a few words about Inuit and their Arctic homelands.
Inuit, and I name this and I use the name to include the Upic in the
Western part of the Arctic. Inuit live mainly in the Arctic regions of
North America, Greenland, and even have a toll hold in parts of Alaska.
Excuse me, a toll hold in parts of Northeastern Siberia. The blue areas
on the map indicate approximately their traditional homelands.
They’re predominately coastal dwellers, although a few groups live
within the margins of the treeline, notably in parts of Alaska, Northern
Quebec, and Labrador. Coastal Inuit traditionally lived on marine mammals
such as seals, walrus, and whales; while those living inland relied
almost exclusively on caribou. Diet was augmented seasonally by fish,
migratory birds such as geese, ducks, and also ptarmigan, and minimally by
foraged roots and berries in the summer. Over the past 60 years or
so, Inuit have become more urbanized and moving from their camps in the
land into crowded settlements established by national governments
across the Arctic. This afternoon we’ll be looking
mainly at the astronomy of the Inuit of Igloolik. They’re also known by
their own name as the Igloolingmut who live on a small island in
Canada’s Nunavut territory. Igloolingmut star knowledge is shared
by other Inuit communities in North Baffin Island, but at a general level
its cosmological foundations are applicable across the entire Inuit
range from the Bering Sea, across Arctic America, to the West and East
Coasts of Greenland. Igloolik and the Igloolik Island is shown inset on
the map in the screen is just below 17° North, placing it 320 kilometers
above the Arctic Circle. The winters here are long and dark and the sun is
gone each year from the end of November until the middle of January.
And the summers while they’re short and blessed with the midnight sun,
are invariably short. The ice-free season even in these times of climate
change lasts around three months from late July until the end of October.
In fact, Igloolik as I speak is experiencing freeze-up, not like
here. Igloolik was established as a
settlement by the Canadian government in the early 1960s and is now a
growing town of around 1,900 people, mostly Inuit. Before moving into the
settlement Inuit of the area lived in small seasonal camps on the coastal
inlets of nearby Baffin Island. Locations chosen for the
predictability of the marine animals on which they depended.
As you can see, the terrain around Igloolik tends to be rather flat and
featureless compared to most other locations in the Eastern Arctic.
There are no mountains to obscure the horizon, and so a large and rather
inviting sky is the hallmark of Igloolik scenery, which is very good
for anyone that’s interested in stars.
Igloolike Island has an extremely rich archeological heritage. The
numerous remains of ancient dwellings scattered throughout the island have
found their way into Inuit cosmology. Inuit tradition views these sites as
having been occupied at a single time in the very distant past by the
island’s first people. This was at a time when there was no winter and no
death. Life it was said was easy and food plentiful, but the island
eventually became impossibly overcrowded, the countless
archaeological sites prove this, and people were literally being pushed
into the sea. Legends tell that this desperate situation was eased only by
people calling for death and winter. So death and winter came, social
order was established, and the growth of the community checked.
A version of this legend ends with the words “with death came the sun,
the moon, and the stars. For when people die, they go up to the heavens
and become luminous”. Archaeologists with a very different
cosmology view the island sites as having been occupied by various
Arctic hunting peoples over the last 4,500 years as the island gradually
rebounded from the seas following the last Ice Age.
My interest in Inuit astronomy came about perhaps inevitably as a result
of a long-term resident in Igloolike. I was there with my family for almost
25 years. And it was also aided and abetted by my dabbling in the very
esoteric practice of celestial navigation. During my observation
sessions on clear winter nights, and I’d be usually fumbling with a frozen
sextant or a frozen artificial horizon, older, curious Inuit would
often happen by point out a few of their stars, gently implying or so I
thought that an understanding of the sky and the employment of its
contents could be had without the use of my cumbersome gadgets. I took the
hint and so began in 1985 a series of interviews with Inuit elders about
their astronomy lasting intermittently over some 20 years.
All this was part of a major oral history project sponsored by the
Igloolik elder society. About 30 elders, three of the main
contributors shown here, [foreign language] participated in the
program. When interviewed about their astronomy, most insisted that
the information they possessed was meager compared to that of their
parents or grandparents. Nevertheless it was clear that these
elders were virtually the last keepers of a more or less detailed
knowledge of their astronomical traditions.
The rapid dilution of Inuit star knowledge is not surprising. The
semi-urban life most Inuit now live hinders the transmission of
traditional knowledge. Conditions readily conducive to learning about
the celestial sphere have ceased to exist. In the old days for example,
slow-paced, dog team journeys across the open tundra gave excellent
opportunity to learn about the sky. Nowadays however with their
snowmobile travel leaves very, very little inclination or enthusiasm for
star gazing. Significantly elders pointed out that they no longer
noticed the stars because of the glare of the community street lights.
Unfortunately light pollution, the anthema of urban dwelling sky
watchers everywhere now pervades the Canadian Arctic.
Inuit cosmology was based on shamanistic belief and observance and
offered a view of the sky and its contents well suited to their
spiritual and pragmatic needs. Their astronomy, particularly for those
groups living above the Arctic Circle reflects the unique appearance of the
celestial sphere at higher latitudes, perhaps demonstrated most
dramatically by the sun’s absence from the sky during the mid-winter
months. The illustration on the screen is by
[foreign language], a well-known artist from Cape Dorset on Baffin
Island. [Foreign language] image beautifully captures the Inuit
perspective of the intimate relationship between the sky, its
contents, and the earth. Unlike our view, which seems increasingly to
expand the limits of space, [foreign language] sky is actually contained
by the earth. You’ll notice too that her drawing is also about time,
place, and activity. In effect it’s a calendar delineating the Arctic
year, including the freezing and melting of sea ice, as well as the
key activities associated with each of the seasons. Notice too that the
sun’s annual cycle is represented along the fringe of high mountains
bordering the earth. And you can see the sun’s annual cycle is represented
around the edge of the drawing. Across the Arctic, the notion of a
flat earth was widely held. In Alaska for instance, lost hunters
were said to have fallen off the edge of the world, while in Labrador such
accidents were prevented by high cliffs, keeping anything from living
going to the region beyond. The carving by [foreign language] on the
left of the screen nicely illustrates the world’s mountainous perimeter.
The image on the right shows the legendary mesana [phonetic], at the
end of the world staring triumphantly into space holding a string of
brilliant beads, proof that he has reached the earth’s extremities; a
widespread Inuit legend, known from areas as far apart as Alaska and
Northern Quebec, tells us that such beads are found only at the world’s
end. Earth and
sky are analogous in the Inuit view, each in winter having a
similar snow-clad topography. In the sky, the sun and moon live in
adjoining igloos, regular traffic took place between the two realms.
Shima’s for instance, on their spirit flights would visit the moon and the
moon man protector of abused orphans, would come to the earth to enforce
taboos and to confer fertility on childless women. It was believed
that taboo breaking was often responsible for the creation of
celestial objects and virtually all stars with human personifications
were created following the commission of some grave social transgression.
*** and *** as we shall see are at the root of the epic Inuit legend
recounting the creation of the sun and the moon.
Because of Igloolik’s high northern latitude, around 70° north, the
visible portion of the celestial sphere is notably less from what we
see in the more temperate latitudes. In practical terms for example, this
means that the brightest star, Sirius, such an obvious feature of
the late night sky in Washington just now is barely seen at Igloolik. It
literally creeps along the horizon. In contrast, the twin stars Castor
and Pollux, which rise and set at Washington’s latitude, are
circumpolar, meaning that they’re always above the horizon and can be
seen any time during the hours of darkness in Igloolik, obviously if
there’s no cloud cover. Inuit names for stars and star
groupings fall into several categories. As I’m going through
this you can look at the names as they give various constellations on
the table there. The two principle ones are first human and animal
personifications. The second intrinsic designations derived from
some feature of the star in question, including for instance, its spatial
relationship to other stars, whether the star is leading or trailing, and
in the case of the North Star, it’s apparently fixed position in the sky.
Some have anatomical designation; the breastbone of which is what they call
the Ploidies, and also the collar bones.
Normally only single stars are used by Inuit for personification of
humans and animals. This practice is consistent with the widespread that
such stars were once animate beings on earth, possessed of single souls,
which in transformation logically retain their individual identities.
The image on the screen shows a view of the sky as perceived by Igloolik
Inuit. Almost all their major stars and constellations are represented
here, including most obviously Ursa Major. I mentioned the collar bones,
these are four stars that comprise our stars Capella and Colleen and
Castor and Pollux; Cassiopeia has actually two designations. The three
brightest stars in Cassiopeia are considered lamp stands for a soap
stone lamp. I’ve mentioned the Ploidies before, that’s the
breastbone. We’ll hear more about Alderbarn, which is the polar bear
and the surrounding stars, the star cluster, the Hiodies. Sirius here is
represented as an old woman cleaning her igloo window. She also has a
lamp, which apparently flickers each time people go between the moon and
earth. Now if any of you have seen the star Sirius at lower latitudes
it’s extremely brilliant. Some people have likened it to a cut
diamond. It is full of prismatic figures changing all the time, and
Inuit feel that the draft of these passerby’s cause the lamp to flicker
thus. Myths and legends can serve a variety
of purposes from the Archean and quoting of cultural values and
expectations to explicit cautionary tales aimed at dissuading wayward
behavior. Celestial legends share these same characteristics, but in
addition, are a practical device for making sense of the sky and its
contents. Indeed Igloolik elders say that one of the purposes of star
stories is to help us remember the exact location of important stars
used in time telling and in navigation or way finding. And
incidentally once Inuit do tell you their stories about stars, they do
tend to stick with you. They’re less complex than some of the projections
that we tend to make on the sky. And the legend of Uluctut [phonetic]
stars, and these are the stars in Orion; Uluctut means the runners and
it illustrates the point I’ve just made very well. The story involves
the three main stars in Orion’s belt and the prominent star Aldebaren in
the constellation Taurus and finally a number of stars
in the Hiodies cluster. This legend relates that on a bright
moonlit night three brothers and their dogs come across a polar bear;
they begin to hunt it. However they’re unaware that they have been
seen by a woman who has recently given birth and is thus under various
taboo restrictions, one of which prohibits her from looking at
hunters. Breaking this taboo causes the three hunters, their dogs, and
the polar bear to rise up to the sky where they’re all conformed into
stars. The three hunters become Orion’s belt stars, ahead of them is
the polar bear, the star we know as Aldebaran, surrounded by the Hiodies
star cluster, which are now the hunter’s dogs.
There’s a lovely embellishment of this story and that’s the great
nebula in Orion is sometimes said to be the children and they’re usually
cousins of the hunters that are carrying fur clothing to their
fathers that are pursuing the polar bear. Now, those of you that have
observed the great nebula in Orion will recognize that it’s quite fuzzy
and stands in very well for fur clothing.
Legends can also be seen as akin to hypothesis, offering an explanation
for the way things are or seem to be. The sun/moon legend provides an
example. In its entirety, this legend is one of the most widespread
and complex of all Inuit traditions. It is often abbreviated to relate how
two siblings, a brother—a sister and her incestuous brother rise up to the
sky to become the sun and the moon. In its fullest sense this story is
much more than this. It addresses universal concerns about creation,
social and cosmic order, nourishment, retribution and renewal. The
concluding part of the narrative in which the sun and the moon are
actually created goes like this; long ago before the sun, moon, and stars,
when all was dark, a young woman alone in her igloo was repeatedly
visited by a man who took advantage of her. Wishing to find out who this
man was, she decided that the next time he visited she would mark his
face with soot from her extinguished lamp. On his next visit she did just
this, smudging his face with her sooty fingers. When he left she
followed him to a large igloo where people were celebrating. And there
in the light of the oil lamps she discovered to her horror that her
visitor that had been none other than her own brother. Distraught, she lit
a torch of moss and rushed around the igloo. Her brother also lit a torch
and followed her. Outside they ran round and round the igloo in a
clockwise direction. The sister leading, the brother following, until
at last they ascended into the sky. Her torch grew brighter and brighter,
but her brother’s torch merely smoldered. She in her brilliance
became the sun, and he the pale moon. Across the Arctic, key elements of
this legend have been used by Inuit to explain a number of observed
phenomenon. For instance, their apparent motion of the sun across the
sky from east to west is established in the clockwise direction of the
chase around the igloo. The sister’s brightly burning torch compared to
that of her brother’s smoldering one accounts for the difference in
luminosity between the sun and the moon. The moon’s dark patches are
the smudge marks on the brother’s face, and this illustration shows
them as does this, the dark patches on the moon are soot. Solar eclipses
results when the moon in his continuing pursuit of the sun
periodically catches up with his sister and embraces her again.
Even the moon phases are explained; the sister full of disgust at her
brother’s *** stops giving him food. He gradually wastes away, her
pity evoked, she begins to feed her brother again, thereby restoring him
to his former size. This cycle of revolution and pity continues
endlessly, hence the monthly waxing and waning of the moons.
Inuit have no word for time, not at least in the abstract sense, commonly
understood in our industrial society. This does not mean of course that
they somehow lacked any comprehension of the links between time and so-
called economic activity, a view too often attributed to cultures with
perceptions of time do not coincide with those of the Western world.
Expressions dear to us like saving time, losing time, over time, time is
money, create all kinds of difficulties for Inuit translators.
Once at a conference that was dealing with Inuit co-ops, a government
advisor was trying to explain to Inuit that time costs money. The
translator was really baffled and gave it his best shot, which was a
watch costs a lot. And if I go on much longer I’ll be timed out by Doug
here. I’ll mention that with the
introduction of Christianity, Inuit were introduced to that rather
unusual concept or division of time called a week. And on the right of
the screen we have an early calendar that was made by Inuit hunter.
Again, you can see the preoccupation that Inuit have with the product of
the hunt. This is basically a tally of animals he’s caught up to a
certain date. The markings around the edge of the calendar are days of
the week, obviously the crosses are Sundays. The ones that are sort of
scored off are days that have already passed, but that gives you some idea
of the introduction of our time, the beginning of Inuit accepting
industrial time as it were. For Inuit, the changing seasons
determine not only their day-to-day activities, but also their diet,
dwelling locations, and family groupings as they moved about their
local area in response to the migrations of the animals on which
they depended. The annual cycle was reckoned usually by 13 moon months,
beginning with the first new moon coinciding with the sun’s return.
The designation of each moon was based on recurring events in the
natural world, such as the birth of seal pups, the nesting of birds, the
thickening of caribou pelts, and the freezing of the sea ice.
Significantly moon months and the depth of winter were marked by the
appearance of certain stars, and in a moment we’ll look at some of these
particular months. You can see here how the names of the
moon months pick up things that are going on in the environment. This
one was important; caribou hair sheds, it was a moon when it was good
to go caribou hunting to catch caribou for winter clothing. The one
down here, [foreign language] meaning hearing, perhaps its meaning isn’t
immediately obvious, but this happened round about early November
when the ice was thick enough to allow dog team travel and remote
camps could then visit each other by dog team because in these days of
course there were no communications like we have today.
The moon of [foreign language] literally meaning great darkness,
spanned the sunless period straddling the winter solstice. This was a
period of relative inactivity and resources at this time were often
scarce. But to the extent permitted by available moonlight or twilight,
Inuit would still try to hunt on the sea ice, but it was often
unproductive. Storytelling and indoor games help pass the time.
String figures or cats cradles as they’re sometimes known were
especially popular and were played almost obsessively. I’ll just
mention that elders would tell me that various camps had different
kinds of string figures and people would be sent on long journeys
actually to get someone’s new invention of a string figure.
It was only during the sunless period that these games were permitted
because it was widely believed that string figures would entangle the sun
as soon as she appeared on the horizon. The appearance of two
stars, which we call Alter and Tatazed [phonetic], but which the
Inuit call [foreign language] in the Northeastern quadrant of the sky
around mid-December was taken as a sign of winter solstice as well as a
promise of the sun’s return. The next one is [foreign language];
this literally means that the sun is possible. And obviously it was a
month of the returning sun, and for Inuit marked the beginning of a new
year. Until the introduction of Christianity to the Igloolik area in
the 1920s and ‘30s, the sun’s annual return was an occasion for
celebration of renewal, symbolized by the extinguishing and then relighting
of the soapstone lamps with a new flame. This ceremony was also said
to strengthen the land. The ceremony usually involved children
extinguishing the lamps and I think the involvement of children
themselves, a symbol of renewal, was used particularly for that purpose.
The lamps among the igloos of each community would be relit from a
single flame, a new flame from tinder that was kept especially for that
purpose. And you can imagine that temperatures, let’s say 40 Celsius
below or 30 as it could easily be then, caused—didn’t really invite
people to extinguish their only source of heat, but the sun’s return
was so significant to them that these observances were made without any
complaint. In recent years this celebration has
been reestablished and is now a major community event. This image on the
screen shows a soapstone lamp used in the ceremony just after it has been
relit. Note the parallel imagery between the lamp flame and the inset
picture of the sun peaking just above the horizon. When the sun comes back
it’s literally on the horizon for a few minutes before disappearing
again. Traditionally the return of the sun
was an anxious time for Inuit due to the effects of atmospheric
refraction, the sun often appeared reluctant to return, sometimes
hesitating and behaving erratically on the horizon. And on a number of
occasions in Igloolik when I’ve witnessed the return of the sun, the
day it would always be back earlier than the prescribed date
astronomically because of this phenomena that we know as refraction.
But you would see just the tip of it some days and then remarkably the
next day you wouldn’t see it again; there would be a glow, but no sun.
And then the next day it would be above. And this bouncing around the
horizon was very typical of the sun’s return, and I think it really led to
Inuit uncertainty about the sun’s actual return, which was never taken
for granted and taboos at this time were carefully observed; one of which
was to destroy the cords of the string figures and as I’ve already
mentioned there was fear that these string figures, even symbolically
would prevent the sun from rising. With the sun now back on the horizon,
string games were replaced by a game called [foreign language]; and this
is a cup and ball game where the player tried to impale a caribou
vertebrae usually on a bone spike and the action of tossing up the
vertebrae was said to encourage the sun to rise. In fact some songs that
go with the game of [foreign language] include references to the
sun rising higher and higher. The next month, and this is the last
month that involves the actual sun’s return, was called [foreign language]
and that literally means that the sun is increasingly rising. Its
elevation was carefully observed, and I think this all goes back to the
uncertainty that the Inuit had about the sun really coming back. So in
Igloolik at least they would actually measure the sun and its return by in
successive days seeing if the sun would first fit between the extended
thumb, mid-thumb or harpoon thumb first, harpoon first, then the thumb
of a mitt, and then finally with the mitt appearing to fit between the
sun’s lower limb and the horizon at noon. When it had reached this point
it was called [foreign language] and [foreign language] literally means
mitted, the sun has been mitted. This stage was called [foreign
language] and occurred a few weeks before spring equinox. And it really
marked the end of the winter’s dark period, Inuit were now confident that
the sun was back, light levels were rising increasingly, and the seals
and walrus in which they depended were beginning to become more
accessible. The worst of the winter was behind them, and although
temperatures remained low, the warmer days of spring were in the offing.
And around this time which was a time of promise, they would note the two
stars that they called [foreign language], but which are known to us
as - - appearing on the horizon, fairly above the Southern horizon
just after sunset when the sky was still bright to the west. And
there’s a song still well-known in the Igloolik area which celebrates
the sighting of the [foreign language] stars. And in translation
the last verse goes [foreign language] appear, yonder the
daylight. It is a joyous feeling that again in the broad daylight will
I sleep. Thank you. [applause]
MR. HERMAN: Thank you John.