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Nunani

July 25, 2003 - Baby thief (Part two)
July 18, 2003 - Baby thief (Part one)
July 11, 2003 - The Hirluaq (Part two)
July 4, 2003 - The Hirluaq (Part one)

Nunani

July 25, 2003

Baby thief (Part two)

RACHEL QITSUALIK

There is nothing strange about worrying that one's child might be kidnapped. It is almost certainly a fear that is as old as parenting itself, evidenced even in troupes of lower primates, such as baboons or chimpanzees.

Watch any such primates long enough, and you will notice that baby-stealing is all too common. Male primates steal suckling young for use as living shields against the aggression of other troupe members. Female primates steal the young of other females out of jealousy, wanting the social attention and importance attached to having an infant. Sometimes, the goal is simply to deprive a new mother of the same. Thus, through such fundamental deprivation, does one female punish another.

Unfortunately, humans are not much different in their essential primate behaviour. If they were, well, they would probably be able to leave their babies safely unattended in a mall for an hour. But such is not the case. Today, more than ever, an unattended child is in danger of being snatched up by a pedophile, perhaps even someone with ransom in mind. And it is not at all uncommon for a child to be stolen by a woman who cannot have children of her own.

Since pedophiles rely upon secrecy for their aberrations, they were not a common issue among traditional Inuit, who lived in close-knit encampments, with all eyes upon each other. Noted pedophiles were quickly rooted out, and dealt with harshly.

Baby-snatching, especially by women, was much harder to deal with. As stated before, Inuit used to live in distinct camps, collections of interrelated families. Families that left a given camp would often stumble across other encampments in their travels, those of strangers or little-known relations.

Since the women were constantly mingling with each other and the children, there was the very real danger of a strange woman - perhaps an old mad-woman or one who could not have children of her own - simply stealing a baby or young child. The proper way to deal with such a situation, today, would be to notify the police. The situation is a criminal justice issue.

But in pre-colonial times, there were no such institutions to depend upon. If a strange woman simply fled the camp with your baby, you had to make your own justice, or there was none at all. Too often, there was none at all.

Over the centuries, the very real threat of baby-theft found its way into numerous Inuit stories, and the female baby-thief became epitomized in a singular type of folkloric monster.

The Netsilingmiut people, having especially detailed and vividly textured monsters, called this creature amajursuk, or "one who carries in an amouti." The amajursuk is a giant, ghastly hag, who snatches unattended children and steals them away in her exceptionally large amouti (a traditional female top, engineered for nursing, having an oversized hood for piggybacking infants).

Other Inuit peoples knew the creature as amoutalik, or "one with an amouti," and it was generally implied that it was a sort of malevolent spirit.

But whether giant or spirit, all Inuit peoples seem to have agreed that this creature is female, hag-like, dangerous, and a baby-thief. It is also implied, in some versions of the tales about these beings, that the creature does not actually have an amouti, but rather a hollow, fleshy hump that resembles an amouti hood - an imaginative touch that nicely amplifies the thing's horror factor.

As with most monsters of Inuit lore, it is unclear as to whether there is supposed to be one or many of the creatures. We have no way of knowing whether the tales refer to "The Amoutalik," or to a supernatural species.

But since the amajursuk and amoutalik (I shall use the latter term, hereafter, to denote both) are most likely folkloric representations of the mad, baby-snatching crone in her most severe form, the creatures were probably thought of as many.

A clue to the idea that the amoutalik is inspired by true madness is that amoutalik stories all depict the creature as being easily befuddled, prone to confusion. Her victims do not escape through extreme cunning, as in most Inuit tales, but simply by confusing the amoutalik - often with magic. And if we take a look at an archetypal amoutalik story, despite its wild shamanistic content, we can spot the probable reality that inspired it.

(Concluded in part three.)

July 18, 2003

Baby thief (Part one)

RACHEL QITSUALIK

A great deal has been written about how Inuit love their children. In an exceptionally harsh world, any culture becomes especially preoccupied with its youngest generation, which only makes sense if you think about it.

After all, the more unkind the times, the more the survival of the culture itself comes into question. And there were times, among pre-colonial Inuit, when raising a child to healthy adulthood was quite an accomplishment.

The consequent appreciation of their children is probably the reason why Inuit have traditionally fussed over them, indulging the very young to a degree that disgusted the first visiting Europeans.

In old Inuit tradition, it was every community member's right to coddle and interact with the young. It was almost as though a child were communal property, raised by all. But, then, members of any particular camp were almost all related.

Out of necessity, this tradition has been modified over time. Inuit have taken up the southern, Occidental way of regarding a child as the property of its parents (or legal guardians) only. But let us not mourn the loss of tradition here.

In a settled, community existence, a child is surrounded by numerous strangers, many of whom are neither family nor friends. In this confusing, heterogeneous social environment, where all nearby families occupy the same area (instead of separate camps), people have to create artificial barriers.

Guardianship is one such barrier — invisible, but socially and legally concrete. Inuit can no longer afford to let their children mingle with all community members, at will, trusting that some close relative will be there to keep them safe.

Like any southern family, like any of those living within a state anywhere on Earth, Inuit parents need the legal right to dictate who their children are permitted or forbidden to keep company with. Tradition is great, but some traditions simply do not work within certain systems. Modern Inuit seem to have taken to this idea pretty readily; but they have always been an old culture ready to learn new tricks.

This is not to say, however, that traditional Inuit did not experience some anxiety over their children. Outwardly, traditional Inuit parents used to put on the public face of trusting everyone in the community, but they nevertheless watched what company their children were in.

This was part of the old Inuit way with personal feelings, the traditional ethic that one's feelings — especially negative ones — should be kept to oneself. Such Inuit stoicism pervaded traditional society. In order to preserve social harmony within often cramped confines, in order to survive psychologically in a world where death continually struck healthy and sick alike, Inuit had to be disciplined.

This was true of all cultures that once lived as pre-colonial Inuit did, but Inuit practised it up until recent times. The truth is that, psychologically, our ancestors were much tougher than we. Today, when we push ourselves to our limits, it is often out of personal choice. Our ancestors had no alternative.

Discipline begins with the emotions, and so it was among traditional Inuit. So even if a parent disliked or failed to completely trust someone associating with their child, they kept it to themselves. They just subtly tried to make sure that their child and the suspicious party were never left alone together.

It is important to remember that it is impossible to place bounds upon a child's socialization within a closely-knit group. If a parent refuses to let a child associate with a fellow member of a camp, the parent must be ready to confront that member about it. The ill feelings that invariably arise from such a confrontation are just the sort of thing that Inuit were trying to avoid. Camp members had to pretend to like one another, overlooking even the deepest enmity, since they had to co-operate in order to survive.

Nevertheless, as with most of the anxieties that Inuit had to repress, fears about the fate of children at the hands of aberrant individuals became expressed in traditional stories. Even while traditional Inuit praised and fussed over their little ones, they were telling each other stories of parents cannibalizing their children, babies accidentally having their heads ripped off, and mothers going insane or making children sick by feeding them incorrectly.

The fear above all, however, was that of kidnapping.

(Continued in Part two.)

July 11, 2003

The Hirluaq (Part two)

RACHEL QITSUALIK

As the flashlight gradually died, I still could not rip my eyes from that mass - the possible body - against the wall.

Some instinct told me that if that thing was ever going to move, ever going to struggle up into a sitting position or roll toward me, this would be the time. Get the powdered milk, an inner voice screamed. Close the lid. Get out.

"Close the lid and get out," I said aloud.

With that, something brushed against my leg. My scream flew up, bounced off my palate, and was swallowed convulsively, never quite managing to escape. But my whole body jerked, as though electrified. The experience was so sudden and wracking that I barely noticed my hand, still halfway into the barrel, scraping against the lid's edge.

There was that feeling you get when you know that you have been sliced. Not injured or hurt. Just the brain's registration of "sliced."

The experience pulled my eyes from the could-be body. I had enough milk and stumbled out of there, jug in hand, bouncing off boxes and camping gear that filled the hirluaq, until I was on the porch. My eyes were drawn downward toward white and red in the jug - blood in the powdered milk. The lid had nailed my little finger, so the pad just hung by the remaining skin. It was difficult to care as I fled toward home.

"What did you see?" my father asked.

I told him what had happened, asked if my theory was correct: That, as a lay pastor, he had placed a dead person in the hirluaq to await burial after winter.

"Just some old caribou skins," he said.

I did not probe further, but the answer never sat well with me. It never helped me get a grip on why the hirluaq was such a horror, and that bothered me even more. Years went by. I tried to leave it be.

I only saw the hirluaq once as an adult. It was just a shed, not half as large as I remembered. It was hard to believe that it had ever contained such a world of darkness.

A truth: A wound is only best understood while it is healing, not when it is initially received. Similarly, the truth about adulthood is that we do not so much shed our fears, we simply become better at understanding why they are there.

My family almost lived in the hirluaq, you see. As mentioned earlier, the only childhood task I dreaded more than fetching things from the hirluaq was hauling combustibles, like paper, down to the shacks by the creek.

The stuff was for families who lived in those shacks. They burned it in barrels, for warmth. When Inuit were first cajoled into leaving their nomadic ways, there was nothing for them to live in. A tent or snow-house is comfortable, but impossible to maintain in a settled existence.

So those earliest families that settled used scrap wood, often cast-offs from construction, to build little shacks. They were poorly ventilated, breeding sickness and reeking of urine and vomit. Until the government recognized the crisis and instituted "matchbox" housing, that creek and the shacks along its sides were like the lands of the dead.

The hirluaq had been intended as our shack.

My family was blessed, and we never moved into that place, which we turned into our storage shed. But assisting poorer families with bags of things to burn was a constant reminder of what might have been.

I think the reason the hirluaq was such a place of horror for me was that, in a way, it was always still a shack by the creek, a place for Inuit to suffer and die in the dark. And it occurs to me that maybe my father had told me a kindly lie.

Perhaps the thing I had seen in the hirluaq really had been a body. After all, the pre-funereal dead have to be stored somewhere, don't they? But it doesn't matter now. I simply feel like a tragedy has been averted, and am thankful that Inuit are alive, walking about, with no shacks by the creek.

But, like the scar on my finger, my vision of an alternate future is indelible - the possibility of Inuit lying cold, tucked away, forgotten and dead, like that mass in the hirluaq.

Pijariiqpunga.

July 4, 2003

The Hirluaq (Part One)

RACHEL QITSUALIK

Scars are like stories written upon the flesh. We all bear them, each a reminder of a past event. Unfortunately, their nature is such that they never tell happy stories, which is why we keep our scars to ourselves, and we rarely ask about those of others.

If you look at the little finger on my right hand, for example, you will see a thin, somewhat curved scar. If you had seen it before it became scarified, you would be looking at a wound that nearly took off the fleshy pad of my finger. I got that at the hirluaq, in my early teens.

The hirluaq was next to our house. It was a storage shed that my parents used for extra equipment. My siblings and I dreaded setting foot in it, especially in the dead of winter, since it was lightless, airless, cold, like a kind of place where all the unwanted things of life came to rest.

While cramped, it was always large enough to fill with imagined terrors. It could, and did, hold anything, and it was a cold trip there to retrieve powdered milk, cereal, a needed tool, or an item of clothing. The only task I disliked more than retrieving things from the hirluaq was hauling bags of combustible items (wood, paper, etc.) down to the dilapidated shacks by the creek. So it was the hirluaq, the somewhat lesser of two evils, for me.

The storage shed was a dark world in miniature, having its own smells, those of rotting canvas, dried fish, gasoline. The outer porch I could handle, having personally carted over most of what lay there: several boxes of camping equipment; on the left, the tackle box filled with biscuits and left-over frozen meals; over in the corner, the camping tent; next to it, a harpoon and fishing spear; hanging above that area, the gas lamp; to the right, caribou skins; near them, my father's outdoor clothing; underneath that, pots and pans.

The lock to the hirluaq door was invariably frozen, which meant prying it open, flashlight under chin. The door opened to reveal a long, narrow area leading deeper into the place. No simple shed, the hirluaq had originally been meant as a small home. As a shed, it was absolutely tomb-like.

One evening, I was sent out to fetch some powdered milk from the hirluaq. I had learned to get in and out of that place as speedily as possible, but sometimes there was an inevitable searching around in order to find what one wanted. This was one such occasion.

Our year's supply of powdered milk was kept in a large barrel, and fetching milk entailed filling a pitcher-sized container that I held in hand. As I groped about in the dark, trying to find the barrel, I kept thinking: Why was I always sent out alone on these missions? Surely my sisters were smaller and better able to crawl around between the unidentifiable, shadowy masses herein.

Yet, after some fumbling about, I eventually found the barrel and managed to pry the freezing cold lid off. I was resolved to fill my container as fast a possible, but I was nervous, casting furtive glances around the place. That was when my eyes locked upon something bulky, roughly man-sized, thickly bundled and lined up along one wall, as though it had been deliberately shoved out of the way.

Oh my God, I thought, where did they store people waiting for burial? It was too cold, in mid-winter, to bury them properly. They would have to put them somewhere, wouldn't they? It was one of my father's duties, as a lay preacher, to perform the last rites for the deceased. Had he recently mentioned that someone had passed away?

My brain began to race, and it seemed as though the air thinned noticeably. Could the air even reach me in here? But I was still staring at that inert bundle, and thoughts were battering at my mind. If I stood with the dead, was there a soul also in here with me?

"Ataatavuut qilangmiittutit…" I recited the Lord's Prayer in Inuktitut to myself. Could the dead hear our thoughts?

Sorry, sorry I didn't mean to intrude on your place, I thought at it.

That was around the time my flashlight began to dim.

(Continued in Part Two.)

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