October 16, 1998

Anthropologist unearths treasure trove of Inuit culture

Between 1946 and 1967, Danish anthropologist Svend Frederiksen recorded many interviews with the last known shamans of the Keewatin region. His has been rediscovered by an anthropologist from Laval University.

LOUIS McCOMBER
Special to Nunatsiaq News

NUUK, GREENLAND — At the 11th Inuit Studies Conference in Nuuk, Greenland earlier this month, Bernard Saladin d'Anglure, an anthropologist from Laval University, announced the discovery at the Sisimiut Museum in Greenland of the Danish anthropologist Svend Frederiksen's forgotten work.

Between 1946 and 1967, Frederiksen extensively interviewed the last known shamans of the Keewatin.

Throughout the last 30 years of his career, Saladin d'Anglure has been digging into the eastern Arctic Inuit oral tradition in search of all possible remaining information about shamans and shamanism.

That journey was not always easy, since most Inuit converted to Christianity at the beginning of this century, and since then have been reluctant to talk about their ancestral spiritual practices.

The difficulty of researching that matter is reinforced by the fact that Catholic or Anglican missionaries historically condemned their traditional Inuit counterpart (the angakok) for worshiping the devil.

The helping spirits of the shaman rapidly became evil in the creeds of the two competing churches. The Inuktitut word "tuurngaq" used to name those spirits, suddenly was translated by "devil" in the new Christian dictionaries.

On top of struggling against this rather recent conversion of Inuit to Christianity, Saladin d'Anglure faced the inherent secrecy associated with traditional shamanistic activities.

Finally, the people who openly practiced shamanism in Inuit society at the beginning of the century are not around any more to pass on their knowledge.

Major breakthrough

In that context, the rediscovery of Svend Frederiksen's field notes is considered a major breakthrough in Inuit studies by most Inuit and circumpolar scholars.

Frederiksen was born in Greenland of Danish parents. His father was a Lutheran minister in Sisimiut, and he insisted that the young Svend should speak the Inuit language fluently.

When he first visited Igluligaarjuk (Chesterfield Inlet) in 1946, Svend Frederiksen was an accomplished linguist and anthropologist trained for ten years under the influence of William Thalbitzer at the University of Copenhagen and a skilled Inuktitut speaker.

He had an opportunity to spend a few weeks with the best-known shaman of the area, Qimuksiraaq, who another famous Greenlander, Knud Rasmussen, had interviewed in 1922.

Interviews with shamans

Before his death in 1967, Frederiksen had identified and interviewed most of the Keewatin's remaining significant shamans.

Beside numerous trips to the North that took him to the Keewatin, Baffin Island, Greenland and Alaska, Frederiksen visited many southern sanatoriums to talk with knowledgeable elders.

He left more than 2,000 pages of field notes and manuscripts containing transcripts of interviews with shamans. In April of 1997, Bernard Saladin d'Anglure had for the first time a chance to look through this important ethnographical material.

"To my big surprise it was written in a Central Arctic dialect that I was understanding, Saladin d'Anglure said. "I was probably the first one since the death of this poor man to really read what he had collected. I recognized the names of many old angakoks who I had known myself. I was very excited."

In his lifetime, Friederiksen barely published anything more than a few minor articles. That might explain why the bulk of his rich ethnographical material was forgotten in the Sisimiut Museum Library for so many years.

Kenn Harper discovers boxes

Kenn Harper, a historian and linguist from Iqaluit, was the first to pay attention to those mysterious boxes more than 15 years ago, while visiting Sisimiut. He could read on the boxes the words: "Svend Frederiksen, Eskimology."

Harper photocopied some 200 pages of documents, including the interview with Qimuksiraaq and mentioned the existence of those archives to some friends.

It was only after 1990 that a complete inventory was made of the entire contents of those boxes by a Danish graduate student of anthropology, Klaus Georg Hansen. Hansen made a presentation about this important discovery at the 8th Inuit studies Conference held in Quebec City in 1992.

Hansen also traveled to Washington, D.C., where Frederiksen had been a teacher for some years at the Catholic University.

Many recordings

He located numerous recordings of shamans that Frederiksen had collected on plastic disks, or regular recording tapes. The inventory of this material have yet to be completed.

"I would say that Frederiksen's material is the best contribution to Inuit studies since Knud Rasmussen," an enthusiastic Saladin d'Anglure said.

"Those data are written in Inuktitut and we don't have that with Rasmussen. Also we can read the exact question asked by the interviewer and it can help very much in understanding the answer.

"This material could prove to be more accurate than the accounts of Rasmussen, since we have probably the original recordings in Washington. Maybe sometime soon we will hear on the Web the voices of the last 20 shamans of the Keewatin."