Inuit Mentors

RACHEL ATTITUQ QITSUALIK

The best educational tool available to traditional Inuit society was the mentoring system.

Every Inuk knows how intensively the Inuit culture has been studied, but there are likely few who have wondered why other cultures marvel at us so much.

Ingenuity is the greatest reason. They wonder at how and when it occurred to us to master the cold, to thrive in a place where even those most ancient of life forms — trees — cannot survive.

Who would think to use the insulating properties of snow in housing construction? What pressures and ideas, the rest of humanity wonders, impelled us to overlook warfare and territory, to live in bands without leaders, where even the weakest individual’s opinions were respected?

We have a cold weather technology that not even modern industrial prowess can yet surpass. It is still best to wear a caribou-skin qulittaq in -60 weather. And there is no other culture that has so effectively partnered with canines for the benefit of travel — a technique that is still preferred by many to skidoos, and unmatched for extended travel over the land. The utility of huskies was a hard-earned lesson to those earliest explorers of Antarctica and the Arctic.

Yet, as important as cunning itself has been the manner in which Inuit once taught and learned.

Obviously, one’s first mentors were parents or other close relatives, as well as favourite aunts, uncles, and older cousins.

In practice, however, any mentor was an individual of skill, one with specialized expertise to offer. Such mentors were not so often chosen as found, like necessary pieces required to complete the pu le of a young person’s life.

Useful skill of any sort was the measure by which one’s worth was measured in traditional society. Apprenticeship under a mentor was therefore taken very seriously. As one acquired mentors and skills, so one became a valued human being. It was a matter of pride and self-fulfillment — the drive to be useful to others. The mentors themselves were the trailblazers, the standard in any respective skill to which one aspired.

So Inuit did not receive a packaged set of pre-determined skills. An individual found his or her skills by finding his or her mentors. In this sense, the society itself was one’s university. The teachers were one with their very courses, the content springing from their very being.

The Inuktitut language was the great facilitator in such a process. Its very age has lent it a wonderful flexibility, so that old words may flutter up from near-oblivion, allowing a partial grip upon ephemeral concepts. Equipped with this language, capable of invoking images even of extinct giant beavers and woolly mammoths, the mentor was able understand the apprentice’s thoughts, to present his or her own in a way that was relevant to the student.

The mentor soon came to know well the foibles, strengths, and weaknesses of the apprentice. They were a team, practicing together and living the knowledge itself.

The mentors themselves, like pearls along a gossamer thread, were the lifeline of the new generation, with each child reaching back to the minds of those before. In this sense, the knowledge was passed from one to another, so that the whole society formed an efficient and remarkably strong web of varied skills. It was a living archive, not merely constituted of facts and opinions, but of tangible minds and bodies.

Creativity a most respected factor in Inuit learning. Inuit understood that a portion of one’s skill invariably came from the self, from one’s own imagination and personal observations. Therefore, in teaching, the mentor never imparted the full extent of his or her knowledge to an apprentice, with the understanding that there are natural gaps that the healthy apprentice must fill in with imagination alone. The mentors might have appreciated Albert Einstein’s opinion that, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Finally, it’s a well guarded secret that in teaching others, you never pass on all the factors you know. That way, there was knowledge you kept to yourself, like keeping a part of a family recipe. In this ancient formula as it were, you added your own spices.

Pijariiqpunga.