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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
To the memory of the ephemeral goddess Sedna, whose huge body reached out across the depths of the Arctic seas, whose hair was forever matted, full of ordure, clogged with bear furs and the snouts of narwhales, and could be combed only by a shaman on one of his cosmic journeyes.
The inukshuk are piles of rough stone, shaped like men, and found on the coasts of the Canadian Arctic. I am well aware that they have never found a place in the history of statuary. However, they are unquestionably representations of the human form, and no one would confuse them with the simple cairns raised here and there by so many nomadic tribes in the course of their wanderings. They are disappearing, or have already disappeared with the recent, swift, and far reaching changes in Eskimo life. It is really almost a matter of chance as to whether one recognizes that they represent, or represented, a remarkable image of man. For me, the chance was a two-fold one, so to speak.
1 L'Esthétique et le sacré. Paris, Seghers, 1976. chap. 1, pp. 19-29.
2 "Inukshuks and Inunguaks on Fox Peninsula and the North Quebec Coast," Canadian Geographical Journal, vol. LXXII, no. 3, September 1976, pp. 34-37.
3 Op. cit. p. 84, document belonging to the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative.
4 Ibid. Same document.
5 Ibid., p. 87.
6 This territory comprises several thousand kilometres of coastline. One should remember that the Eskimos do not normally inhabit the hinterland. As a compar ison, there are 30,000 in Greenland, 24,000 in Alaska, and fewer than 3,000 in Siberia. All are Canadian, Danish, American, or Soviet citizens respectively. Their votes are polled regularly, and they enjoy their full rights, often benefitting besides from supplementary assistance. Alexandre Stevenson, "De la banquise a la grande ville," Le Courrier de l'Unesco, January 1975; Paul-Emile Victor, Eskimos, nomades des glaces, Lausanne and Paris 1972.
7 P.E. Victor, op. cit., p. 24 ff.
8 Ibid., p. 134. The author has, furthermore, witnessed this ritual, at Ammas salik, on the east coast of Greenland.
9 As Knud Rasmussen, who did so much for the Eskimos and our under standing of them, has chosen the name Thule for the most important township in north-west Greenland, I should eliminate any ambiguity here by recalling that this is the legendary Ultima Thule of the ancient geographers, i.e. a northern land of which all that is known is that there lies nothing beyond it.
