Inuit Names and no I'm not talking about Eskimos!!

A couple of weeks back I went along with a friend to the opening of an exhibition on the material histories of the fur trade (Northern Canada) which was very interesting as there were all these artefacts from the far north: snowshoes, wooden googles, beautifully embroidered fur boots and parkas and jackets and bone miniatures of animals etc. The Inuit fascinate me and I've always wanted to experience living in an igloo! The image of curious explorers with their packs of huskies in the bleak white wilderness encountering polar bears and the Northern Lights is the stuff which makes great stories. I met an anthropologist who had lived with Inuit people in Canada as part of his project and wasn't I was jealous.

Then a few days back I watched this short on television about Inuit names and as the narrator read the names aloud they sounded so poetic : 'Irniq, Tulugaq, Nauja, Amamruq, Taliriktuq ...' I could go on - and they all mean something - they derive from the elements that are important to Inuit culture - animals and birds, the spirit world, the landscape, the sky, relationships. For example, Tulugaq stands for raven and Nauja for the sea-gull. I wish my name wasn't so mundane! But there is also a political narrative embedded in these Inuit names. In the 1920s the Inuit names were replaced by E numbers which they had to wear as name tags around their necks. Since, Inuit often have multiple names for a person or object( 31 to describe snow) the Canadian government devised the E number system to keep count of the population. Along with a loss of names there was an accompanying loss of culture. The Inuit are trying to reclaim their lost names and identities by legal means at the present moment. That is indeed a way forward. This ties in interestingly with the way in which the Irish language was officially suppressed until its more recent resurgence. Irish poets like Heaney try and use old Gaelic place names in their verse to recover what was lost like the Inuit.

For more information on The Inuit you can go and check out this website from where I got some of my background information: http://www.athropolis.com/links/inuit.htm. Enjoy exploring...