Inuit

I didn't really know much about it before I looked into it.

But There was a folklorist in the 1940s who was wandering through Alaska, as folklorists do, they go to Alaska, and found these carved ivory things that people said that the Inuit had been carving for centuries.

And this folklore is asked around like, is that true? And apparently they had not been carving these things for centuries.

These were created in 1908.

So this was like the viral meme of its day.

And it was so viral it made it all the way up to the Inuit in Alaska.

It's a pretty good metric for if your meme is good.

But the Billiken was created in 1908 by a woman named Florence Pretz who said it came to her in a dream.

At this point in our travels, let's take a little wander in a slightly different direction.

The Inuit, as the indigenous Eskimo peoples of the Far North call themselves, trace their ancestry back through language to a common source, as do many other peoples around the world.

Their collective memory brings to mind a mode of being that is both human and animal.

In his novel Ulysses, James Joyce calls this the strand-entwining cable of all flesh, an evolutionary cable of common ancestry and linguistic connection that reaches far, far back in time.

The great Danish collector of shamanic tales and songs, Knud Rasmussen, travelled through the Arctic homelands of the Inuit from Siberia to Greenland in the early years of the 20th century.

He collected the following statement of origins from Nalungwit, a Netsilik woman.

It was then reworked as a poem in English by Edward Field in the 1960s.

That was the time when words were like magic.

We shared uncounted common interests.

How to write music, Inuit cooking, those little porcelain figures you can buy in magazines.

We shared our hopes, our dreams, our lives.

But now it's all over.

Thanks so much for tuning in, and I hope you'll join me again next week for another conversation with the artists and creators shaping Canada's musical landscape.

Musings is a production of the Canadian Music Centre Prairie Region.

As a program dedicated to music and music makers from across this country, we acknowledge that the lands on which we live, work, create, and listen are the traditional and contemporary territories of diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

We recognize the enduring presence, cultures, knowledge, and creative traditions of Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and offer our respect and gratitude to the Indigenous communities whose land we each call home.

And so she's a hero and in the faith.

At 21 years old, she went up and she rode by dog sled from community to community to community to bring the gospel message of Jesus Christ to the Inuit.

A white girl.

So a few years later, after she'd been up there for a while, my dad comes up to just serve for a He left, came down, and then had a chance encounter with a beautiful gal named Velma Cole.

But I think the return to a different relationship to the ground, to the earth, will require a different kind of listening, a different kind of not doing, of not knowing.

I believe I shared with you and Adrian this term from the Inuit tradition, kartsuluni.

And just for the listeners now, kartsuluni translates quite literally, sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth.

And these were the whaling people, and they couldn't go out to hunt until the whale people gave them a song that says that they are in mutual and reciprocal relationship with one another.

It was used by the Abnaki Indians in describing to the whites the dwellers of the far north, and it means the people who eat raw meat.

The Eskimos called and still call themselves the Inuit, which means the people.

The exact relation of the Eskimo to the other races of the continent is hard to define.

From the fact that the race was found on both sides of the Bering Sea, and that its members have dark hair and dark eyes, it was often argued that they were akin to the Mongolians of China.

And coming back to what Marco said, the issue is always presence.

And there's no doubt that in the north we have our our indigenous folks that are up there, the Inuit and so on.

But When you talk about the country, it's 10 million square miles.

It's huge.

And so, you know, we have this shipbuilding program, but I don't think it's enough, particularly in the changed circumstances of the Arctic, where we're We're pouring a lot of defense dollars into some very, very pricey pieces of military equipment, naval warships, fighter planes, radar planes, north warning system, all that kind of stuff, all of which is good and important.

But the basic reality is that if you want to be able to kind of knit the Arctic together in terms of the ability of Inuit communities to live and prosper, If you want to use the Arctic as an export portal for Canada, as is increasingly being talked about, And if you want to be able to actually demonstrate your sovereignty in the Arctic, the first thing is you have to have icebreakers.

Yeah.

Okay.