Book review: ‘Arctic Song’ animates creation myths and cultural stories of the Inuit people

“Arctic Song: Creation Stories from the Arctic”

Germaine Arnaktauyok and Neil Christopher; Inhabit Media, 2024; 72 pages; $28.95.

Every human society holds its own creation myths. For millennia, until science arrived with its factual but emotionally neutral explanations about what actually occurred, these myths explained life itself to those born into the cultures that created and lived by them. And while they might not factually tell us how we came into this world, myths help explain how our many diverse peoples perceive themselves. Myths, and especially creation myths, form the backbone of human identity. Sustaining them in our oral and written literature is crucial to the self-understanding of everyone.

In the epigraph to the brief and wonderful children’s book “Arctic Song: Creation Stories from the Arctic,” the late linguist Susan Sammons of Nunavut Arctic College tells us “One of the first signs that a culture is dying is when people forget their creation stories.” This is the fate that the revered Inuk artist Germaine Arnaktauyok, who cowrote this collection with educator, author and filmmaker Neil Christopher, seeks to prevent in bringing to the page these stories drawn from the oral traditions of the Inuit culture, which spans the Western Hemisphere’s Arctic region from Alaska to Greenland, inhabiting it for some 10,000 years.

“In the beginning the world was blanketed in darkness,” we are told in the opening lines of the first story told here. “Those that lived back then had to carry their own light.” With these words, we are drawn into the realm inhabited by the Inuit, where darkness is all there is for several long months. The large animals of the sea and land that would sustain the Inuit had not yet come into being. The only illumination came from the fingers of hunters, wandering the land in search of rabbits and ptarmigan (within these pages, Arctic hares are referred to as rabbits).

Light arrived owing to a conflict between rabbits and ravens. Rabbits sought darkness for safety, but ravens required light to see the world and search for food. And so Raven (capitalized as the singular spirit so ubiquitous to all of Northern mythology) utters a word, and light emerges. Rabbit, frightened by his sudden exposure, replies with his own word, and darkness returns. The conflict remains unresolved, and so the polarized balance between the summer and winter skies came into being.

This balance is visualized in one of Arnaktauyok’s many captivating paintings that accompany each story in this book. Raven rests upside down in light that deepens into the orange of late summer along the symbol’s dividing line, while Rabbit leaps over him against a backdrop of nighttime stars.

“Inuit legends have a lot of movements going on, and interesting little details,” Arnaktauyok writes in her foreword, explaining how she approaches these stories. “It’s like looking at a blueprint in my mind, and that’s how I get my imagination going,” she says, adding, “We don’t have many illustrated legends nowadays, so I hope people can take away something interesting from this book.”

Arnaktauyok’s paintings instill life into these brief legends. Each provides insight into how the Inuit viewed themselves and the world they dwelt in long before it was upended by the arrival of Europeans. Here narwhals, caribou, birds and other creatures travel through the sea, land and air, often accompanied by people who interact with them across those three dimensions.

In one story, a hunter’s dogs, animals immeasurably critical to the subsistence practices that allowed the Inuit to thrive in one of the Earth’s most forbidding climates, chase a polar bear into the night sky, never catching it. As they soar farther from view, all that can be seen of them is their glittering lights, the stars that twinkle in the darkness.

Unlike the myths of Western culture and of many found elsewhere, here there is no deity lying at the heart of these stories. But spirits and mythological beings abound, part of a magical realm that brought about the features of the world.

Giants, so abundant in mythology across the globe, once wandered the landscape, we learn. But they could not be sustained by the scarcity of food. So they laid down and died, their bodies forming the hills, mountains, and islands the Inuit live upon.

Spirits are the source of the aurora that glistens in winter’s magnetosphere. Arnaktauyok depicts this as people gliding in the heavens, attired in parkas, dancing in the lights. “How can anyone be lonely or truly mourn when you can see those who came before you playing in the sky,” she asks.

The cycles of life are also explained. Children, we discover, were once birthed from the earth to sustain the Inuit population, while death came into the world to prevent their numbers from growing too many.

The text of these myths is bilingual. They are written in both English and Inuktitut, employing the alphabets of each. The Inuktitut script is foreign and geometric to Western eyes, but its use is fundamental to this book. “Arctic Song” is just one of a growing number of children’s books coming from Inhabit Media, located in Nunavut, the first Inuit-owned publishing company in Canada. The purpose of this book is not just to delight readers and preserve mythology. It’s to instruct Inuit children in their own cultural traditions. To instill in them and maintain their identity.

“Inhabit Media was born out of a need for Nunavut kids to see their culture accurately represented in the books they read in schools,” we are told on the company’s website. “We have spent the last ten years working with elders and storytellers from across the Canadian Arctic to ensure that the region’s unique Inuit oral history is recorded and not lost to future generations.”

One result is this wonderful children’s book, which invites readers of all ages and from every corner of the planet into the heart of a culture that arose in isolation from nearly all of the rest of the world, sustained itself for millennia and endures today in part owing to artistic endeavors like “Arctic Song.”

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