Did the Innuit have legends about a place far, far away (down south perhaps?) where it wasn’t frozen all the time? A warm place. A place where ice doesn’t exist…?
Obviously they know about the rest of the world now, but I’m talking about old legends, passed down from earlier generations back when they were isolated. I’d think any people who live in such an extreme climate would have stories/legends about a place where the climate was not so extreme. Either here on earth or in the afterlife. Surely “Innuit heaven” is nice and warm, right?
I used to have a friend who worked with the Intuits while building the Yellow something pipeline. He loved them and learned a lot about them. He had a whale penis bone ring to give him sexual potency. We talked a lot about his experiences in the frozen waste lands, but he never once told me about their legends. Mostly what he learned from them was how to keep warm and how to get food and how to keep it safe.
Sadly, he died last July, so I can’t ask him about their legends now but I’m pretty sure that he would have told me tales about them if he had known any. That was the sort of stuff we talked about.
chacoguy: interesting, but it means people as a whole got around, not people within one generation (to have direct knowledge). But it is some evidence that they could have known about the warm south. Although there was the “Little Ice Age” back then, covering the top half or so of the continental US.
flatlined: i think they’re incredibly clever to have been able to adapt and survive in such extreme climate. They’re human extremophiles. Part of me wonders if they would have gone south if they knew about it, to get to a more reasonable, tolerable climate, but part of me thinks human stubborness and reverence for “home” (no matter how objectively horrible home may be) would lead them to say “fuck the warm, this is our land and our lives are right here in the freezing cold surrounded by nothing but ice.”
Even so, no matter how acclimated they are to the freezing cold, i can’t imagine them not having days where they’d pine for something warmer. For them, i’m sure 50F would be warm if not hot. But… something above freezing.
When you know how to kill seals with a spear to the nose and get reindeer by driving them into the river and build good shelters that are easy to heat, it can be hard to learn other ways.
It is like a thousand miles to the warm places, and many of them are not even very warm for nearly three-quarters of the year. There are no seals to kill as you cross the muskeg, you have to figure out what you can eat on the long trek. Then, when you get there, you have to learn all new stuff to survive there. Just, not worth the pain.
I took a cab ride in Wisconsin once, it was early morning in June. 55°F, and the driver had the A/C on. People who live in cold places are, quite simply, used to it. Why go somewhere that is not comfortable to you?
I’m just wondering if they have knowledge (or rumor/myth) about the warmer places down south. Like I said, I can come up with reasons why they don’t pick up everything and move there permanently. But do they think the entire planet/world is freezing cold?
Do they have a concept of rain? Liquid water falling from the sky? Or a place where liquid water does fall from the sky, totally unfrozen?
I’ve never heard of such a legend. The stories in that culture are mostly either parables for how to live one’s life, or creation legends to explain the unknown. It would seem unlikely that there would be a story about a warmer place. Accepted science says that the Inuit ancestors crossed the Bering Land Bridge to arrive in North America. This means they came from Siberia/northern Asia, which is none too warm. While some of the migrants continued southward through the ice-free corridor, those who remained behind lived in isolation for about 10,000 years and would probably have assumed that the climate they lived in was typical everywhere. Pining for what one can’t have wasn’t a trait in Inuit culture until the white man came along.
As for the question about rain: The Arctic is not frozen all the time. Of course they know what rain is. They have electricity and TV and phones and cars, just like most people.
Not only would moving to a new place require new methods of hunting and such, but much more importantly, it would mean dealing with the other people who are already there. Tropical islands are even nicer, climate-wise, than the contiguous US, but we still don’t all live there, just because we wouldn’t all fit.
True, there’s like this huge Wall of ice separating those frozen Wildlings from us civilized folk, or so I’m given to understand. There’s a historical documentary series going on about it right now. I saw a bit of it and apparently they know about us bad even sneak over the Wall for raids from time to time.
Their hunting depended on the cold, whether it was Sea Hunters or those who hunted land animals. Too much of a change “wouldn’t compute” I don’t think, or be desirable. Do we have myths and legends about a frigid land? (Not snark; I’m wondering.)
I seem to recall hearing a story on the radio of a Native legend of a warrior who went to fight a monster, described as being “big as a mountain”, who left round footprints, and who had an arm in the middle of his forehead. The story told the legend straight, and didn’t comment on the obvious inference that this monster was a mammoth.
I found interesting the idea that a legend of a mammoth might have survived in oral tradition for some thousands of years. No idea if the story was a retelling of an actual legend, or if it was made up.