The seal will not yield itself up to just any Real People hunter. The hunter must win them over, not just through his guile and stealth and skill but also through the quality of the hunter’s own courage and inua.
These inua – the spirits of the Real People, seals, walruses, bears, caribou, birds, whales – existed as spirits before the Earth, and the Earth is old.
During the first period of the universe, the Earth was a floating disk beneath a sky supported by four pillars. Beneath the Earth was a dark place where the spirits lived (and where most live to this day). This early Earth was under water most of the time and without any human beings – the Real People or others – until two men, Aakulujjuusi and Uumaaniirtuq, crawled out of humps in the earth. These two became the first of the Real People.
There were no stars in that era, no moon, no sun, and the two men and their descendants had to live and hunt in total darkness. Since there were no shamans to guide the Real People in their behavior, the human beings had very little power and could hunt only the smallest of animals – hares, ptarmigan, the occasional raven – and they did not know how to live properly. Their only decoration was to wear the occasional aanguaq, an amulet made from a sea urchin shell.
Women had joined the two men on the Earth in this earliest of times (they came from the glaciers much as the men had come from the Earth), but they were barren and spent all their time walking the coastlines staring into the sea or digging into the ground in search of children.
The Second Cycle of the universe appeared after a long and bitter contest between a fox and a raven. The seasons appeared then, and then life and death itself; shortly after the seasons arrived, a new era began in which the life spirit of human beings would die with the bodies and the inua-spirit would travel elsewhere.
Shamans learned some of the secrets of the cosmic order then and were able to help the Real People learn how to live properly – creating rules which forbade incest and marrying out of the family or murder or other behavior which goes against the Order of Things. The shamans were also able to see back even into the time before Aakulujjuusi and Uumaaniirtuq crawled out of the Earth and to explain to the human beings about the origins of the great spirits in the universe – the inuat – such as the Spirit of the Moon, or about Naarjuk, the spirit of consciousness itself, or about Sila, the Spirit of the Air, who is also the most vital of all ancient forces; it is Sila who created and permeates and gives energy to all things and who expresses her wrath through blizzards and storms.
This is also the time when the Real People learned about Sedna, who is known in other cold places as Uinigumauituq or Nuliajuk. The shamans explained that all human beings – the Real People, the redder-skinned native human beings who lived far south of the Real People, the Ijirait caribou spirits, and even the pale people who appeared so much later – were born after Sedna-Uinigumauituq-Nuliajuk coupled with a dog. This also explains why dogs are allowed to have names and a name-soul and even share their master’s inua.
The moon’s inua, Aningat, had incest with and otherwise abused his sister, Siqniq, the inua of the sun. Aningat’s wife, Ulilarnaq, loved to disembowel victims – animal or Real People – and so disliked the shamans’ meddling in spirit matters that she would punish them by making them laugh uncontrollably. To this day, the shamans may be seized by uncontrollable laughter and frequently die from it.
The Real People enjoy knowing about these three most powerful spirits in the cosmos – the all-pervasive Spirit of the Air, the Spirit of the Sea, who controls all animals who live in the sea or depend upon the sea, and the final member of this trinity, the Spirit of the Moon – but these three original inuat are too powerful to pay much attention to the Real People (or to human beings of any sort) since these ultimate inuat are as far above the many other spirits as those lesser spirits are above human beings, so the Real People do not worship this trinity. Shamans rarely try to contact these most powerful of spirits – such as Sedna – and content themselves with making sure that the Real People do not break taboos that would anger the Spirit of the Sea, the Spirit of the Moon, or the Spirit of the Air.
But slowly, over many generations, the shamans – known as angakkuit among the Real People – have learned more secrets of the hidden universe and of the lesser inuat spirits. Over many centuries, some of the shamans have acquired the gift that Memo Moira called the Second Sight – clairvoyance. The Real People call these abilities qaumaniq or angakkua, depending upon how they manifest themselves. Just as human beings once tamed their cousin-spirits, the wolves, to become dogs who shared their masters’ inua, so did the angakkuit with the hearing-thoughts or sending-thoughts gifts learn how to tame and domesticate and control the smaller spirits who appeared to them. These helping-spirits were called tuurngait, and they not only helped the shamans see the invisible spirit world and look back to times before human beings, but also allowed them to look into other human beings’ minds to see the faults committed by the Real People when they break the rules of the universe’s order. The tuurngait helping-spirits aid the shamans in restoring order and balance. They taught the angakkuit their language, the language of the small spirits, which is called irinaliutit, so that the shamans could address themselves directly to their own ancestors and to the more powerful inuat powers of the universe.
Once the shamans had learned the irinaliutit language of the spirit-helper tuurngait, the shamans could then help human beings confess their misbehavior and faults so as to cure diseases and to restore order out of the confusion that is human affairs, thus restoring the order of the world itself. This system of rules and taboos passed down by the shamans was as complex as the crisscross string patterns created between the fingers of Real People women to this day.
The shamans also acted as protectors.
Some minor evil spirits roam among the Real People, haunting them and bringing bad weather, but the shamans have learned how to create and consecrate a sacred knife and to kill these tupilait.
To stop the storms themselves, the angakkuit found and handed down a special hook that can cut the silagiksaqtuq, the vein of the wind.
The shamans can also fly and act as mediators between the Real People and the spirits, but they can – and frequently do – also betray the trust of their own powers and harm human beings by using ilisiiqsiniq, powerful spells they cast which stir up jealousy and rivalry and which can even a create a hatred sufficient to compel a Real Person to kill others for no reason. Frequently a shaman loses control of his tuurngait helping-spirits, and when that happens, if it is not remedied quickly, that incompetent shaman is like a large metallic rock calling down the summer’s lightning and there is little choice except for the Real People either to bind up the shaman and leave him behind or to kill him, cutting off his head and keeping it separate from the body so that the shaman cannot bring himself back to life and pursue them.
Most shamans with any power at all can fly, heal people, families, and entire villages (actually by helping people heal themselves by finding balance again after confessing their faults), leave their bodies to travel to the moon or to the bottom of the sea (wherever the inuat most powerful of spirits might dwell), and – after the proper irinaliutit shamanic incantions, singing, and beating of drums – turn themselves into animals such as the white bear.