In the Great White North

Question: Since the Inuit pantheon is still in progress, I have a few mythology questions to ask. 1. When most people think Inuit they probably think Eskimos, so which came first (i.e. Eskimos moving outward or Inuit entering Eskimo lands)? 2. Alaska has some pretty neat animals (penguins, yeah!), so does the pantheon have any established roles for these creatures? & 3) How "mobile" are the Inuit gods (i.e are they "free-roaming" gods like the Atua or they more isolated to a "specific" tribal region)?

This one's more recent, but I'm jumping in with it because it's a big ball of misconceptions, and since I'm hip-deep in Inuit stuff right now anyway, I'm happy to tackle it!

First of all, there's a reason that people think of the term "Eskimo" when they talk about the Inuit: Eskimo was what they were called by outsiders until fairly recently in history. The word Eskimo comes from the Ojibwa word eshkipo, which means literally "eaters of raw meat", and was the term used by those people to refer to the Inuit, who lived north of them and with whom they occasionally interacted. The word was picked up by European settlers coming in, who heard it applied to the Inuit and therefore assumed it was their name, and it's been used casually as an umbrella term for all the northern Canadian, Greenlander and Alaskan peoples ever since. Unfortunately, the word was used by the Ojibwa as a somewhat scornful term for their northern neighbors, and was definitely never used by the Inuit to refer to themselves, and in the modern day it's usually pretty thoroughly insulting to refer to an Inuit person as an Eskimo. Inuit, which means "the people" in the widespread language of Inuktitut, is the term that most Canadian and Alaskan Inuit have formally requested they be referred to by instead.

There are people who were referred to as Eskimos who aren't Inuit, since Europeans and their descendents usually used the word to mean "any native American people who live up there in the extreme north" and didn't do much distinguishing between different ethnic groups, but by and large, when someone talks about Eskimo culture or Eskimo mythology, they're talking about the Inuit. So there's no conflict between when the Eskimo and the Inuit inhabited the same territory, because 95% of the time you're talking about the same group of people. There's really no such thing as an "Eskimo", just a lot of Inuit peoples and a few smaller ethnic groups such as the Aleuts and Yupik. The Inuit and most of the other peoples of the Arctic areas of North America most likely settled around ten thousand years ago, after crossing over the ancient landbridge from Asia before the two continents finished separating.

As for your second question, you're right, there are a lot of awesome animals up in Inuit territory - but penguins, sadly, are not one of them. Penguins actually don't inhabit the north polar area and never have; they're native to the south polar region instead, and can be found in Antarctica as well as the southern parts of South America, Africa and Australia. The only penguin-style bird to be seen in Inuit-settled areas - and only in far eastern Canada and Greenland, at that, definitely not in Alaska or mainland Canada - was the Great Auk, now extinct, which shares a lot of similar traits with modern penguins but lived on small rocky islands and seldom bothered coming ashore to interact with humans. They were occasionally hunted by people in those eastern areas and sometimes used in ritual, but there aren't any deities strongly associated with the auk, never mind penguins.

However, there's no shortage of awesome animals that are important to Inuit mythology and ritual. The polar bear is, of course, a big deal as the apex predator in the area, and the walrus and seal are both major food sources and the most important creatures of the cold, cold northern oceans. Caribou (known to those in a festive frame of mind as reindeer) and musk oxen are the major land animals that humanity is concerned with, and various other creatures, including loons and ravens for birds, arctic foxes for land creatures and narwhals for ocean denizens, also have their place in the general Inuit view of important parts of nature. Some of these creatures have deities specifically associated with them, like the Caribou Mother or our good friend the Great Bear, while others fall under the dominion of more generalized nature gods like the Sea Woman and Earth Mother. Inuit religion stresses the idea that all natural features, including various kinds of animals, have master spirits (i.e., the gods) that inhabit and empower them, so many rituals are dedicated to requesting that these gods depower animals to allow them to catch them or proving that they respect the creatures so as not to draw the wrath of their presiding deities.

Finally, your last question is a good one. If you look at our mythology world map, you'll see that Inuit "territory" covers a very large range, which, similar to the Polynesians, means that it includes various different groups. Many different Inuit peoples have slightly different languages and regional variations in their religion but share many of their deities and practices in common, making their gods something of a confederate pantheon in spite of the fact that we often think of the Inuit as a single homogenous group. The differences between regions aren't as marked as they are among the Polynesians; the islanders are more isolated from one another thanks to being on completely different bodies of land, whereas the Inuit have had a little more historical ability to travel and trade between different groups and thus have fewer groups with severely conflicting religious ideas. You'll definitely see some variation - for example, Father Raven is a big deal for western Inuit groups but diminishes in importance as you go east, whereas the Greenland Inuit are way more into the Sea Mother than the inland Canadian Inuit who don't have to rely on her watery bounty nearly as much - but overall, you'll see the same deities, monsters and religious observances repeated across most of the northern reaches.

So that's a quick crash course in some Inuit basics, and hopefully you'll get to hear more about their specific religious character someday not too far in the future!