McNally does a good job of expressing the way that religion is diffused into a sacred way of life that is multifacted. Religion is not just a discrete part of life, an activity (although many Inupiaq people in Barrow did go to church) but a comprehensive way of life in relationship to the ecosystem--the land, animals, and seasons. I was privileged to see some of that sacred way of life firsthand--although perhaps at the time I didn't understand exactly what I was witnessing. I remember families leaving town during the summer for weeks at a time, from my perspective, they would disappear into the tundra to fish and hunt and gather-- going away to their summer cabins, somewhere in the tundra. They were perfectly at home, navigating through what seemed to me to be trackless tundra but to them was a landscape well and thoroughly known.
In addition to their familiarity with camping, fishing, hunting sites, there may have been other sacred or holy places out there in the landscape--sacralized by stories and historical events that I did not know about. The one special or sacred spot that I knew about was a section of land called the Ukkuqsi archaeological site on the coast just on the edge of town in Barrow, AK where there had been a very old Inupiaq settlement. It is protected--the cliff there is slowly eroding into the sea and archaeological artifacts are occasionally exposed, so no one was supposed to go there or disturb that area. The story I was told about the place was that an ancient body of a shaman had been discovered there mummified by the tundra. A team of scientists were preparing to excavate the body and take it to a museum. But the night before they were to remove the body, a storm came in and washed the body out to sea. The deceased shaman, it seems, was still powerful enough to call up the storm in order to escape the clutches of the scientists--the sea claiming the shaman's remains before the scientists could get to them.
No comments:
Post a Comment