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Description
A thousand years ago in the bitterly cold lands of the Arctic, one of the greatest migrations in human history was beginning. Groups of people who would one day be known as the Inuit left their homes in the Bering Sea and started heading east. Over the next few hundred years, their travels would take them from the Pacific to the Atlantic on the opposite side of the continent, from the coast of Alaska to the shores of Greenland. They brought with them a complex society, poised to coordinate themselves for whaling, warfare, and trade to an extent never before seen in the Arctic. The earliest expressions of their culture are known to archaeologists by many names: the Birnirk, the Punuk, the Northern Maritime Tradition, the Western Thule. Their Inuit descendants today call them Taissumanialungmiut - "the people of long ago".

But the lands that the Taissumanialungmiut found in the east were not empty. They knew from existing trade contacts that there were people already there. Archaeologists classify them variously as Norton, Dorset, Ipiutak. In Inuktitut, these people are known today as Sivullirmiut, "the first people". Like the Taissumanialungmiut, they had strong cultural ties to cultures on either side of the Bering Sea, but they were also more connected to the Athabaskan peoples of the interior. In the lands of the Sivullirmiut, trees were few and far between, with a single, precious piece of driftwood sometimes being preserved and repurposed for centuries. But they traded with the people of the forested interior, and from them they learned how to make useful tools out of wood like birchbark baskets and snowshoes.

One of these Sivullirmiut peoples were the Ipiutak. Like the Taissumanialungmiut, they had their origins in a rich artistic and religious tradition known as the Old Bering Sea Culture. Whether the Ipiutak were rivals or allies to the Old Bering Sea people is unclear. The hallmarks of their culture were shamanic performances in community centres known as qargi, and their intense reverence for the dead. They are perhaps most famous for their elaborate burial masks resembling those from Central Asia. They were not as reliant on whaling as the Taissumanialungmiut, but varied their subsistence strategies to pursue salmon and caribou in addition to marine mammals. Although their shamanic performance centres served as hubs for long-distance trade, evidence for warfare shows that the Ipiutak's relationships with their neighbours were not always peaceful.

The Birnirk were one such group of neighbours. Considered the predecessors of the Thule and therefore the direct ancestors of the modern Inuit, the Birnirk and the closely-related Punuk cultures were much more focused on whaling than any of their predecessors had been. Catching and killing a bowhead whale was no easy feat, and it required high levels of social coordination to accomplish. While the men were the ones who physically pursued the whale, women had an equally important role to play in ensuring the success of the hunt. They manufactured the clothes that would keep the hunters alive and were ready to prepare the meat when the catch was brought home, but their role in whaling went beyond the physical. Whalers' wives were thought to have a special connection to the whale's spirit, and so the women had to carefully observe strict taboos and rituals so as to ensure the whale's goodwill in sacrificing itself to the hunters.

One of the most crucial things that early Inuit women had to do was to make sure that everyone knew when they were menstruating. Marine mammals were believed capable of perceiving the aura of blood around a person, whether they had come into contact with a dead body or a menstruating person. Whales would flee any hunter so marred, and so it was of the utmost importance that anyone who was menstruating made sure that their community was aware of it. In fact, concealing menstruation was considered the worst taboo that Inuit women could break and would earn them a hefty purgation in the afterlife. Menstruation was associated with the powers of life and death, so anyone undergoing it was considered far too powerful to come into contact with hunters, since powerful spirits might be attracted to their energy and interfere with the hunt.

Because menstruation was considered such a potent spiritual force, the onset of it during puberty was marked with special tattooing rituals. An ancient, sacred women's art in the Arctic, tattooing had many functions. Among humans, it advertised gender, age, family affiliation, and status. It could also be used to treat a wide variety of ailments, from migraine to arthritis. Facial tattoos among women were considered a particular mark of beauty, since unbroken lines showed that the woman had been able to endure the pain of the tattooing process without squirming. To the spirits, tattoos also served several different purposes. Sedna, the primordial woman who governed the oceans and the afterlife, would look for tattoos as a mark of a good Inuk after death. In fact, finger tattoos are thought to have been connected to Sedna's own origins as a girl whose severed fingers became the marine mammals of the ocean. Tattoos were also how Inuit people's ancestors would recognise them after death. In the realm of the living, tattoos offered a way to interface with spirits, keeping the spirits of a person's joints inside their body to prevent aches and pains, as well as protecting people from dangerous and powerful spirits in the wild. Although menstruation was often the time when girls received their first tattoos, women who didn't menstruate could also earn them through completing other important rites of passage like sewing their first sealskin parka or making their first successful hunt. However they got them, tattoos were a sign to the community that a girl was now a woman.

In the shifting cultural landscape of 10th century Alaska, tattoos were an instant way to recognise whether someone you came across was friend or foe. The two women in this illustration come from two different cultures. A Birnirk woman has come to the shores of Cape Krusenstern to settle. Her eyes are protected from the blinding brightness of the snow by a pair of beautifully carved ivory snow goggles. The tattoos on her face mark her as someone who has come from the Bering Sea in the west. Across an icy stream, however, she spots an Ipiutak woman. The Ipiutak woman's tattoos are of a much older provenance in these lands. Her snow goggles, too, are of a different, rounded style. To the Birnirk woman, these foreign implements mark the other woman out as one of the Sivullirmiut - or, as they are also known in Inuktitut, the Tuniit.

The Tuniit occupy an ambivalent place in Inuit oral history. The nickname is not an entirely kind one, and the Tuniit are sometimes portrayed as less than human. While they know the land like the back of their hands, they lack some of the technology of the Inuit, which leads to a sometimes patronizing portrayal. They are said to speak like children, and to have only "one song". At times the Tuniit are portrayed as very small, other times as giants. They are beings of great strength but are also very timid, often running away from the Inuit upon contact. The idea that the Tuniit were shy and fled the incoming Inuit has interesting parallels in the archaeological record, which frequently shows the abandonment of sites shortly before the arrival of Inuit incomers. In Cape Krusenstern, where this illustration is set, the last Ipiutak settlement dates to AD 988. After this point, the Birnirk and other proto-Inuit peoples appear to have demographically overwhelmed the earlier populations, resulting in an almost complete genetic replacement of the Tuniit or Sivullirmiut. As the Thule expanded east across Canada in later centuries, this replacement was even more dramatic, with the complete disappearance of Dorset haplogroups from the Arctic gene pool. While there is some evidence of warfare, there is overall very little evidence of contact between the Taissumanialungmiut and the Tuniit, whether in Alaska or in Canada. Many sites seem to have been abandoned by the Tuniit shortly before the Inuit arrived, though in northwestern Alaska there is more evidence of cohabitation until the Tuniit's eventual disappearance.

Can the disappearance of the Tuniit really be explained by a propensity to run away when confronted with the Inuit? Why is there so little evidence of intermarriage while at the same time little evidence of widespread massacres? There is no real answer to this question, either in the archaeological record or in Inuit oral history. One particularly poignant account by Inuit writer Joe Patiq has this to say about the interactions between the Inuit and the Tuniit:

It is said that when you meet them you forget them as soon as you part. You cannot remember anything about them... When an Inuk remembers and starts to tell about it, happy to be telling about meeting such a being, the person just ends up crying a lot. It is said that the person will start to say, 'Look, I met this...' then right away the person will start to cry.

Why does the Inuk weep when asked to recall his meeting with a Tunik? Is it because he knows that his people are the reason the Tuniit were driven out? Or is it because he is grieved that the Tuniit will ultimately be forgotten as none of them will remain to tell their own stories? As Keavy Martin puts it, the idea of forgetting is the central trope in the stories the Inuit tell about the Tuniit. The Taissumanialungmiut survived to become the Inuit and to tell their own stories about themselves. But the Tuniit are known to us only through fleeting glimpses in Inuit stories which complement an often mysterious and puzzling archaeological record. It is the same in Cape Krusenstern as everywhere else in the Arctic. Why did the Ipiutak disappear in 988 after living side-by-side with the Birnirk for centuries? More and more Birnirk came to occupy the coast in the late 10th and 11th centuries - did they drive out the Ipiutak, or did some other demographic crisis open up the lands for settlement first? Like the Inuk of Patiq's story, we can't tell the story of the Tuniit in a way that does these people justice, a gap which leaves an empty sadness in its wake.

This illustration, then, attempts to reconstruct an encounter with one of the last Ipiutak women and a woman from the Birnirk culture. While the Inuk is illuminated by the sun and dominates our field of view, the Tunik is obscured in shadow. Her tattoos signal that she was initiated into the old ways, but the child she carries on her back will not know them. Has her family been driven out from their homelands by incoming Birnirk, like the woman she eyes warily across the stream? Or has she married into a Birnirk family herself, her tattoos the only sign that she was not born among them? The Inuk does not know, and neither can we, separated by a gulf of time from this vanished culture. Still, while the Tuniit themselves are not be able to tell us about their lives, they do live on in the stories and memories of the Inuit, incomplete as those memories may be. And so we catch a last glimpse of the Ipiutak in the face of this Tunik, pausing in her lonely trek to contemplate the future of the Arctic standing across from her.

This story was originally going to be about the more famous expansion of the Thule across Canada, which displaced the Dorset in one of the greatest demographic mysteries of North American history. However, the Thule expansion in Canada, while conventionally dated to AD 1000, has recently been proven to have started about two centuries later. So I shifted my focus westward and looked at the place where the earliest Thule peoples were starting to expand a thousand years ago, which took me to Cape Krusenstern. Arctic archaeology has a long and thorny historiography, with heated arguments about the relationships between various archaeological cultures (not to mention the Cold War-era fighting between Russia and the United States over origins). Although the stories of the Tuniit are usually framed around the interactions between the Thule and the Dorset, the concept of the Tuniit also applies to the people the Thule first displaced in Alaska, so it was interesting to look at the archaeology through that lens. I've been pretty wrapped up in reading about this the past three weeks as it's been really fascinating.

The Inuit woman's tattoos are based on those of St. Lawrence Island women to reflect her origins in the Bering Sea. The Ipiutak woman's tattoos are instead based on an ivory maskette which is a few thousand years old, reflecting her roots in the pre-Inuit cultures of the North American continent. The Inuit woman's snow goggles are based on a real Punuk pair , while the Ipiutak woman's are based on a real Ipiutak pair . I was particularly struck by the elegant beauty of the Punuk snow goggles, although the Ipiutak ones remind me a bit of a steampunk scientist! The illustrations of Tuniit women in Rachel A. Quitsualik's book Tuniit: Mysterious Folk of the Arctic was the inspiration for my depiction of the Ipiutak woman's clothing.

Learn more on the website: womenof1000ad.weebly.com/inuk-…

Others in the series include...

Sophia and Adelheid

Kokannon

Duong Van Nga and Le Thi Phat Ngan

Dobira

Thorgunna

The Deaconess of Lucca
Karima al-Marwaziyya
Sembiyan Mahādevi and Kundavai Pirāttiyār
The Parishioner of North Elmham

Zoë and Theodora Porphyrogenita

Description
A thousand years ago in the bitterly cold lands of the Arctic, one of the greatest migrations in human history was beginning. Groups of people who would one day be known as the Inuit left their homes in the Bering Sea and started heading east. Over the next few hundred years, their travels would take them from the Pacific to the Atlantic on the opposite side of the continent, from the coast of Alaska to the shores of Greenland. They brought with them a complex society, poised to coordinate themselves for whaling, warfare, and trade to an extent never before seen in the Arctic. The earliest expressions of their culture are known to archaeologists by many names: the Birnirk, the Punuk, the Northern Maritime Tradition, the Western Thule. Their Inuit descendants today call them Taissumanialungmiut - "the people of long ago".

But the lands that the Taissumanialungmiut found in the east were not empty. They knew from existing trade contacts that there were people already there. Archaeologists classify them variously as Norton, Dorset, Ipiutak. In Inuktitut, these people are known today as Sivullirmiut, "the first people". Like the Taissumanialungmiut, they had strong cultural ties to cultures on either side of the Bering Sea, but they were also more connected to the Athabaskan peoples of the interior. In the lands of the Sivullirmiut, trees were few and far between, with a single, precious piece of driftwood sometimes being preserved and repurposed for centuries. But they traded with the people of the forested interior, and from them they learned how to make useful tools out of wood like birchbark baskets and snowshoes.

One of these Sivullirmiut peoples were the Ipiutak. Like the Taissumanialungmiut, they had their origins in a rich artistic and religious tradition known as the Old Bering Sea Culture. Whether the Ipiutak were rivals or allies to the Old Bering Sea people is unclear. The hallmarks of their culture were shamanic performances in community centres known as qargi, and their intense reverence for the dead. They are perhaps most famous for their elaborate burial masks resembling those from Central Asia. They were not as reliant on whaling as the Taissumanialungmiut, but varied their subsistence strategies to pursue salmon and caribou in addition to marine mammals. Although their shamanic performance centres served as hubs for long-distance trade, evidence for warfare shows that the Ipiutak's relationships with their neighbours were not always peaceful.

The Birnirk were one such group of neighbours. Considered the predecessors of the Thule and therefore the direct ancestors of the modern Inuit, the Birnirk and the closely-related Punuk cultures were much more focused on whaling than any of their predecessors had been. Catching and killing a bowhead whale was no easy feat, and it required high levels of social coordination to accomplish. While the men were the ones who physically pursued the whale, women had an equally important role to play in ensuring the success of the hunt. They manufactured the clothes that would keep the hunters alive and were ready to prepare the meat when the catch was brought home, but their role in whaling went beyond the physical. Whalers' wives were thought to have a special connection to the whale's spirit, and so the women had to carefully observe strict taboos and rituals so as to ensure the whale's goodwill in sacrificing itself to the hunters.

One of the most crucial things that early Inuit women had to do was to make sure that everyone knew when they were menstruating. Marine mammals were believed capable of perceiving the aura of blood around a person, whether they had come into contact with a dead body or a menstruating person. Whales would flee any hunter so marred, and so it was of the utmost importance that anyone who was menstruating made sure that their community was aware of it. In fact, concealing menstruation was considered the worst taboo that Inuit women could break and would earn them a hefty purgation in the afterlife. Menstruation was associated with the powers of life and death, so anyone undergoing it was considered far too powerful to come into contact with hunters, since powerful spirits might be attracted to their energy and interfere with the hunt.

Because menstruation was considered such a potent spiritual force, the onset of it during puberty was marked with special tattooing rituals. An ancient, sacred women's art in the Arctic, tattooing had many functions. Among humans, it advertised gender, age, family affiliation, and status. It could also be used to treat a wide variety of ailments, from migraine to arthritis. Facial tattoos among women were considered a particular mark of beauty, since unbroken lines showed that the woman had been able to endure the pain of the tattooing process without squirming. To the spirits, tattoos also served several different purposes. Sedna, the primordial woman who governed the oceans and the afterlife, would look for tattoos as a mark of a good Inuk after death. In fact, finger tattoos are thought to have been connected to Sedna's own origins as a girl whose severed fingers became the marine mammals of the ocean. Tattoos were also how Inuit people's ancestors would recognise them after death. In the realm of the living, tattoos offered a way to interface with spirits, keeping the spirits of a person's joints inside their body to prevent aches and pains, as well as protecting people from dangerous and powerful spirits in the wild. Although menstruation was often the time when girls received their first tattoos, women who didn't menstruate could also earn them through completing other important rites of passage like sewing their first sealskin parka or making their first successful hunt. However they got them, tattoos were a sign to the community that a girl was now a woman.

In the shifting cultural landscape of 10th century Alaska, tattoos were an instant way to recognise whether someone you came across was friend or foe. The two women in this illustration come from two different cultures. A Birnirk woman has come to the shores of Cape Krusenstern to settle. Her eyes are protected from the blinding brightness of the snow by a pair of beautifully carved ivory snow goggles. The tattoos on her face mark her as someone who has come from the Bering Sea in the west. Across an icy stream, however, she spots an Ipiutak woman. The Ipiutak woman's tattoos are of a much older provenance in these lands. Her snow goggles, too, are of a different, rounded style. To the Birnirk woman, these foreign implements mark the other woman out as one of the Sivullirmiut - or, as they are also known in Inuktitut, the Tuniit.

The Tuniit occupy an ambivalent place in Inuit oral history. The nickname is not an entirely kind one, and the Tuniit are sometimes portrayed as less than human. While they know the land like the back of their hands, they lack some of the technology of the Inuit, which leads to a sometimes patronizing portrayal. They are said to speak like children, and to have only "one song". At times the Tuniit are portrayed as very small, other times as giants. They are beings of great strength but are also very timid, often running away from the Inuit upon contact. The idea that the Tuniit were shy and fled the incoming Inuit has interesting parallels in the archaeological record, which frequently shows the abandonment of sites shortly before the arrival of Inuit incomers. In Cape Krusenstern, where this illustration is set, the last Ipiutak settlement dates to AD 988. After this point, the Birnirk and other proto-Inuit peoples appear to have demographically overwhelmed the earlier populations, resulting in an almost complete genetic replacement of the Tuniit or Sivullirmiut. As the Thule expanded east across Canada in later centuries, this replacement was even more dramatic, with the complete disappearance of Dorset haplogroups from the Arctic gene pool. While there is some evidence of warfare, there is overall very little evidence of contact between the Taissumanialungmiut and the Tuniit, whether in Alaska or in Canada. Many sites seem to have been abandoned by the Tuniit shortly before the Inuit arrived, though in northwestern Alaska there is more evidence of cohabitation until the Tuniit's eventual disappearance.

Can the disappearance of the Tuniit really be explained by a propensity to run away when confronted with the Inuit? Why is there so little evidence of intermarriage while at the same time little evidence of widespread massacres? There is no real answer to this question, either in the archaeological record or in Inuit oral history. One particularly poignant account by Inuit writer Joe Patiq has this to say about the interactions between the Inuit and the Tuniit:

It is said that when you meet them you forget them as soon as you part. You cannot remember anything about them... When an Inuk remembers and starts to tell about it, happy to be telling about meeting such a being, the person just ends up crying a lot. It is said that the person will start to say, 'Look, I met this...' then right away the person will start to cry.

Why does the Inuk weep when asked to recall his meeting with a Tunik? Is it because he knows that his people are the reason the Tuniit were driven out? Or is it because he is grieved that the Tuniit will ultimately be forgotten as none of them will remain to tell their own stories? As Keavy Martin puts it, the idea of forgetting is the central trope in the stories the Inuit tell about the Tuniit. The Taissumanialungmiut survived to become the Inuit and to tell their own stories about themselves. But the Tuniit are known to us only through fleeting glimpses in Inuit stories which complement an often mysterious and puzzling archaeological record. It is the same in Cape Krusenstern as everywhere else in the Arctic. Why did the Ipiutak disappear in 988 after living side-by-side with the Birnirk for centuries? More and more Birnirk came to occupy the coast in the late 10th and 11th centuries - did they drive out the Ipiutak, or did some other demographic crisis open up the lands for settlement first? Like the Inuk of Patiq's story, we can't tell the story of the Tuniit in a way that does these people justice, a gap which leaves an empty sadness in its wake.

This illustration, then, attempts to reconstruct an encounter with one of the last Ipiutak women and a woman from the Birnirk culture. While the Inuk is illuminated by the sun and dominates our field of view, the Tunik is obscured in shadow. Her tattoos signal that she was initiated into the old ways, but the child she carries on her back will not know them. Has her family been driven out from their homelands by incoming Birnirk, like the woman she eyes warily across the stream? Or has she married into a Birnirk family herself, her tattoos the only sign that she was not born among them? The Inuk does not know, and neither can we, separated by a gulf of time from this vanished culture. Still, while the Tuniit themselves are not be able to tell us about their lives, they do live on in the stories and memories of the Inuit, incomplete as those memories may be. And so we catch a last glimpse of the Ipiutak in the face of this Tunik, pausing in her lonely trek to contemplate the future of the Arctic standing across from her.

This story was originally going to be about the more famous expansion of the Thule across Canada, which displaced the Dorset in one of the greatest demographic mysteries of North American history. However, the Thule expansion in Canada, while conventionally dated to AD 1000, has recently been proven to have started about two centuries later. So I shifted my focus westward and looked at the place where the earliest Thule peoples were starting to expand a thousand years ago, which took me to Cape Krusenstern. Arctic archaeology has a long and thorny historiography, with heated arguments about the relationships between various archaeological cultures (not to mention the Cold War-era fighting between Russia and the United States over origins). Although the stories of the Tuniit are usually framed around the interactions between the Thule and the Dorset, the concept of the Tuniit also applies to the people the Thule first displaced in Alaska, so it was interesting to look at the archaeology through that lens. I've been pretty wrapped up in reading about this the past three weeks as it's been really fascinating.

The Inuit woman's tattoos are based on those of St. Lawrence Island women to reflect her origins in the Bering Sea. The Ipiutak woman's tattoos are instead based on an ivory maskette which is a few thousand years old, reflecting her roots in the pre-Inuit cultures of the North American continent. The Inuit woman's snow goggles are based on a real Punuk pair , while the Ipiutak woman's are based on a real Ipiutak pair . I was particularly struck by the elegant beauty of the Punuk snow goggles, although the Ipiutak ones remind me a bit of a steampunk scientist! The illustrations of Tuniit women in Rachel A. Quitsualik's book Tuniit: Mysterious Folk of the Arctic was the inspiration for my depiction of the Ipiutak woman's clothing.

Learn more on the website: womenof1000ad.weebly.com/inuk-…

Others in the series include...

Sophia and Adelheid

Kokannon

Duong Van Nga and Le Thi Phat Ngan

Dobira

Thorgunna

The Deaconess of Lucca
Karima al-Marwaziyya
Sembiyan Mahādevi and Kundavai Pirāttiyār
The Parishioner of North Elmham

Zoë and Theodora Porphyrogenita