A Malemut shaman shared a fascinating cosmology where a moon-dwelling chief governs earthly animal abundance, granting animals to shamans who visit him in pairs with offerings. The sky is imagined as an inverted land, its grass releasing snow during storms. Stars are seen as shining lakes in this sky-land, while the winds are attributed to a northern giant and a southern woman shaping their environments.
Source:
The Eskimo about Bering Strait
by Edward William Nelson
[Smithsonian Institution]
Bureau of American Ethnology
Eighteenth Annual Report
Washington, 1900
► Themes of the story
Divine Intervention: The moon-dwelling chief, a divine figure, influences earthly animal abundance by granting animals to shamans who visit him with offerings.
Supernatural Beings: The narrative involves interactions with supernatural entities, such as the chief in the moon and the personifications of the north and south winds.
Sacred Spaces: The sky and the moon are depicted as sacred realms that shamans can access, with the sky imagined as an inverted land and the moon as the dwelling place of a powerful chief.
► From the same Region or People
Learn more about Inuit peoples
from Kotzebue Sound
A Malemut shaman from Kotzebue sound near Selawik lake told me that a great chief lives in the moon who is visited now and then by shamans, who always go to him two at a time, as one man is ashamed to go alone. In the moon live all kinds of animals that are on the earth, and when any animal becomes scarce here the shamans go up to the chief in the moon and, if he is pleased with the offerings that have been made to him, he gives them one of the animals that they wish for, and they bring it down to the earth and turn it loose, after which its kind becomes numerous again.
The shaman who told me the foregoing said he had never been to the moon himself, but he knew a shaman who had been there.
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He had been up only as high as the sky, and went up that high by flying like a bird and found that the sky was a land like the earth, only that the grass grew hanging downward and was filled with snow. When the wind blows up there it rustles the grass stems, loosening particles of snow which fall down to the earth as a snowstorm.
When he was up near the sky he saw a great many small, round lakes in the grass, and these shine at night to make the stars. The Malemut of Kotzebue sound also say that the north wind is the breath of a giant, and when the snow falls it is because he is building himself a snow house and the particles are flying from his snow shovel. The south wind is the breath of a woman living in the warm southland.
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Dreamtime Whispers 