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Saqiyuq <\/span><\/i>is an oral history of three generations of Inuit women who lived on Baffin Island near Greenland. Of particular interest to me was the grandmother matriarch\u2019s history, since, born in 1931, she provided a first-hand account of the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle where people starved or not depending on the ebb and flow of the caribou herds, all the way to snowmobiles and state schools. A few observations\/excerpts apropos to this blog:<\/span><\/p>\n 1)<\/strong> Apphia, the grandmother matriarch, provided an account of the competition between the Anglican and Catholic missionaries for Inuit converts, with nearly all the non-Inuit in their lives being missionaries.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One side effect of Latter-day Saint missionary work tending to go through the front door legally, and of always having so many more accessible people than we have missionaries for, is that for the most we haven\u2019t been part of the race to find, contact, and convert indigenous peoples with no previous knowledge of Christianity. There\u2019s a whole culture that grew up around missionary bushwacking with a machete in one hand and a bible in the other that we just haven\u2019t been a part of. For the most part we haven\u2019t been the first ones to introduce Christianity to a people, and there wasn\u2019t much of a chance of a missionary companionship being assigned to Sentinel Island<\/a><\/span>\u00a0 or to The Man in the Hole<\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n 2)<\/strong> How to be respectful of indigenous traditions while proselytizing is a highly charged, sensitive subject, especially since the indigenous religion itself can be so intertwined with the traditional culture of a people. (Quick, tangentially related self-promotional sidebar: when I was at the Census Bureau I wrote a paper<\/a> using a bunch of fancy demographic math on the future of endangered Native American languages. It isn\u2019t a pretty picture, but the one Native US language that does appear to have a long-term future, with young native speakers, is Yupik, the language of another Arctic people).<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, some may say that all indigenous people should be off-limits to proselytizing, but as long as there is no coercion I think the marketplace of ideas is a good thing, and that no religion deserves a natural monopoly just because it was there first. I love Elder Uchtdorf\u2019s talk<\/a> on a broader version of this issue.<\/span><\/p>\n Apphia discusses three main changes that Christianity brought about: 1) the Christian ideas about the afterlife changed mourning patterns, and made death a less dreary affair, 2) not hunting on Sunday was a huge adjustment to Inuit culture, and sometimes put families at risk because in the High Arctic every spare minute had to be used to find food in order to survive, and and 3) it reduced the prominence of the shamans, who traditionally acted as the sort of spiritual judges to make sure that the people didn\u2019t offend the spirits and cause the game animals to stay away. While we might think # 3 is a bad thing, it seemed to be a relief to her since people would feel Jonah-like guilt that their failure to, for example, report their pregnancy to the community was what caused the dearth in food, and it was clear that Apphia wasn\u2019t any less Inuit after her conversion to Christianity, but rather Christianity became part of her Inuit-ism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 3)<\/strong> Apphia had a rough life. I think it was Jared Diamond who made the point that for Arctic peoples their great cathedrals were the fact that they survived. Danish settlers of Greenland died off, and early European Arctic explorers perished at latitudes with viable human populations. It wasn\u2019t easy. She accidentally killed her brother while they were playing with a gun, her mother died early, she suffered marital rape, her father killed a man in a blood feud and had to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life, she had a great-aunt (later known for her generosity in sharing food) who survived by eating her dead children\u2019s corpses, her family was almost buried alive in a snow drift before her husband was able to dig them out at the last minute, and the cord attached to the placenta froze after one of her <\/span>eleven<\/span><\/i> births. Still, she wasn\u2019t resentful, and at times spoke with fondness about her hunter-gatherer youth.<\/span><\/p>\n