Volume four of this series shares tales of Inuit and Christian beliefs and how these came to coexist--and sometimes clash--in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In this new collection, Kenn Harper shares tales of Inuit and Christian beliefs and how these came to coexist--and sometimes clash--in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During this period, Anglican and Catholic missionaries came to the North to proselytize among the Inuit, with often unexpected and sometimes tragic results. This collection includes stories of shamans and priests, hymns and ajaja songs, and sealskin churches, drawing on first-hand accounts to show how Christianity changed life in the North in big and small ways. This volume also includes dozens of rare, historical photographs.

A true story from the great age of Arctic exploration of an Inuit boy's struggle for dignity against Robert Peary and the American Museum of Natural History in turn-of-the-century New York City. Sailing aboard a ship called Hope in 1897, celebrated Arctic explorer Robert Peary entered New York Harbor with peculiar "cargo": Six Polar Inuit intended to serve as live "specimens" at the American Museum of Natural History. Four died within a year. One managed to gain passage back to Greenland. Only the sixth, a boy of six or seven with a precociously solemn smile, remained. His name was Minik. Although Harper's unflinching narrative provides a much needed corrective to history's understanding of Peary, who was known among the Polar Inuit as "the great tormenter", it is primarily a story about a boy, Minik Wallace, known to the American public as "The New York Eskimo." Orphaned when his father died of pneumonia, Minik never surrendered the hope of going "home," never stopped fighting for the dignity of his father's memory, and never gave up his belief that people would come to his aid if only he could get them to understand.

A distinguished anthropologist–who is also an initiated shaman–reveals the long-hidden female roots of the world’s oldest form of religion and medicine. Here is a fascinating expedition into this ancient tradition, from its prehistoric beginnings to the work of women shamans across the globe today. Shamanism was not only humankind’s first spiritual and healing practice, it was originally the domain of women. This is the claim of Barbara Tedlock’s provocative and myth-shattering book. Reinterpreting generations of scholarship, Tedlock–herself an expert in dreamwork, divination, and healing–explains how and why the role of women in shamanism was misinterpreted and suppressed, and offers a dazzling array of evidence, from prehistoric African rock art to modern Mongolian ceremonies, for women’s shamanic powers. Tedlock combines firsthand accounts of her own training among the Maya of Guatemala with the rich record of women warriors and hunters, spiritual guides, and prophets from many cultures and times. Probing the practices that distinguish female shamanism from the much better known male traditions, she reveals: • The key role of body wisdom and women’s eroticism in shamanic trance and ecstasy • The female forms of dream witnessing, vision questing, and use of hallucinogenic drugs • Shamanic midwifery and the spiritual powers released in childbirth and monthly female cycles • Shamanic symbolism in weaving and other feminine arts • Gender shifting and male-female partnership in shamanic practice Filled with illuminating stories and illustrations, The Woman in the Shaman’s Body restores women to their essential place in the history of spirituality and celebrates their continuing role in the worldwide resurgence of shamanism today.

First Published in 1993.This study seeks to analyze shamanism and initiation from the perspective of shamans, rather than from the laity's point of view. One of the aims of this research has been to get behind the shamans' language in order to understand their experiences.

Using archival material and oral testimony collected during workshops in Nunavut between 1996 and 2008, Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten provide a nuanced look at Inuit religion, offering a strong counter narrative to the idea that traditional Inuit culture declined post-contact. They show that setting up a dichotomy between a past identified with traditional culture and a present involving Christianity obscures the continuity and dynamics of Inuit society, which has long borrowed and adapted "outside" elements. They argue that both Shamanism and Christianity are continually changing in the Arctic and ideas of transformation and transition are necessary to understand both how the ideology of a hunting society shaped Inuit Christian cosmology and how Christianity changed Inuit shamanic traditions.

Historian Kenn Harper shares tales of Inuit who played a pivotal role in the expeditions of some of the most famous Arctic explorers, including the unfortunate John Franklin.