Folk Tales of the Inuit of Baffin Land — Part 1
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Eight tales of the Inuit of Baffin Land, from Cumberland Sound, open a new shelf on KacheliTV. A woman fashions her old seal-skin jacket into a walrus and her trousers into a caribou, and must set their heads right before they go free. A girl who would not marry is turned to stone on her cliff, and travellers still hear her voice as they pass. Seven sledges hunting a bear rise into the sky and become a constellation. Two little girls invent thunder and lightning at play, and keep the boy they stole. An owl is outwitted by a lemming at the door of her own burrow; an owl repays a raven's painting with a whole lamp of oil; a family of foxes hides inside a whale and talks a wolf pack out of its dinner; and a hungry traveller is fed all winter by the skeleton people of Padli.
In this episode:
0:53 — Origin of the Walrus and of the Caribou
2:41 — The Echo
4:06 — The Hunters Transformed into a Constellation
5:14 — Origin of Thunder and Lightning
8:23 — The Owl and the Lemming
10:18 — The Owl and the Raven
11:53 — The Foxes
13:50 — The Huts of the Skeleton People
This premiere reads eight of the volume's Cumberland Sound tales. Held for the owner's ruling by name: The Lost Sisters · Iqallijuk and Nipernook · The Woman Who Married a Stone · The Wigwam of the Dead · Kamuk and His Mother-in-Law · The Man Who Mended a Broken Skull · The Two Brothers · Innerjulik. Held as sacred-class material: the Tales of Angakut, the Tales of Spirits (the Tornait), the volume's accounts of angakok practice and its Inuktitut texts. Not read on this shelf: the Sedna tellings · Kiviuq · Iggiayuk · The Orphan Boy Who Was Caught by a Whale · the tale of the two women who got themselves husbands · Ipi, Who Visited the Dead · and the remaining origin and animal tales that turn on a killing, every one of them named in the shelf's canon file; the tales from the west coast of Hudson Bay printed in the same volume belong to another shore and are not billed here. No claim of completeness is made for the volume.
From The Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay by Franz Boas (Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XV, 1901), public domain — the eight tales complete as printed, in the book's order, in Boas's printed English. The volume's notes were collected by Capt. George Comer, Capt. James S. Mutch and the Rev. E. J. Peck, as its title page records. Narrated by Bruno. Theme: Imperial Violin Masquerade.
Season 165 — Folk Tales of the Inuit of Baffin Land, Episode 1.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
