We are here with the spirits, because no one can survive alone. Not for long.
Even in the summer, when Sister Sun lights the sky with her fire, she cannot see me. I sit in my tent, the middle one, the tupiq with the red-and-white dog resting outside. I live deep in Adlivun, where the spirits of the dead exhale butterflies instead of breath, and it sounds like shhh if you listen.
Far above me, over the open sea, you might hear the click of ankle tendons and the clatter of hooves as seven caribou race past the sky to become stars. They graze high above the spirits of those who bled to death, the ones who play within aurora. Green and red, red and green, the ghosts kick about the skull of a walrus and you can hear their game if you listen.
If you think I’m lonely down here, you are wrong. I share space with many. The unskilled and the unwilling. Bad hunters and the women with no tattoos abide with me. I will give them another chance, yes, even those who killed too slowly and caused needless suffering. Even those who found joy in others’ agony, who killed then left the dead to rot. Yes, even the ones who would not feed their communities. It may take a long time, but I have the patience of my ancestors. These ones who do not care for one another may yet learn. They may find their way and their resolve. I can wait. And once they’ve breathed out their last butterfly cloud, their namesakes shall be born and they will return to the surface like a shoal of fingerlings and then they will do better. In the meantime, they have nothing of interest to say and I do not listen to them.
I listen instead to my children: the seals, the whales, those pinnipeds, the anirniliit: those which breathe. My knuckleborn. Those I birthed through my shattered fingers and severed thumbs, my bleeding, tortured hands. My messengers are part of me. The seals poke their noses through holes in the ice. These fingers peep through agluit. The whales breach and blast their breath up into the sky. These knuckles steam in the cold. The walruses bask upon rocky shores and point their tusks skyward. These thumbs scrape at the ice with their nails. They all offer themselves to the hungry in turn, and those who survive tell me what they’ve seen.
I want to know what the humans are doing. Do they take only that which is freely offered? Do they bring a final sip of sweet water to my generous children? Or do they maim and abandon? Kill more than is necessary? Take wasteful advantage of my offspring’s altruism? Pollute and ruin and poison?
When my children are mistreated, I call them home and they join me in Adlivun. My husband wags his tail and dances to see them return. The humans did not listen, and they wither away because they have forgotten equilibrium.
Would you send your children to such a place? I will not. No. I will not change my mind, will not release my children. I am stubborn. It needs to be earned. If you don’t want to starve any longer, you’d best listen. Send me an angakoq in the form of Nanook. Yes, send Nanook, and let the crafty white bears untangle my uncombed hair with their claws. Let them smoothe it and braid it for although I am tattooed all over, although I have mastered many skills, this is something I can never again do for myself.
My husband waits outside the tupiq. Though he sleeps in a circle with his nose buried in his tail, he is quick to wake when anyone draws near. He’s been here the longest of us all. He sank to the bottom of the sea because of Anguta, my ataata/ Anguta didn’t approve of my dog husband. And so when he should’ve been loading my first husband’s packs with caribou and fish and the feathers of eider ducks, Anguta instead loaded them with rocks. And my husband sank to the bottom and waited for me, leaping up on me and laughing with his blue eyes when I arrived.
Though ataata tried to kill me, his only child, I made my peace with him when he returned to me. The tornat and tupilat gather here, brought to me by him. He is as good a hunter down here as he ever was up there. We are together again, me, my husband, my ataata. We are here with the spirits, because no one can survive alone. Not for long. We must all care for one another.
My own namesakes live on above. Arnakuagsak. Nuliajuk. Sassuma Arnaa. And even past the quidlivun, the hunting ground of Brother Moon, even past that, my dwarf planet namesake: 90377 Sedna, bides her time in the deep dark of space.
But stars are even further away than this distant descendant. The Tukturjuit, those seven wayward caribou who ranged so far into the celestial sphere: the Tukturjuit are stars. Do their teeth scrape lichen from asteroids? Do they defecate comets? Do they watch us so far below? What do they see? What do they hear?
Listen. I have recurring dreams. I dream powerful angakkuit, wicked men with wicked ways, find their way to me, circumventing the transformation into a bear. They crash into me, and inuksuit mark the collision. They enter my body, push me aside deep within my own mind so that I feel smaller than a louse. My hair is polluted with things which will never rot away. These men have control now, and they loose the tupilat, those unready souls, upon the world.
These women without their tattoos, the lazy ones, the ones who refuse to learn or teach or work, they dominate. They do not chew the hides. They do not tend the qulliq. No one has clothes to wear. The air inside their igluit is poisonous. Their children are uncared for, and the little ones wander close to the water’s edge.
Even the bad hunters are released, and my children are mowed down in genocide, killed and not eaten, killed for pleasure, strangled in plastic, gorging on things which look like food but must never be eaten, living in the overflow of vanished glaciers and ice caps. The snow that is left is red, and not with blood from polar bear kills but with tailings from the mines.
I dream the qallunaat steal away the children of the people. They take them far away, and many little ones never make it back. Those who do are too thin. Too quiet. They don’t recall how to live upon the land. They return lost within themselves, and their memories of me have been buried beneath the corpse of a skinny desert man nailed to two pieces of wood.
Listen to me now. My hair is tangled with things which will never rot away. I will call back my knuckleborn and the melted lands will roast beneath the ire of Sister Sun. I shall not return until wicked men’s inuksuit fall. So do not let the wicked seize power, for they are greedy and will not provide for anyone but themselves. You must respect my children, and in return, they shall care for you.
Shantell Powell is a two-spirit author and swamp hag raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid. A Brave New Weird winner and Aurora finalist, she’s a graduate of the LGBTQ+ novel immersive at GrubStreet and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Her writing is in SolarPunk, The Deadlands, Augur Magazine, and more. When she’s not writing or making things, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods. Find her online at shanmonster.dreamwidth.org.
Header photo by Russ Heinl, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Shantell Powell by Bangishimo.
