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The Inuit creation myth tells of a daughter who becomes a creature of the sea and air after her fingers are cut off. In one variation, she falls in love with a bird and her father cuts off her fingers, which turn into various creatures. In another variation, a giant daughter with an insatiable appetite is thrown overboard and her fingers become essential food sources for the Inuit.
Since the dawn of human time, people have wanted to know how the world and all the living things it contains were created. Each culture has told rich stories of symbolic creatures and objects important to that culture in an attempt to describe and explain the moment of creation. There are many variations of the Inuit creation myth, but most of them feature a daughter who has her fingers cut off and becomes a creature of the sea and air.
In a variation of the Inuit creation myth, the daughter falls in love with a bird fishing in the ocean. The bird lures her away from the human world and marries her. When her father tracks them down and steals her daughter, her bird husband gets angry and creates a storm in the ocean. To save himself, her father throws his daughter over the side, but she clings to the edge and almost capsizes the boat. The father grabs his hunting knife and cuts off the fingers of both hands, and the dismembered fingers turn into whales, walruses, seals, seabirds, turtles and other creatures.
Another variation of the Inuit creation myth places a tribe of giants at the beginning of time. In early winter, a giant gives birth to a daughter. The daughter has an insatiable appetite, she devours all the plant foods her parents can muster and eats all the meat that has been saved for the winter.
The daughter grows and grows, and the older she gets, the more her appetite increases. When she ran out of food, she turned on her parents and tried to eat them too. To save her, her gigantic mother and father trapped her in a blanket and rowed her away from shore and into the sea.
As in the previous version, the girl is thrown overboard again so that her parents can save themselves. In this version, however, the girl is so huge that she grips both sides of the boat and stops it from moving forward. The parents pay and pay, but the boat doesn’t budge.
When their daughter tries to capsize the boat, the parents realize that if they don’t free her, they will drown. The mother cuts to the left hand and the father to the right hand. One by one, they cut off their daughter’s fingers.
Each finger transforms when it hits the water. Some become mammals such as seals and walruses, while others become salmon and other fish. One by one, the daughter’s fingers populate the world with the animals that are essential to the Inuit as food. Thus, in the Inuit creation myth, the hungry daughter ultimately provides the future with enough food for everyone.
