Aakulujjuusi

Also Known As: also written Aakuluujjusi, A’akuluujjusi, Aakulukjuusi and Aakuluujusi; Akkalookjo in a Cumberland Sound telling printed by Franz Boas; paired in the tellings with Uumarnituq, the first man who became the first mother
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Inuit Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He is one of the two first men who rose fully grown out of the earth of Igloolik after an earlier world collapsed, and his magic song opened the way for the first human birth.
Role in Mythos: Aakulujjuusi is the first father, the man from whom, with Uumarnituq and their child, the Iglulik and their Netsilik neighbours say every living person descends.
Relation to Humans: He is not worshipped or petitioned; he is an ancestor, and the story of him explains why people are born, why women were needed, and why death came. In English he has been turned into a creator goddess who made caribou from her trousers, a figure the recorded Inuit tellings do not contain.

The world before this one stood on pillars, and one day the pillars gave way. Everything on it went down into nothing. Then the ground stirred on an island in the dark, two small humps of earth split open, and two grown men climbed out, blinking at a sky with no sun, no moon and not a single star. One of them was Aakulujjuusi.

That is the Igloolik account of how people began, and it is one of the strangest creation stories on record, partly because it has no god in it at all. Nobody makes Aakulujjuusi. He grows. Knud Rasmussen heard the bones of it in the early 1920s, during the Fifth Thule Expedition, from Tûglik, a Netsilik woman living at Igloolik who had it from her great-grandmother, and printed it in 1929 in *Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos*: the pillars, the emptiness, two men born and grown up all at once, a magic song, children. Rasmussen gives no names. The names come from later Igloolik tellers, set out by the anthropologist Bernard Saladin d’Anglure in a 1990 article in *Études/Inuit/Studies*, which also prints the Inuktitut wording of the story from Rasmussen’s unpublished manuscripts. There the two men are Aakulujjuusi and Uumarnituq, and they come out of two little earth mounds called niaquqtaq on Igloolik island itself. Saladin d’Anglure had that detail from the Igloolik elder Aagiaq, who had it in turn from a very old woman of the island who died in the 1930s.

The world the two men woke into was cold and nearly empty. It was always night. They hunted hare and ptarmigan, the only game within reach, and when they needed to see they wet a forefinger with spit and it glowed, and they walked by that small light across the snow. They burned powdery snow in their lamps. There were a few animals, raven and snowy owl, lemming and fox, polar bear and wolf, and nothing at all in the sea. Men and beasts spoke one language in different accents, and either could slip into the other’s shape. There was no weather, no wind, no sea ice, no death. The island floated.

Then the two men wanted children. Aakulujjuusi took Uumarnituq as his wife, and Uumarnituq became pregnant, and the belly grew until the day came and there was no way out for the child. Aakulujjuusi did the only thing that works in an Inuit story when the body fails: he made a song. In the words Rasmussen took down, as Saladin d’Anglure translates them, he sang to the human being in front of him and to the penis, and called for a passage to open, wide and roomy, passage, passage, passage. The penis split. A son came out.

Tellings differ on what happened to Uumarnituq afterward. Tûglik’s version says plainly that one of the men was changed into a woman by the song, and most retellings follow her, so that Uumarnituq becomes the first mother and the pair become the first couple. Saladin d’Anglure’s reading is that the story discovers the need for a female sex at the same moment it discovers the power of the spoken charm, the irinaliuti, which the Iglulik treated as real force drawn from Sila, the breath of the world. From Aakulujjuusi, Uumarnituq and their son, the Iglulik said, all living people descend. Saladin d’Anglure adds that the first couple also made many kinds of animal, or called them up out of other worlds, though he gives no episode of it.

Their descendants multiplied fast, and not only by birth. Babies could be found lying in the earth and gathered like eggs; girls were easy to find and boys were not. Old people did not have to stay old either. When age came on them they did a somersault, headfirst off the edge of the sleeping platform, and stood up young again. Nobody died. So the island filled, and began to tip, and began to sink.

An old woman, frightened for all of them, shouted for death and for war. A very old man lying on the bench shouted back that they should not die and should not fight, but her words had gone out first. People began to die. They built boats and scattered to empty country, each group to its own ground, and the dying never stopped. Saladin d’Anglure thought the old woman was probably Uumarnituq. The telling he recorded does not say who the old man was. It is tempting to give that last losing shout to Aakulujjuusi, and some modern retellings do, but the record leaves him lying there unnamed.

Death came with consolation attached. Those who died by violence, in war or in a hard childbirth would go up to the land of day, where on clear winter nights they can be seen playing ball with a walrus skull, and the play is the northern lights. Everyone else would go below.

What Aakulujjuusi could do is small and specific. He could sing a body open. He could father a people. His power ends where the story’s does, at the moment people become ordinary: once death arrives, the first father has nothing more to say, and the tellings stop mentioning him.

The version most English readers meet is something else entirely. Online, and in at least one goddess encyclopedia, A’akuluujjusi is a primordial creator mother who threw down her trousers and made caribou, threw down her jacket and made walrus, then swapped their tusks and antlers when the animals proved too dangerous to hunt. The goddess is a mistake. The trousers belong to a different story. Rasmussen recorded it at Igloolik from the storyteller Orulo: an old woman went inland, made caribou, gave them skins from her own breeches of caribou hide, took away their tusks after one killed a hunter, kicked them in the forehead to make them shy, and ruffled their belly hair to slow them down. She then went to live among the herds for good and became Tuktut Ikviat, the Mother of the Caribou. She has no other name in the text, and no walrus appears. The online goddess cites Patricia Monaghan’s *Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines* as its source, and somewhere between Rasmussen’s two stories and that entry, a nameless woman’s tale and a first man’s name were fused into one figure. In the Igloolik tellings Aakulujjuusi is a man, and he never made a caribou.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Aakulujjuusi in Inuit mythology?

Aakulujjuusi is one of the first two humans in an Inuit creation story from Igloolik, in what is now Nunavut. He and a second man, Uumarnituq, rose fully grown out of two small mounds of earth after an earlier world collapsed. The Iglulik say all living people descend from these two and their son.

Is Aakuluujjusi a goddess?

No. In the recorded Igloolik tellings Aakulujjuusi is a man, the first father. The popular claim that A’akuluujjusi is a creator goddess who made caribou from her trousers and walrus from her jacket mixes his name with a separate story Knud Rasmussen recorded about a nameless old woman who became the Mother of the Caribou.

How did the first child get born in the story of Aakulujjuusi and Uumarnituq?

Aakulujjuusi made Uumarnituq pregnant, but there was no way for the child to come out. Aakulujjuusi then sang a magic song calling for a wide passage to open. In the version Bernard Saladin d’Anglure published, the penis split and a son was born; in the version Rasmussen printed, the song changed one of the men into a woman.

Who recorded the Aakulujjuusi story?

Knud Rasmussen printed the story without names in 1929, from the Netsilik storyteller Tûglik at Igloolik. The names Aakulujjuusi and Uumarnituq come from later Igloolik tellers, published by the anthropologist Bernard Saladin d’Anglure in 1990. Franz Boas also printed Baffin Island versions in which the names appear as Akkalookjo and Owmirneto.

How does the Aakulujjuusi story explain death?

The first people never died, and old people made themselves young again by somersaulting off the sleeping platform. When Igloolik island grew so crowded that it began to sink, an old woman called out for death and war, and her words came true. People then scattered in boats, and death never stopped.