Sila

The wind that strips a camp bare on the Arctic coast is, in one telling, a baby shaking out his clothes. He is dressed in caribou hide, tunic and breeches, and the skins hang loose at the neck and the wrists and the waist. When something displeases him he twists and shrugs inside them, and the air comes pouring out of every gap, and a family down on the land lies in a snow house listening to its own roof hiss and works out how many days of meat is left.

That child is Sila, and Sila is also the sky, the weather, the outside, the reach of the whole world, and something not far from what English would call sense or reason. One short Inuktitut word carries all of it. Sila is what a person walks out into and it is also what moves inside them, so the breath in a hunter’s chest and the gale that pins him down are the same substance under two conditions. Where the power is spoken of as a person it takes the longer name Silap Inua, the indweller of the air. The two names are not two beings.

Knud Rasmussen met the sharpest statement of it at the very end of his sled journey across the North American Arctic. On the last morning of October 1924, in Nome, hours before boarding the last steamer of the year, he interviewed an angakkuq from Nunivak Island named Najagneq, a Yup’ik man recently out of jail for killing several men, whom no witness would testify against. Najagneq had spent the winter telling people that white men had killed him ten times and that each death had cost him one of his ten helping spirits, which were ten white horses. Rasmussen called him the ten horsepower wizard. Then Najagneq described Sila, and Rasmussen recognised, at the far western end of a journey that had started in Greenland, the same thing he had been hearing all the way across.

Sila, Najagneq said, is a great spirit supporting the world and the weather and all life on earth, and so mighty that his utterance to mankind is not through common words but by storm and snow and rain and the fury of the sea, all the forces of nature that men fear. But he has another way of speaking, by sunlight and calm water and small children innocently at play who understand nothing. The children hear a soft and gentle voice, almost a woman’s. It comes to them in a way they cannot explain, and it frightens them so little that they mention it at home almost in passing, and it is then the angakkuq’s business to work out what is coming and guard against it. When all is well, Najagneq said, Sila sends no message at all. He withdraws into his own endless nothingness and stays there, so long as people do not abuse life and go on treating their daily food with reverence.

The eastern tellings give the same power a childhood, and it is an ugly one. In a story the Netsilingmiut hunter Nakasuk told Rasmussen, published in 1931, the great giant Inukpasuksuk and the human son he had adopted came upon a larger and uglier giant fishing through the ice of a frozen lake, and asked him to share one of the two enormous char he had caught. He refused. Inukpasuksuk knelt and whispered to his son to shout, as loudly as he could, that the giant had crooked teeth in his ugly mouth. The boy shouted it until the ice cracked with the answering roar, and while the two giants fought he crawled between the boulders and cut the tendons behind both of the big giant’s legs. The wife came over the hills after her husband’s death cry and went the same way. Following her tracks back, which were already filling with water and turning into small lakes, the giant and the boy found a baby lying on the ground where she had shaken him out of her coat without noticing, screaming for a mother who was no longer alive.

He was a baby and they left him.

The cold did not kill him. The wrong done to him turned him into a tuurngak, and the tuurngak went up into the sky and became Sila, and he has not forgotten. From up there he shakes his clothing loose and sends down the storms that stop a hunt, empty a cache and keep people inside for a week at a time. Another Netsilik man told Rasmussen plainly that the storm spirit Nârtsuk was silap inua, the spirit of the air, so the giant orphan and the world-upholding power are not rival explanations but the same figure told at different distances. Among the Iglulingmiut, Rasmussen recorded him as a great and dangerous spirit somewhere up in the air, between sky and sea, hanging over the earth and threatening people through wind, fog, rain and snow.

His powers follow from what he is. Nothing in the country can be done against him, because he is the country’s air, and every activity that matters happens outdoors: the sea state, the visibility, the drifting, the temperature of a night spent on the ice. He is also the breath that makes a person a person, which is why sila is not only outside. His weakness follows from the same place. He is reachable. A powerful angakkuq can travel up to him, calm him, and tighten what he has loosened, and the weather clears and the hunting resumes. He is also answerable to conduct rather than to sacrifice, and he goes quiet and absent as soon as people behave, which makes him the rare kind of storm you can argue with by not deserving it.

The word never stopped working. In Inuktitut today, sila is simply the weather and the outdoors, and Sila qanuippa is how you ask what it is doing out there. That ordinariness has caused trouble in the research literature, where climate scientists collecting Inuit observations have tended to translate sila as weather and stop, while the ethnographic record gives a spiritual power that weather is only the visible edge of. Timothy Leduc made the gap itself the subject of a 2007 paper in Climatic Change, arguing that the flattened translation quietly discards the part of the concept that carries the obligations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sila in Inuit mythology?

Sila is the Inuit power of the air, the weather and the wider world, personified as Silap Inua, the indweller of the air. Sila upholds the world and all life in it, and communicates through storms, snow, rain and rough seas rather than through speech. The same word also means breath and something close to reason, so Sila is understood to be inside people as well as around them.

What does Sila do when people break taboos?

Sila punishes misconduct with weather that makes ordinary life impossible: violent wind, heavy snow and dangerous seas that keep hunters from travelling or working. In the Netsilik tellings he causes this by shaking his loose caribou-skin clothing so the air rushes out of the gaps. When people behave properly he sends no message at all and withdraws into his own emptiness.

Is Sila the same as Narssuk?

Yes. In Netsilik and neighbouring traditions Sila is identified with Narssuk, also written Naarjuk and Nârtsuk, a giant infant orphaned when his parents were killed and then abandoned on the ground to die. The wrong done to him turned him into a spirit who went up into the sky, and one of Rasmussen’s Netsilik sources stated directly that Nârtsuk was silap inua, the spirit of the air.

How do Inuit deal with Sila’s storms?

A powerful angakkuq, or shaman, travels in spirit up to Sila to calm him and refasten the clothing he has loosened, after which the weather clears and hunting can begin again. Sila also gives warnings before trouble arrives, sometimes through small children who hear a soft voice and repeat it casually at home, and it is the angakkuq’s job to interpret those warnings.

Is Sila male or female?

The Netsilik tellings treat Sila as male, and the account Knud Rasmussen collected from the Nunivak angakkuq Najagneq also uses masculine terms. Sila is never depicted in art or described as having a fixed appearance in that Alaskan account, which presents the power as formless. The one detailed physical picture comes from the eastern Arctic, where Sila is the giant child in caribou skin.

Related Entries

Sedna, Aningaat and Siqiniq, Qalupalik, Ijiraq, Amarok, Adlet, Akhlut, Keelut, Kigatilik, Tupilaq, Tunghak, Njord, Vayu, Zephyrus