Cannibal: Part Two

RACHEL ATTITUQ QITSUALIK

In folklore, cannibals make the very best villains. In a way, they are the ultimate symbol of gluttony, the lust for food taken to such an extreme that even one’s fellow humans are no longer exempt from consumption.

Similarly, cannibals are a symbol of betrayal. As predators, there exists an unspoken understanding between humans that they are not to turn their predatory skills against each other — but will instead cooperate against those animals that are not human.

Cannibals, however, have violated this most fundamental social contract — not to prey upon those of their own species — having removed themselves to a plane of thought that is seemingly alien to the rest of us. The cannibal is a creature of chaos, choosing to remain outside of the usual social contracts that ensure human safety: in other words, a monster. The monster is not predictable, so the monster, the cannibal, is unsafe.

And to whom is the monster image most useful? Well, parents, of course. A most difficult task, faced by any parent, is in making their child understand the dangers of the unknown.

Children incessantly wander off while parents aren’t looking, meandering into nebulous dangers. It would be easy if the parents could simply explain such dangers, cautioning the children against them.

Unfortunately, most explanations of danger only confuse children, or simply don’t impress them. For this reason, societies across the ages have developed strikingly similar children’s stories — mostly cautionary tales against wandering away from the safety of home, at the risk of being eaten by semi-human monsters that exist “over there.”

Unlike many subjects, eating is something that even the smallest child can comprehend, and therefore the idea of a monster that gobbles up children is easy to grasp. The cannibal is the parental metaphor for the thief, the abuser, the kidnapper, the pedophile — all the horrors an adult can imagine, but cannot adequately explain to a child.

Yet, over an extended period of time, cultures do pay an inevitable price for the cannibal-fears that parents convey. An accumulation of such fears, over generations, can result in a society that defines its sense of integrity only against other, more supposedly “savage” cultures.

If such stories are not explained to children as they grow — if they are not eventually taught that those “others” are not actually cannibalistic, but that the tales were only to serve the purpose of disciplining them when they were younger and less comprehending — there exists the good chance that the children will retain their fears unto adulthood, passing on to their own progeny an exaggerated, brand of xenophobia (or perhaps we could could say “anthropophagiphobia”).

We can easily see the effects of such compounded xenophobia — whether deriving from cannibal hatred, or from other sources — manifested in the various ethnic conflicts entrenched in the histories of nearly all societies, from the most basic and ancient band-level groups to the youngest and most sophisticated nations.

Closest to home, there exists the ancient Indian-Inuit enmity, as I’ve already noted in the first article of this series, an enmity revolving around cannibal fears projected from each society toward the other.

As one follows the northern side of the taiga up into the northwest, from the peoples of the Padlermiut to the Haningayormiut to the Kogluktomiut to the Avvagmiut to the Kittegaryumiut to the Kikiktarugmiut, one finds an increasing prevalence of traditional myths and stories that refer to conflicts with numerous Algonkian-speaking Indian peoples along the treeline.

Such tales normally refer to raids by Indians upon Inuit, and follow a distinct pattern: the Inuit men go hunting, only to later return to find that Indians (nastily termed Iqiliit, or “People With Lice Eggs”) have raided their village, and either exterminated or captured the Inuit women and children.

Wrathful, the hunters track the Indians to their camp to find them gathered around the fire, alternately congratulating themselves on a successful raid, or snacking on some leftover Inuk. Sated and thereby unaware, the Indians fail to notice the Inuit circling round their camp, whereupon the Inuit leap up and fill the Indians full of arrows.

Some Inuit cultures, in fact, actually were so used to such skirmishes that they had developed a special barbed arrow for killing people.

Pijariiqpunga (continued in Cannibal: Part Three).