Inuit in wooded regions wore snowshoes

Sad to say, it appears that the folk at Audi’s ad agency are ahead of Jane George in their grasp of at least some aspects of Inuit material culture.

For many Inuit, snowshoes are not the “jarring anomaly” Ms. George would have us believe. Referred to as talluk in Inuktitut, tagluk in Inuinnaqtun, and tangluq in Yup_ik, snowshoes were an essential item of seasonal equipment for Inuit travelling and hunting in the wooded areas of Labrador, Nunavik, the Western Canadian Arctic, and, appropriately for the Audi ad, Alaska.

In fact in Alaska, snowshoes were so deeply embedded in Inuit traditions that they appear in the cosmology of Inuit groups in the Bering Strait region of Alaska, where the Galaxy, or Milky Way, is called “Tanglurallret,” a reference to the tracks made by Raven’s snowshoes as he walked across the sky creating the inhabitants of the Earth.

Ms. George also takes issue with the “odd scenes of tree-covered mountains” used for the ad’s background. Far from being “odd,” this scenery provides the ad with an authenticity (intentional or not) which would have been missing had it been shot in the open, treeless tundra. In short, there is nothing anomalous about an Alaskan scene depicting Inuit, trees, and snowshoes. Indeed, if anything’s out of place in this picture it’s the Audi car.

I attach an old photograph taken around 1910 of two Labrador Inuit, one of them holding a pair of snowshoes. The vintage of this photograph is surely sufficient to dispel any speculation that the Inuit shown were just about to set out for some remote, snowy, wooded slope to make a very early Audi ad.

The source of the photograph is: S.K. Hutton, Among the Eskimos of Labrador, Seeley, Service and Co., London, 1912.

John MacDonald
Igloolik