Week 10 Storytelling: Ghost Diary

Dear Diary,

All hope is lost. My mother and father are dead and now my sister has passed away as well. I have no other family, so I am forced to live with strangers in the village. I appreciate them taking me in and caring for me, but I’m weak and so they tease me because I have no strength. Now I’m an orphan AND have no strength. It’s no wonder everyone picks on me.

Dear Diary,

Today everyone went hunting, leaving me alone in the house… again. I was feeling very lonesome, since I am always excluded and left alone, when I heard a noise. I got scared and decided to hide in case someone was coming to hurt me. I was hiding and the noise happened again and again and then all of a sudden a ghost came in! It went over to our water tub and drank some of the water, and then it left. I guess ghosts get thirsty too. I tried telling the people I live with about it but they didn’t really believe me. Here’s hoping that more ghosts show up tomorrow.

Dear Diary,

It happened again! I was all alone in the house when the walls and frames began to shake and the next thing I knew a whole bunch of ghost came tumbling into the house! It was so exciting because one of the ghosts was my sister! I missed her so much. They invited me to sit with them on the floor while they played wrestling games and told stories. They told me if I kept their stories a secret that they would make me strong! I’m so excited!

Dear Diary,

Well, I accidentally told the people that I was going to be strong and as soon as I did, all my strength was gone. It was not fun. To prove my strength, the villagers tied me to a post and told me to escape from the ropes and hit a drum that was on the other side of the room. But all my strength was gone and I was not able to escape, so I just looked like a dummy. Eventually they untied me and left to go to a singing contest without me. So here I am, alone in the house again, wallowing in my shame.

Dear Diary,

You will never believe what happened! My Mom and Dad, as ghosts, came in to visit me!!! Once I told them how I am always being picked on by the others and how I am always excluded from activities, Mom and Dad told me that I should come with them and become a ghost! I am so excited! So here’s hoping being a ghost is better than being human!

Ghost (Source)

Author's Note. This is based on the Eskimo Tale Qalaganguase, Who Passed to the Land of Ghosts. It is about a boy whose entire family is dead and he is forced to live with strangers in the village. Because he is weak they exclude him from everything and leave him alone in the house all day. While they were gone, ghosts would come and visit the boy. The ghosts told the boy if he did not tell the villagers about them, then they would give him strength, but the boy did not follow their instructions and as soon as he told the villagers of his strength, it began to leave his body. The ghosts then came back again to take the boy with them to the land of the ghosts and he left with them and became a ghost.
I felt it best to write this in diary form because the diary would have been used as a form of comfort for the boy since he was continuously left alone and had no family or friends. I did not include what happened after he became a ghost because I felt as though him leaving his diary would have been his way of letting go of the past and going on to a brighter future. Leaving the diary also would have allowed the villagers to read about the boy and make it into a story. 

Bibliography. Eskimo Folk-Tales by Knud Rasmussen with illustrations by native Eskimo artists (1921).

Week 10 Essay: What about the Eskimos?

I took a class here at the University of Oklahoma about a year ago called Indigenous People and Resources where we discussed the Native American, or indigenous, peoples who lived in the Arctic region. Since I already knew so much about the people who lived there I decided I would get to know them further by reading their stories, which is while I chose Eskimo Folk Tales as my reading for this week. What is funny is that the term Eskimo actually means eaters of raw flesh. It is a term that the Inuit gave to the Inupiat since they are kind of like rival tribes. The Inupiat actually do eat raw meat because in order for them to get all of the nutrients and vitamins that we get from eating vegetables they have to eat their meat raw. Their main source of food is the bowhead whale, and if they were to cook it then they would lose all those vitamins and nutrients so they eat it raw. Knowing so much about these people from my previous class was definitely helpful when imagining the stories. I was able to better see the types of clothes they would wear, the houses they lived in, the setting of the area they lived. There were actually several things in the stories that I was able to notice was attributed to their surrounding environment. When they described the houses they lived in they would say that they had to crawl in and out of the houses, this was probably to minimize the amount of cold air that crept into the houses and trapped in the heat. The stories often mentioned sealskin; since there are many seals in the Arctic region the sealskin was probably used as a snow and/or water repellant, as well as a thick layer to keep them warm. I think of it as the original rain jacket! Also, they mentioned putting rocks over people who had died. I attributed this to the ground being so frozen that they could not actually burry the dead, so instead they had to burry them with rocks on the surface. All in all, the Eskimo stories were very interesting and entertaining.  

Inupiat Family (Source) 

Week 10 Reading Diary: Eskimo Stories

Eskimo Stories

Some of these stories actually reminded me of Biblical stories. Just goes to show that people are the same no matter where they are and people never really change.

I got an idea while reading some of the internet stories this week. These stories were originally verbal stories to teach children, and one of the people who's storybook I read took similar stories that taught lessons and turned them into a storytelling. What if I took a chief, or someone of importance in the village, and had them tell the children one of the stories while the parents were away since that was how the stories were originally told.

The story The Coming of Men, A Long, Long While Ago reminded me of the story of creation. It had a very strange take on death, because it seemed to me that there was a zombie for a minute there in the story. It had the similar Native theme of being one with nature, since it explained that after we die we are transformed into stars. So natural elements still very important even in the Arctic region.

I found some aspects of some of the stories to be a bit confusing because I could not tell if it was a name or a mythical creature. What I found interesting was because they live in the Arctic they could not burry the dead like they do in more tropical climates because the ground was too frozen to dig, so they placed stones over the dead body.

I greatly enjoyed the story The Woman Who Had a Bear as a Foster-Son because it reminded me of going off to college. In a way it is about growing up and having to let go of someone you love so that they may create a life for themselves. Gave me an idea of the foster-mother having a diary.

I had storytelling ideas both for Qalaganguase, Who Passed to the Land of Ghosts and Isigaligarssik. For the first I was thinking of doing a diary for the little boy since he is now an orphan and would be lonely. His story would get left behind once he turned into a ghost since he would no longer need material things really.  For the second story, I could make it an elder telling the story of how he defeated the wizard and how love conquers all, but he is telling the children and a researcher.