Inuit

Inuit religion is the traditional belief of the Inuit, who hunt along the Arctic and subarctic coasts from Alaska across northern Canada to Greenland. It had no formal clergy or church, and varied a good deal between communities.

Prey animals were treated as beings whose souls had to be propitiated, and taboos around hunting, birth and death kept the spirits content. Many peoples revered Nuliajuk, or Sedna, mistress of the sea animals, who withheld game when taboos were broken; the angakut, shamans who held helper spirits, travelled to her to plead for it.

European ships began meeting Inuit in the northeast of Canada in the sixteenth century, and Christianity spread slowly. In Greenland the angakut kept practising, sometimes in secret, and in 1746 King Christian VI wrote to the Greenlanders to complain of them.