A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
inuksuk
An inuksuk is a stone structure built by Inuit across the Arctic to do a job. Some mark a route, a cache, a good fishing place, or a dangerous spot. Some were built in long converging lines to funnel caribou toward waiting hunters, with turf or heather added to the tops so that from a distance they read as people standing. The plural is inuksuit.
Etymology
The word means, roughly, that which acts in the capacity of a human. It is built on the Inuktitut word for a person with an ending meaning a substitute or a stand-in, so an inuksuk is not a statue of a person but a thing doing a person’s work in that spot. That is a different idea from a cairn, and the name carries it precisely.
Notes
The human-shaped figure with outstretched arms that appears on the Nunavut flag and on souvenir shelves is properly an inunnguaq, meaning an imitation of a person, and it is not the traditional form. Most inuksuit are not figures at all: a single upright, a balanced slab, a window of stones framing a direction to walk toward. Some are centuries old and are still navigational aids on ground where a compass is unreliable.