A History Teacher Reacts | "The Wild World of Inuit Folklore" by Sam O'Nella

[Music] hey youtube welcome back to another history teacher reacts video with mr. Teri's I continued my search for historical knowledge here on YouTube alright today's video was chosen by patreon and that is salmonella z' the wild world of Intuit folklore excited that they voted on this because I love Salmonella videos they're informative they're funny and I know you guys get a kick out of them too because they get great views and great feedback so I hope you will like this too if you would like to be a part of the polls that patreon pledgers get to participate then become a member down in the description you will see a link to the patreon and currently right now at least as of now patron pledges start as low as a dollar a dollar a month get you access to that supports a channel a little bit higher pledges get some other benefits like more discord features which is pretty cool too but if you haven't subbed to this channel thank you thank you in advance for for subbing hopefully you enjoy our history community and join along with me as as I always say trying to further my knowledge here for history and to become a better history teacher and just a fan of history so let's go ahead and get started we got today's episode the wild world of inner wit folklore alright Sam what he got for us [Music] hey kids from clubbing seals to inventing new compound nouns for snow nobody knows how to kick it quite like the Inuit course if you're a close-minded tree dweller like me you might initially think that they can't be that good at storytelling given that they only know about like six things but that's not true they've actually gotten incredibly complex and fascinating or all seven things you can ask one about it there's plenty of these guys around today let's look 65,000 so uh a lot of people who don't know that you know what are natives to the - like Canada and the more arctic regions there so it's amazing that those people exist given the terrain and the climates maybe that helps they don't have to compete with other humans as much although there's obviously gonna be tribal issues that but pretty amazing those people even existed plus they're the ones you know their ancestors are the ones that fought off you know Vikings and and the earliest of the Europeans that came over to North America there so there are pretty tough people I mean to survive and then defend themselves the way that they have but looking at the numbers we've got 65,000 Canada and United States and mostly Alaska 16,000 50,000 in Greenland and even back in Denmark so does that mean they moved there or native to there by the latter or probably the the former there all right let's see what got Sam but they've got Jesus and microwaves and [ __ ] and that's boring we want to talk about this stuff from before missionaries came and sent their miserable way of life to a Farm upstate so instead let a twenty-year-old college kid who's never lived outside of Delaware tell you all about obvious disclaimer Inuits are super diverse calling a caribou nu at a copper anyway it is like calling a copper caribou a caribou caribou sure they both look the same from far away but when a thunderstorm Eights you better know which one to hide under as such while most of the fun can be applied in broad terms the most door mates you better know which one to hide under as such well I'll make sure to add that to my next lesson most of the following can be applied in broad terms the most Inuits the little details come from a variety of subcultures don't necessarily represent the whole got it Swank now a lot of the world's faiths are centered around bringing people together and inspiring them with stories and images of the divine so as to give them a wider sense of purpose here on earth that's all well and good but that whole search for greater meaning thing only really comes into play once your original purpose of making sure you don't die is pretty much figured out they're not so for the Inuit you see and and and in Maine in the big picture right your temporal well-being is gonna be better than your long-term or spiritual well-being so I wonder what he's getting at here though with that just more about their survival aspects it's so easy living in a place where plants can't grow and being naked for an hour means certain death as such their beliefs were a little more practical being more sensitized towards fostering the paranoid levels of fear required to survive in such a hostile environment right it's like okay need one survive need two okay afterlife or something so makes sense that since survival is so difficult that their focus is going to be on more temporal study I guess for example vnu I believe that everyone has a sort of lifeforce or soul what they called an unique and like plenty of religions they believed it lived on after death and could meddle in the world of mortals but while most cultures regard animals as being spiritually inferior meat puppets to the Inuits a creature sola is just as powerful and vengeful as that of a person and like I said up there in the Arctic not much greenery in the scenery so they basically had no choice but to devour nothing but souls every single day and wouldn't you know it souls don't much care forget Nate so the Inuit made sure to follow a complex set of guidelines on how to placate their prey in the afterlife lest the pissed-off ghosts of that Arctic Tern whisper sweet nothings into a polar bear's ears and turns your whole village into a big Japanese flag by Sunrise here's a few if you kill something make sure you eat it all just as an American who doesn't clean his plate doesn't get dessert and Inuit who doesn't need all those walrus doesn't get anymore walrus I mean since resources are so scarce yeah you're gonna you're gonna need to use every part of it there's definitely cultures like that most native cultures in general they're very efficient in their use of animals and nature because they know they gotta replenish it they know it that it's really bad to be wasteful you find that actually all over the planet their ever till they starve if you kill a polar bear make sure to point its head towards the direction it came from so it can find its way home more easily if you pull a seal out of the water give him some fresh water so he's not thirsty when you bash his brain in also its spirit lives in its bladder so make sure to hold on to it until the yearly bladder festival where everyone gets together blows up their bladders like balloons and throws them out to sea so they can reincarnate into new seals these taboos aren't all just about hunting seems legit there's a load of them about pregnancy they're make fun of people's facial features or else the baby will have the same features don't walk backwards or else the baby will come out backwards dangerous face you there are very literal people aren't they a very literal people bed towards a doorway or it'll come out sideways also dangerous don't wrap rope around your hand or it'll come out with the umbilical cord around its neck extremely dangerous don't drink directly from a soup bowl or it'll come out with dark skin not touching that one don't put a bowl on your head or else it'll be wearing the placenta like a hat - hilarious and the list goes on central to the consequences of breaking a lot of these rules is the being known as Sedna the story behind Sedna varies pretty widely between different groups of Inuits but here's the gist of it she was once a young girl who pissed everyone off either by being annoying or eating too much food or rejecting an arranged marriage or marrying a dog for some reason so her father throws her out of a kayak and when she tries to get back in he chops off all her fingers the sea goddess sees this furrows her long floppy seaweed brow does a sassy snap and the girl turns into an immortal sea witch while her disembodied fingers turn into the first seals and to this day Sedna sits at the bottom of the ocean growing new fingers which promptly fall off and turn into all the world's sea lions and our walruses that Wow okay so there was origin story for all this stuff all of their natural interactions they're like getting your fingers cut off and they regrowing but then those things become what narwhals and seals and all that stuff all right all right very fascinating that is until someone goofs up in some small arbitrary fashion like yeah setting up bad news I just caught a guy chewing a piece of blubber once with that well he wasn't looking north while he did it Oh [ __ ] kidding me it is defense he was standing right on the pole so he literally couldn't look anywhere but South he could have moved that's it no more finger foods for three moons another fun creation of it that's how the Moon and Sun came to be yeah I mean if they feel a lot you know a lot of cultures earlier cultures they of course believe that most natural things happen due to supernatural intervention so like if yeah there is a famine or weather or so against some natural thing they attribute to a supernatural intervention again like a deity deities control nature they control food they control all these events and that's a reflection of it so that the harder something is to naturally explain insert supernatural explanation and that's been kind of basically human history right so long ago there were these two siblings named Melina and an Incan the two got along just fine as kids but as the two got older they're put into their respective genders living areas and saw each other less and less then one day a ningún got the feeling that his lower nose was in dire need of some eskimo kisses so that night he snuck into the women's lodges saw a sister thought I pick that one and proceeded to do you know unspeakable things technically becoming his own Eskimo brother but it was too dark at the time for Melina to tell what happened the next night in ingens like oh [ __ ] do it again only this time Melina smear soot all over his face so later she goes over to the men's lodges and who has crap all over his face but her brother this makes her so mad that she cuts off her own breasts with a knife puts them in a bowl throws them at a ningún and says if you enjoy me so much than here eat him go ahead eat my disembodied quivering titties she runs off into the night with a torch and an engine is really remorseful or horny or something so he chases after her with his own torch and they end up running so fast that they took off like a plane into the sky and Melina became the Sun while an in-game became the moon excuse me miss elder if the Sun and Moon didn't exist yet how did he do that stuff that night when there was no don't use logic now some D don't ask questions just listen to the story tales of the story are tied into real world phenomena some say that a ningún tripped and messed up his torch which is why the moon is so dim and the mood cycles are because he gets really skinny from chasing after her for so long and the new moon is when he goes away for a few days to hunt seals so it can fatten back up but here's the kicker nobody ever explains what the whole lopping off hurt its part was supposed to represent that's entirely just creative Liberty just like ah yes that's why this son doesn't have tits probably for the best it doesn't otherwise half the population will be blind by now and worse it's the half that makes up 85% of my viewer base say you know what thanks for slicing and dicing them Tito's milena I kind of owe you my career but as for you your eyes are valuable you should treat them to something more substantial and informative like say a library of high-quality exclusive documentaries sponsor time curiosity stream was founded by the dude behind the Discovery Channel and it's great for someone like me who works down any useless knowledge he sees like the brave Gators keeping America's sewers free of rats and with thousands of titles a lot of which our curiosity stream exclusives it's hard not to find something that 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again I know as far as into it I mean folklore I know nothing about it but do hear some of these origin stories and supernatural explanations of nature those are fascinating to see that to see that comfort come through cuz there's always so many of these like epic stories that they tie look at any I guess I guess you'd call ancient culture pre modern culture anything like that or has origins that are pre-modern to see these just these fantastic stories and you always want I always wonder like I mean they're obviously they're they're used as supernatural explanations of natural events but like the origins of those actual stories like how do you get that like Crete lady creature and like like does somebody here's wonder does like is that by like one person does it that starts that that someone's as of an influence does that story or agreed-upon like yeah I always wonder about that and that that sometimes difficult because a lot of it becomes prehistory prewriting and stuff like that so you don't get a lot of these origins or a historiography of it so anyway alright but that was fascinating love had love Sam's channel great to see that I don't know what I could have added to it other than just reactions there not much I can add for me a historical perspective other than I guess what I did but awesome thank you to the patreon pleasures for picking this video this week I try to watch as many of his videos even just for the entertainment value but some of those are great side stories that are great to tell in class and stuff like Dodgers to hook kids and things like that as long as you can keep them you know class appropriate and things like that but awesome yeah thanks again for doing that again if you would like to join they'll be linked down below to do that too another plug if you have not joined our discord community definitely do that there's a link down below and you can join our pretty big historical fan sort of community and have some good discussions there but thanks again for subscribing thanks for liking the video hope to see you around soon and we'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Mr. Terry History

Views: 398,295

Keywords: react, history, inuit

Id: CRKjB8n_0mc

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 15 2019