In this work, Mungitok sends a smiling man sailing through a field of gold, birds gathering at his shoulders, arms, and head. These avian forms do more than simply accompany him. Gull and goose heads spring from the crooks of his arms and beneath his shoulders, while several of the birds themselves produce secondary heads, multiplying into a strange flock of beaks, bodies and wings that carry him aloft.

The narrative behind the work has not been clearly established, but we offer here possible context for its imagery [1]. In material gathered during the Fifth Thule Expedition, Knud Rasmussen recorded across several Inuit groups a recurring conception of the moon as an agent of passage between earth and the celestial world. Among the Utkuhikhalingmiut [2], Rasmussen was told:

'When people die, [...] they are carried by the moon up to the land of heaven and live there in the eternal hunting grounds. We can see their windows from on earth, as the stars. [...] Some few of the angakoqs in former times made journeys to the land of heaven, and told what they saw. They visited the moon [...] The dead live happily; those who have visited their land have seen them laughing and playing happily together.' [3]

These details are particularly suggestive here. Mungitok's man does not look startled by his strange passage through the sky. He smiles broadly, almost delightedly, his face turned upward as the birds gather around him. If Rasmussen's account offers even a distant parallel, that smile may suggest not the uncertainty of departure but the pleasure of arrival. It may also cast the strange humanoid figure at lower right in a new light, as someone on earth who looks upward toward the distant windows of the dead.

1. To the best of my knowledge, this has not been discussed elsewhere.

2. Closer to Kinngait, Frans Boas records a Baffin Island account in which an angakoq is carried through the air by his tornaq to the moon and later returned to earth. See Franz Boas, "The Central Eskimo," in Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1888, 598–599.

3. Knud Rasmussen, Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition, (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927), 196-7.

ND