*Photograph taken at Nuuk Art Museum, www.nuukkunstmuseum.gl
If you visit a gift shop in Greenland you are likely to find tupilaks – small bone or soapstone carvings of strange other-worldly creatures. As my son pointed out to me, these aren’t really tupilaks, they are only carvings of tupilaks. Tupilaks are something much more disturbing and dangerous and real. Tupilaks are living creatures, used to attack and kill others.
One afternoon, walking my son home from school, he told me the story of tupilaks, which he’d learned from his teacher. To make a tupilak you first make its body. It can be made out of anything. Then you take something from the person you want to attack, like some hair, and put it in the tupilak. When it then comes to life, it knows to go straight to that person. But you must be careful. If that person has a stronger spirit, they can send it back to attack and kill its maker.
“Are tupilaks real?” I asked my son.
He stopped and looked at me with furrowed brow, like I was clearly some kind of fool.
“Yes!”
“But there are no tupilaks now”, he clarified, walking on, “only in the old days”.
