little light

The Iñupiaq word for caterpillar is aurviq.

The word for butterfly is taqalakisaq.

When I was a little girl, my aapaaluk, my grandpa, held my hand and toddled with me around the spring land of Point Hope.

The land wakes in the Arctic spring, when the sun moves higher and longer across the sky, after the Arctic winter, when it sleeps the cold, cold months, sometimes in twenty-four hours a day of darkness, under a heavy blanket of snow and ice.

“Ataguna,” said my aapaaluk.

Look.

It is a taqalakisaq.

A butterfly.”

Then he was silent.

He is always silent after he tells me to look at something.

“It’s because I want you to taaqsiulgu, Little Light,” he tells me time and time again, “I want you to see in the darkness.

And you cannot do that with too much talking.”

I was learning to look AND to see.

I am learning, still.

I saw the butterfly.

It was beautiful.

So very beautiful.

“It is an Arctic Fritillary,” he said.

“The yellow in it’s wings reminds us of the sunlight off of the Chukchi Sea, Little Light, the sunlight that brings us warmth, the sunlight that brings us hope.

Hope.

The taqalakisaq is born out of the aurviq, the caterpillar.

It becomes the taqalakisaq through ilimmaq, through metamorphosis.

The shaman metamorphoses to fly through the air or the sea to learn the old ways to bring back to the people.

To help the people.

The aurviq, like the shaman, metamorphoses.

Three living things, Little Light - the caterpillar, the shaman, and the bowhead whale - hold the world.

They hold the world.”

I held out my hand.

The taqalakisaq landed on my palm.

My aapaaluk was silent again. 

This time he was silent for a long time.

He looked at the butterfly in my palm.

He saw.

“Little Light,” he said, after the butterfly lifted off of my hand and flittered off into the sunlight. 

Atanya.

Listen.”

You cannot do THAT with too much talking, either.

Sometimes, though, when he really wants me to tusaanigluk, to hear and want to hear more, he uses the word atanya for listen, instead of the common word ‘a’, he will say a few more words.

“Your name is Taklaingiq. 

It is the old language for the agviq, the bowhead whale. 

Your name is similar to the name for the butterfly, taqalakisaq.

The agviq’s name is similar to the name for the caterpillar, aurviq.

The old way teaches that names are important.

The old way teaches that all things are connected.

What does this mean to you, Little Light?

What does this mean for you?

Ataguna.

Atanya.

He held my hand again, the hand that had held the butterfly, and we toddled on.