Someone Was Here
/ Post by Erica Wills of Polar Bears International
In the photo above, I’m standing next to Churchill’s giant inuksuk (pronounced in-ook-sook). In the native Inuit language, inuksuk means “in the likeness of man,” and a general, traditional interpretation is “someone was here.” They were primarily built along traveling roads to communicate directions to fellow travelers, and could also have been used to mark good places to hunt, camp, fish, etc. The English language has come to spell the term as “inukshuk,” but “inuksuk” (plural “inuksuit”) is the preferred Inuit spelling.
Inuksuit come in all sizes (I have a small one in my room!), and giant inuksuit like the one I’m posing with would have needed many people to create it. It required many people working together to carefully balance each stone so the structure would hold. Every stone in an inuksuk is important; no stone is more important than another. Remove one and the whole inuksuk is destroyed. Its strength and meaning comes from the unity of the whole structure. We, too, are like this: each of us is individually important, and one person’s actions can greatly affect the whole system. As a team, we support each other and help each other to succeed.
Inuksuit are a symbol of the human spirit. They remind us of the great things we can achieve when we work together, and that we have a responsibility to invest our efforts in helping one another. Just as each stone is necessary to create the inuksuk, so each person is needed to make an effort in living more sustainably.
The inuksuk has become an important symbol for me, much like they were (and still are) for Inuits. A souvenir I purchased from this trip has an inuksuk on it with the following quote: “May it be a guide for a safe journey through life’s travels, and let it always guide you home.”
One day, I know I’ll escape from the humdrum world of fifteen-page papers and math assignments and be back in my icy home of the Arctic. Until then, I’m going to keep working to make sure I have a home to go back to. By working together, future generations will have a clean, healthy planet as their inuksuk: proof that someone was there, and in Earth’s hour of need more than one someone stepped forward to make a difference.
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