An angakkuq is a traditional Inuit spiritual specialist, a mediator between the human community and the spirit world credited with powers of healing, divination and the maintenance of communal taboo, working typically through trance states reached with the aid of drumming and chant. The role held a central position across Inuit societies of the Arctic, from Alaska through Canada to Greenland, well before sustained European missionary contact, and an angakkuq's authority rested on demonstrated results, successful healings, accurate predictions, favorable hunts, more than on inherited office alone.
Angakkuit were understood to travel between the human world and the spirit world during trance, negotiating with the beings believed to control weather, game animals and human fortune, and a community's welfare was widely held to depend on maintaining that relationship correctly. The office carried real social risk alongside its authority: an angakkuq whose interventions repeatedly failed could lose standing quickly, and the position was earned through demonstrated capacity rather than granted permanently by birth or appointment.
Bernard Saladin d'Anglure's decades of fieldwork among Inuit elders in Nunavut recorded angakkuq cosmology in unusual depth, including its distinctive treatment of gender and rebirth, in which shamanic capacity was sometimes understood to cross the boundary between male and female in ways ordinary social life did not. This atlas draws on that scholarship to describe the office's structure and history rather than to instruct in its methods, a distinction that matters for a role still practiced and still sacred to living communities.