The angakkuq, plural angakkuit, was the specialist who dealt with the powers when rules failed. The office was not hereditary and not administrative: it came through a calling, through instruction from an older angakkuq, and through an initiation. Those who held it worked with helping spirits, tuurngait, and were understood to perceive what others could not.
What that initiation consisted of is not set out here. The ethnography of the early twentieth century describes it, and the description is easy to find; this entry records that an initiatory tradition existed and what standing it conferred, and reproduces neither its sequence nor what was seen or received in it. The omission is deliberate. It is the rule this atlas applies to Lakota ceremony, to Aboriginal restricted knowledge and to the kanzo of Haitian Vodou, and there is no exception in it for peoples who have not issued a declaration. That the material sits in libraries is not a clearance, the less so here, where it was taken during the collapse of the practice, from a small number of named individuals, in the wake of missions that had set out to end it.
What the work was for can be said plainly. The commonest purposes were to find game, to cure sickness, and to establish why the animals had gone. The last of these routinely ended in confession: the angakkuq named the broken rule, the person responsible admitted it before the group, and only then were the animals expected to return. The conduct of the ceremony itself is not described here, for the same reason as the initiation.
The social function is visible in that outcome. In small camps entirely dependent on cooperation, with no police, courts or chiefs, the angakkuq was a mechanism for surfacing grievance, assigning fault, and restoring cooperation without exile or killing. That is not an argument that the practice was merely social, but it explains why it could not be removed without leaving a gap.
Angakkuit were also feared. They could be accused of causing sickness as well as curing it, and rivalry between them could be lethal. Missionaries treated them as the principal obstacle to conversion, and by the twentieth century the office had largely gone underground or ceased in most communities. Where this entry rests on a record it prefers the one Inuit have made themselves, the Nunavut Arctic College elders' projects and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known to Be True, to the expedition ethnography written about them.