Inuit–Qimmiit Kinship: Co-Travel in Life and Afterlife

This article considers traditional Inuit beliefs and practices as expressed through human–animal relationality, examining the physical and spiritual significance of qimmiit (sled dogs), and how qimmiit functioned as co-travellers with humans across physical and spiritual realms of existence. Drawing on ethnographic and missionary narrative sources, it explores Inuit–Qimmiit relationality as central to survival in the pre-modern period. Consulted sources include the writings of explorer–ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, Church of England missionary Edmund James Peck, anthropologist Franz Boas, explorer–author Peter Freuchen, and Oblate missionary Pierre Henry (Kajualuk). These accounts, despite Euro-centric and Christian biases, provide distinct yet overlapping experiences with sled dogs and understandings of Inuit traditions and worldviews. Read comparatively, these ethnographic texts reveal how qimmiit were essential to mobility and spiritual–social order. The article draws on the Qikiqtani Truth Commission to contextualize the harm and suffering caused by the loss of qimmiit during the dog killings of the 1950s to 1970s. The song “Travel Without Me,” from the Animal Kinship Project and written to commemorate qimmiit in the aftermath of the sled dog slaughter, provides a narrative framework structured around kinship and travel, foregrounding Inuit understandings of shared journeys across human and canine existence and framing Inuit–Qimmiit relations as enduring bonds that traverse both physical life and afterlife. Within Inuit religious cosmologies, relationships between humans and qimmiit extend beyond practical cooperation to encompass shared spiritual existence, relational obligation, and continuity of soul across physical and metaphysical worlds. Ethnographic accounts recorded by Rasmussen, Peck, Boas, Freuchen and Henry describe dogs not merely as working animals but as ensouled beings who participate in travel, naming practices, shamanic mediation, cosmogonic and afterlife narratives. Read through a religious studies lens, these sources reveal a cosmological framework in which mobility and survival are embedded within sacred relational structures linking human and animal life. This article examines Inuit–Qimmiit kinship as a form of physical–spiritual relationality, arguing that dogs function as co-travellers whose relational position across embodied and cosmological domains illuminates Inuit understandings of personhood, cosmological balance, and the continuity of life beyond death.