People generally know the aurora borealis by their common name, the Northern Lights. He's heard the folklore and stories, and remembers the fear of the lights when he was growing up. The Spirit of the Dead. Depending on the solar activity cycle, the aurora borealis come in many forms. *. The old Norse explanation was that the strange, shimmering green lights were old maids dancing in the heavens. 2. It is often said that the Inuit have dozens of words to refer to snow and ice.Anthropologist John Steckley, in his book White Lies about the Inuit (2007), notes that many often cite 52 as the number of different terms in Inuktitut.This belief in a high number of words for snow and ice has been sharply criticized by a large number of linguists and anthropologists. According to Finnish legend, when the fox runs across the snowy Arctic fells it lights up the night sky with sparks flying from its tail. I wrote a post about it a while back (The Inuits and the Aurora Spirits). They can take the form of an arch which can be as long as 1000 kilometers, a strip, a curtain, a veil, a wreath, or a pillar with rays extending up to a hundred kilometers. To find out more about Pirurvik, our programs and services, visit www.pirurvik.cawww.pirurvik.ca Northern lights can last from a few seconds up to 45 minutes. When they witnessed the lights, many Inuit, the Arctic’s indigenous peoples, believed they were spirits of the dead playing a game with a walrus skull as the “ball.” The Inuit of Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea flipped its take on this story believing that it was walrus spirits playing with a human skull. The northern lights have haunted the imaginations of spectators for centuries. When the lights start appearing in the night sky, the Finns have a different word for them: revontulet , which translates to "fox fires." The northern lights are natural phenomena that occur in nature. The Northern Lights appear much more often during the cold winter months, and that starts at the end of August. There are different stories depending on which Inuit group we're talking about but it always is about the spirit of the dead. 19, 2021. To the Inuit, the arsaniit are the sky people enjoying a ball game. Broomfield is a photographer from Makkovik, N.L., and has shot the northern lights from Nunavut to Nunavik, Que., Labrador to Antarctica. Some Indigenous peoples view the lights as ancestral spirits dancing before the Great Spirit. The Finnish word for the northern lights … Often on a clear, dark night in the boreal forest, green, purple, pink, and white lights dance on the horizon ... weather, while many Inuit cultures viewed the aurora as a sign of warming temperatures. Northern lights The WAG's Qaumajuq Inuit art centre brings warm glow of appreciation, connection, collaboration and reconciliation to Winnipeg | Posted: 12:00 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 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