I just came across some older posts on small rock piles that hikers are calling ducks and was just so amazed at how ignorant people can be. Rather than trying to understand what these figures are, and why people build them, they just get offended that someone else has a different idea on how to enjoy the wilderness and knock them over, or speculate on how many spider homes were disrupted to gather the rocks! Well, the spiders have now moved into the new rockpiles, and you disrupt them again when you scatter the rocks. In case anyone out there is interested in learning something new today, here is the scoop.
They are NOT ducks, they are inuksuit.
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From Wikipedia:
An inuksuk (plural inuksuit) [1] (from the Inuktitut: ᐃᓄᒃᓱᒃ, plural ᐃᓄᒃᓱᐃᑦ; alternatively inukshuk in English[2] or inukhuk in Inuinnaqtun[3]) is a stone landmark or cairn built by humans, used by the Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic region of North America. These structures are found from Alaska to Greenland. This region, above the Arctic Circle, is dominated by the tundra biome and has areas with few natural landmarks.
The inuksuk may have been used for navigation, as a point of reference, a marker for travel routes, fishing places, camps, hunting grounds, places of veneration, drift fences used in hunting [4] or to mark a food cache.[5] The Inupiat in northern Alaska used inuksuit to assist in the herding of caribou into contained areas for slaughter.[6] Varying in shape and size, the inuksuit have longtime roots in the Inuit culture.
Historically, the most common type of inuksuk is a single stone positioned in an upright manner.[7] There is some debate as to whether the appearance of human- or cross-shaped cairns developed in the Inuit culture before the arrival of European missionaries and explorers.[7] The size of some inuksuit suggest that the construction was often a communal effort.[4]
At Enukso Point on Baffin Island, there are over 100 inuksuit. The site was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1969.
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If you google the term you will find many monumental and impressive examples still standing after hundreds or thousands of years.
Some of us relate to the wilderness by hiking through it and camping there. How is it wrong for others to relate to it by building stone figures that emulate those built by ancient indigenous peoples? Perhaps the current builders were hoping to educate, to introduce the viewer to history, and that the viewer would be curious and want to learn about them, rather than arrogantly assume there was nothing to learn, and tear them down.
Personally, I'm a lot more ticked off by the people that think they should be allowed to take atv's, motorbikes, and suv's into protected areas.