Cultural Calendars: Water Tribe
As we all know, the Water Tribe is primarily inspired by Inuit peoples. However, there is no one standard Inuit calendar, as their traditional timekeeping systems are inextricable from the specific areas where they live. For example, the names of their months typically take inspiration from the different life stages of animals and natural phenomenon in their particular environment. Similarly, Inuit is a language family, so the vocabulary varies quite a bit from region to region. So instead of replicating one specific Inuit group or village's calendar for the Water Tribe, I thought I'd share some interesting details and commonalities I've noticed across the calendars I've looked at; from there, you can decide what to incorporate for your Water Tribe calendar.
Inuit/Inupiat/Yupik seasons vary between 5-8 seasons, depending on the weather cycle of the particular area. The most well documented seasonal cycles (shown above) are from Nunavut, Canada in the Inuktitut language and King Island, Alaska in the Inupiatun language. Keeping track of the seasons is vital for hunter-gatherer societies.
I've written about the celebration of Quviasukvik aka Arctic New Year before, so I won't go too in-depth about it. The New Year for many circumpolar people is defined by the first sunrise after the Winter Solstice, as it marks the end of the polar nights, a period when the sun remains below the horizon for multiple months. Meaning that from Katara and Sokka's point of view, Aang first met Roku on New Year's Eve. ^_^
Since the ATLAverse uses a 12-month system, I figured I would use the names that Inuit groups have assigned to the months of the Gregorian calendar. Below is a graph I made of month names (translated into English) from different Inuit, Inupiat, and Yupik regions. If you click on the underlined names, you'll get a link to the sources:
(The months called "miscarriage" are in reference to February and March bring common months for seal miscarriages.)
Based off this research, here are the month names I came up with for the Water Tribe:
I didn't want to choose a specific dialect group, so I just went with English "translations". I tried to make the meanings clear, while also giving the months names that sound like month names (to an English-fluent ear).
The unit of time known as a "week" wasn't really relevant to arctic peoples as they primarily tracked time based on the seasons and lunar cycles, as that's what's most important to a hunter-gatherer society. As such, I think the Water Tribes just adopted the "international" days of weeks that I mentioned here. East-day, North-day, West-day, South-day, and Center-day would be their day names; whether they'd take a break on Center-day would depend on the month/season they were in.
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