How many words do the Inuit people have for snow?

At the Apollo Theatre in London’s West End, the anthropologist Hugh Brody entranced the audience with several. He told us the word for fresh snow falling in the air (‘Qanirpuq’); the word for snow thawed to make drinking water (‘Aniuk’), and the word for grainy and crystalline snow (‘Pukak’).

Mark Rylance leading a rehearsal… will it come together in time?

Hugh Brody was speaking from the set of ‘Jerusalem,’ sitting by a fire that cast a flickering light on the actors brought together by Mark Rylance for his one-off theatrical adaptation of Survival’s new book on tribal peoples, ‘We are One’. On a large screen suspended above the stage, the audience watched images of an Inuit family ploughing their way through deep drifts, their children wrapped in caribou skins, the northern winds blowing snow across the icy tundra.

Juliet Stevenson, Imelda Staunton, Emilia Fox and Gillian Anderson around the fire

Throughout the evening on Sunday 18th April, 2010, actors including Julie Christie, John Sessions, Juliet Stevenson, Mackenzie Crook, Imelda Staunton and Edward Fox led the audience from the Amazon rainforest to the Kalahari desert, and the grassy plains of South Dakota.

We heard the thoughts of the Yanomami people of Brazil, the Penan nomads of Sarawak, and the Arhuaco of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada. When Derek Jacobi enacted the moving words of the great North American Indian orator, Chief Seattle, the lights went down as he told the audience that ‘every part of this land is sacred in the estimation of my people’.

Seattle’s words had encapsulated the essence of the evening – the importance of land to tribal peoples.

Mackenzie Crook reading the words of Davi Yanomami, from Survival’s book We Are One.

‘We are One’ was a fundraising evening for Survival, and raised nearly £20,000, all of which will go to our campaigns for tribal peoples.

And if you’re wondering just how many different words the Inuit have for snow, don’t ask Wikipedia. Thanks to Hugh Brody’s piece I can now tell you it’s… zero. Not one of the dozens of Inuit words to differentiate the many varieties of snow and ice that have meaning to them refers simply to ‘snow.’

The book ‘We are One’ is available from Survival.