Eskimo

“ But the Eskimo has more than this; when disaster overtakes him, he will often show the rarest endurance and hardihood. In spite of the many dangers and sufferings inseparable from his industry, he devotes himself to it with joy. If the history of the Eskimos had ever been written, it would have been one long series of feats of courage and fortitude ”

“ With all his goodness of heart, the Eskimo is, after all, no more than a man. The boy is, of course, regarded as the kaiak-man and hunter of the future, the support of the family in the old age of his parents, in short as a direct addition to the working capital; while they no doubt think that there will always be plenty of girls in the world. ”

“ When the primitive Eskimo first met with the glacier which he saw gliding out into the sea, and giving birth, from time to time, to mighty icebergs, could he see in this anything else than the activity of a live being? ”

“ The Eskimo.—It is a very easy matter for an artistic ethnologist to make some fine light-and-shade contrasts between two populations, where he has an Iroquois or a Sioux at one end, and an Eskimo of Labrador at the other. An oblique eye, bleared and sore from the glare of the snow, with a crescentic fold overshadowing the caruncula lacrymalis, surmounted by a low forehead and black shaggy locks, with cheek-bones of such inordinate development as to make the face as broad as it is long, are elements of ugliness which catch the imagination, and produce a caricature, where we want a picture. ”

“ Lest the foregoing account of the white and frozen village should convey too dazzling an idea of such a settlement, it should be remembered that the snow all round and about is trampled up, and incredibly defiled by all the refuse of a community who have no ideas at all about sanitation and seemly surroundings. Hence there is an appearance of dirt and squalor wherever the Eskimo encamp, and these little congeries of human beings contrive quite effectually to blot and mar the pure immensity of the snow-white northern landscape. ”

“ On the icy banks of the Arctic Ocean, where mercury freezes and the ground never softens, the Eskimo, wrapped in furs, and burrowing in the earth, revels in grease and train-oil, sustains vitality by eating raw flesh and whale-fat; while the naked inter-tropical man luxuriates in life under a burning sun, where ether boils and reptiles shrivel upon the hot stone over which they attempt to crawl. The watery fruit and shading vegetation would be as useless to the one, as the heating food and animal clothing would be to the other. ”

“ Perhaps the kyacks of some solitary Eskimo, lashed abreast twos and threes to prevent capsizing, may shoot out from some of these bog-covered valleys like seabirds; but it is only when the Eskimos happen to be hunting here, or the ships of the whalers and fur traders are passing up and down—that there is any sign of human habitation on the straits. ”

“ Part of an Eskimo Tribe of Women and Children.
With their outside jackets off, the inner jackets showing the ornamentations of beadwork.
Pure blood Indians do not penetrate so far north as the Eskimo territories, being denizens of the forest but not of the barrens. The Eskimo are a kindly, intelligent people, hardy to a degree. They follow the manner of life and the pursuits of primitive man; but when brought into contact with the whites and with civilisation, show themselves by no means incapable of assimilating a good deal of instruction. ”

“ The heavy work is done by the hale and hearty, who leave only the lighter tasks, such as the tending of the lamps and the minding of the house, to the older folk. Womanlike all the world over, the crones love to get together and indulge in unlimited gossip. All the women, indeed, pay a constant round of visits, and gathering, now here, now there, sit about smiling and gossiping, as is their wont from the tropics to the pole.
The Eskimo are a genial, jovial, peaceable people, among whom quarrelling is a crime, and he or she who disturbs the general peace is a villain of the deepest dye. ”

“ Eskimos are never quite sure where their towns are to be found, for even the places have a way of packing up and moving off. When comfortable houses can be built in a couple of hours, and each householder can carry all his belongings on one [74] sled, it is easiest, if the fishing or hunting proves bad, just to move the whole village over to another site. ”

“ The Eskimos have many strange beliefs. [75] They think there is a spirit in everything,—the rock, the snow, the wind, the very air has its spirit. The seal, therefore, has its spirit, too, and must be treated respectfully.
Etu's father solemnly sprinkled water on the body, while every one watched him in silence. It was an offering to the animal's spirit. He next carefully cut away the skin and showed the thick layer of blubber beneath. The eyes of the company sparkled with delight. Many funny faces were made as each in turn received a huge chunk of raw blubber. ”

“ Prior to the advent of the white man the only idea and the only means of calligraphy the Eskimo had was the etching on ivory or bone. Many vigorous and spirited drawings exist of hunting or other scenes, scratched on blade or handle, and sharply bitten in, black and clear, by rubbing with soot from the lamps. It is not remarkable that a knowledge of writing and reading should have spread [178] among the people in this way, for the Eskimo are avid of instruction, and eagerly avail themselves of any opportunity of being taught. ”

“ Europeans find Eskimo difficult to acquire. The writer, like others, had largely to construct his own grammar when studying it. He spent many long hours, first with the young folk to get the purity of the sounds, then with the middle-aged men to arrive at correct idiom and fluency, then with the ancients to get at the folk lore of the tribe. Oftentimes their speech was merely a series of long and complicated gutturals, two hours of it being enough to make a man’s head spin for the rest of the day. ”

“ Here there is neither silver nor gold, neither gorgeous raiment nor shining palaces, as in our stories; earthly riches have no value for the Eskimo. Nor are there lovely women, flowery gardens, and so forth. ”

“ So much alone can we declare with any assurance, that the Eskimos dwelt in comparatively recent times on the coasts around Bering Straits and Bering Sea—probably on the American side—and have thence, stage by stage, spread eastward over Arctic America to Greenland. ”

“ Eskimo Kayaks at the Arctic Edge
Broadly speaking, the Eskimo's theory of things, evolved from white spirits on the ice-floes or carried across in the age of the mastodon from sires and grandsires in Asia, does not differ materially from our own. There is a Good Spirit, called by different tribes Cood-la-pom-e-o, Kelligabuk, or Sidne, who dwells high in the zenith, and to whom it is good to pray. There is an Evil Spirit, Atti, symbolising cold and death. Their heaven is a warm underworld reached by entrances from the sea. Hell is a far, white, dreary plain. The Eskimo pray to Sidne ”

“ The half-caste race which has arisen upon the west coast, of mingled European and Eskimo blood, is apt to be, according to our ideas, handsomer than the pure-bred Eskimos. They have, as a rule, a somewhat southern appearance, with their dark hair, dark eyebrows and eyes, and brown complexion. A remarkably Jewish cast of countenance sometimes appears among them. Types of real beauty are by no means rare—male as well as female. Yet there is apt to be something feeble about these half-breeds. The pure-bred Eskimos undoubtedly seem more genuine and healthy. ”

“ In the past when whales were plentiful and the whalebone of no value to the Eskimo, strips of whalebone were stitched together with whalebone thongs, and a flat sled formed. It was very strong and less liable to sink in the snow.
The struggle for existence in the Arctic has taught the Eskimo to utilise in the most ingenious ways resources at their disposal so limited that the marvel is so self-sufficing, so healthy, hearty and happy a civilisation, of its kind, could ever have been evolved. ”

“ The Eskimo knows better how to husband his food than the Indian; and give him a snow bank and he can make himself comfortable anywhere. The most gluttonous Indian would turn green with envy to see the quantities of meat the Eskimo can stow away within his inner self at a single sitting; but on the other hand he can live, and work hard too, on a single scant meal a day, just as his dogs do. ”

“ Undoubtedly the Eskimo are linked, if not by blood certainly by custom, to the Arctic peoples of Siberia, to the Lapps and Finns of northern Europe. In historic times they mixed with the Danes and Norsemen. They are not numerically very strong. Forty thousand may possibly total the nation, and of those 12,000 are in Greenland, and rather more in Alaska, leaving some 13,000 souls scattered along the shores of Baffin Land, Melville Peninsula, Boothia, Victoria Island, Banks Island and the rest of the bleak, fragmented continent. ”

“ The term Eskimo may be held to include all the Innuit population living on the Aleutian islands, the islands of Bering sea, and the shores both of Asia and America north of about latitude 64°. In this latitude on the American coast the ethnical points that difference the North American from the Eskimo are distinctly marked. It cannot, however, be said that the designating marks of distinction are so plain between the American Eskimo and the so-called Tchuktschi of the Asiatic coast. ”

“ The mutual resemblance of the different tribes of Eskimos is no less striking than their difference from all other races in features, figure, implements and weapons, and general manner of life.
A pure-bred Eskimo from Bering Straits is so like a Greenlander that one cannot for a moment doubt that they belong to the same race. Their language, too, is so far alike that an Alaska Eskimo and a Greenlander would probably, after some little time, be able to converse without much difficulty. ”

“ We say: ‘He who strikes the earth with a stick beats his mother; he who strikes a stone beats his father’—an idea which closely corresponds with the Eskimo conception, in which, no doubt, the man should properly be represented as rising from a rock.
As to the origin of us Europeans, they have a legend which is not altogether flattering to our vanity. An Eskimo woman, with whom no husband would remain for any time, at last took a dog to mate, and was brought to bed of a mingled litter of human children and puppies. ”

“ The Eskimo of Labrador and Alaska have largely abandoned [135] the snow house for the log shack or sod hut, and have in consequence been decimated by tuberculosis. Everywhere, contact with “civilisation” has tended so to divorce these children of the North from their natural environment as to initiate their wholesale decline. It is only now, in “the last North of all”—in Baffin Land, Boothia Island, Victoria Land, and the rest—that the Eskimo retain their old ways and their old vigour. Their life and their type everywhere else has become mongrel and nondescript. ”

“ Physically the Eskimo constitute a distinct type. They are of medium stature, but possess uncommon strength and endurance; their skin is light brownish yellow with a ruddy tint on the exposed parts; hands and feet are small and well formed; their heads are high, with broad faces, and narrow high noses, and eyes of a Mongolian character. But great varieties are found in different parts of the vast area over which they range. The Polar Eskimo of Greenland, studied by Steensby, were more of American Indian than of Asiatic type [811] . ”

“ Among people like the Eskimos, yet another influence comes into play, which colours their superstition; the influence, to wit, of the natural surroundings among which they are placed, and of the hard and hazardous life they lead. It is a recognised fact that a race which lives by hunting and fishing has a special tendency to become superstitious; of this we have a striking example in our own country. Compare the men of the west and north coasts with those of the eastern districts. ”

“ The Eskimo are not, as is often supposed, a small people on an average; they are rather of middle height, often powerful, and sometimes quite tall, although they are a good deal shorter, and weaker in appearance, than average Scandinavians. In appearance, and perhaps also in language, they come nearest to some of the North American Indian tribes. ”

“ But as soon as the Eskimos come to a place where there are plenty of seals, they go ashore, pitch their camp, take to hunting, and live at their ease. When the autumn and winter approach, they choose a good site and build a winter-house, continuing their journey in the spring or summer as soon as the ice permits. The woman-boat in question had in this manner spent three years on the passage from Umivik, and would no doubt take pretty nearly as long to return. ”

“ North American Indian tribes wander far to the north of the Arctic Circle in Canada and Alaska, keeping their hereditary enemies the Eskimo to the coast and islands The Eskimo of the American coast are intermingling not only with the American whalers but also with the Polynesians who come north as part of the crew of the whalers, and the pure race is tending to disappear. The traces of Eskimo encampments in the Polar archipelago, where no Eskimo now live, may mark a former wider range of hunting grounds, or a greater extension of the population. ”