Inuit

“ Kadlu was an Inuit,—what you call an Esquimau,—and his tribe, some thirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut—“the country lying at the back of something.” In the maps that desolate coast is written Navy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name is best, because the country lies at the very back of everything in the world. For nine months of the year there is only ice and snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that no one can realise who has never seen the thermometer even at zero. For six months of those nine it is dark ”

“ He is as untiring in his efforts to aid us in our search as in securing food, and there is always a degree of intelligence displayed in whatever he undertakes that is wholly foreign to the Inuit character. Even the stones that he brought into camp bore marks that were most astonishingly like writing. ”

“ They are dwarfs and are frequently seen between Iglulik and Netchillik, where the Anganidjen live, an Inuit tribe whose women are in the habit of tattooing rings around their eyes. There are men and women among the Uissuit and they live in deep water, never coming up to the surface. When the Inuit wish to see them, they go in their boats to a place where they cannot see the bottom and try to catch them by hooks which they slowly move up and down. ”

“ The cold was intense, the land was barren of game, the region seemed accursed in its desolation, while the conditions of travel were hard in the extreme.
The absence of human life was far more distressing to the heroic McClintock than the rigors of the journey, for without Inuit aid the labors and sufferings of his crew and of himself would be unavailing. Was it possible that the region was abandoned by beast [179] and so by man? Was his mission destined to be a failure? Could he succeed without Eskimo help? ”

“ The largest part of an Inuit's food is, however, eaten raw. These o-yooks are merely festal occasions, though they occur several times a day, and may happen at any hour of the day or night when the natives are assembled in villages and have plenty of food on hand. ”

“ If they could only rest contented with a fair shot, the Inuits would probably secure more game than they now do, for the most of those I have seen them lose in this way went down after the hunter had approached within easy range—say twelve or fifteen yards. They are so anxious, however, to make a sure thing of it that they often try to get too near. I have frequently timed an Inuit as he started for a seal on the ice, and found it takes about an hour from the time he starts in pursuit until the shot is fired. It is amusing to watch the countenance of the seal through a spy-glass. ”

“ They call themselves as a race “In ́uĭn,” a term corresponding to the 43 “Inuit” of other dialects, and meaning “people”, or “human beings”. Under this name they include white men and Indians as well as Eskimo, as is the case in Greenland and the Mackenzie River district, and probably also everywhere else, though many writers have supposed it to be applied by them only to their own race. ”

“ The Inuit say that in olden times there were a great many of these creatures, and they often sat in a row along the ice floes, like a flock of penguins. Their numbers have become less and less, till now there are but a few left.
Anyone standing on shore may see them swimming under water very rapidly, and occasionally they rise to the surface as if to get air. They make a great noise by splashing with their feet [Pg 15] and arms as they swim. In summer they like to come out and bask on the rocks, but in winter they sit along the edge of the ice or else stay under water. ”

“ Whoever cuts a whale's body with an iron axe will die. Indeed the use of all iron instruments is forbidden in the village during these four days. These Inuit have a special name (nu-na hlukh-tuk) “for a spot of ground where certain things are tabooed, or where there is to be feared any evil influence caused by the presence of offended shades of men or animals, or through the influence of other supernatural means. This ground is sometimes considered unclean, and to go upon it would bring misfortune to the offender, producing sickness, death, or lack of success in hunting or fishing. ”

“ It remained for the expeditions of Hall, Nares, Greely, Amdrup, Holm, and Mylius-Erichsen to prove by their united observations that there was not only an Inuit settlement on the east coast, but that such [337] natives are the descendants of the true Children of the Ice, who have crossed Grinnell Land, skirted northern Greenland, and thus come eventually to their present habitat. Their fathers were formerly inhabitants of the most northerly lands of the globe, of the lands of Grant, Grinnell, Greenland, and Hazen (or Peary) . ”

“ Another cause of misfortune is for the line to become entangled around the arm of the hunter, so that he cannot cast it off, in which case he is most assuredly drawn into the sea, and in nine cases out of ten drowned, for his knife is seldom at hand for an emergency, and no amount of experience will ever induce an Inuit to provide against danger. ”

“ Still among the Inuits of extreme southern Greenland were numerous and curious traditions of the inhabitants of the east coast, one to the effect that far to the northward were some light-haired people of European complexion. ”

“ They have neither seal float and spear nor inflated legs, but carry the skin scraper. They must try to enter the huts while the Inuit hold a long sealskin thong before them to keep them off. If they fall down in the attempt to cross it they are thoroughly beaten with a short whip or with sticks. After having succeeded in entering the huts they blow out all the fires.
The parts of the feast already described as celebrated in Cumberland Sound seem not to be customary in Akudnirn, the conjuration of Sedna and the exchanges of wives excepted, which are also practiced here. ”

“ I found it under some rubbish in a house at Colombo, and have translated it from one end to the other.
[Pg 234]
"ANGUTIVUN TINA"
[This is a very free translation of the Song of the Returning Hunter, as the men used to sing it after seal-spearing. The Inuit always repeat things over and over again.]
ur gloves are stiff with the frozen blood, Our furs with the drifted snow, As we come in with the seal—the seal! In from the edge of the floe.
Au jana! Aua! Oha! Haq! And the yelping dog-teams go, And the long whips crack, and the men come back, Back from the edge of the floe! ”

“ Any one who has been killed by accident, or who has committed suicide, certainly goes to the happy place.
All Inuit who have been bad—that is, unkind one to another—all who have been unhappy while on this earth, will go to Adliparmiut. If an Inung kills another because he is mad at him, he will certainly go to Adliparmiut.
Kumlien’s remarks on this subject, as well as on other ethnographic subjects, are not trustworthy. He has transferred Greenland tales to Cumberland Sound, though the traditions of these tribes differ materially one from the other. ”

“ Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Underworld, and the Inuit believe that every one who dies must spend a year in her horrible country before going to Quadliparmiut, the Happy Place, where it never freezes and the fat reindeer trot up when you call.
Through the village people were shouting: “The tornait have spoken to Kotuko. ”

“ The women went on shore, and the men awaited the white people at the crack on the ice. Five of the white men put up a tent on the shore, and five remained with the boat on the ice. The Inuits put up a tent not far from the white men, and they stayed together here five days. During this time the Inuits killed a number of seals on the ice and gave them to the white men. They gave her husband a chopping-knife. He was the one who had the most intercourse with the white crew. ”

“ Such, though inadequately described, are the newly found Inuits of the Angmagsalik district of East Greenland, the sole surviving remnant of the untutored aborigines of the north polar lands. Their human evolution is of intense interest, as it has been worked out under adverse conditions of appalling desolation as regards their food and their travel, their dress and their shelter, their child-rearing and their social relations. ”

“ If there are Eskimos upon this north-east coast, their secluded position, debarring them from all intercourse, direct or indirect, with the outer world, must render them, from an ethnological point of view, among the most interesting people in existence.
↑ Hans Egede. Trans. ↑ Sæter = mountain châlet. Trans. ↑ The Eskimos call themselves inuit—that is to say, 'human beings'; all other men they conceive as belonging to a different genus of animals. ↑ North of the 68th degree they could kill seals and whales in plenty from the ice all the winter through ”

“ They soon found that there was a bright side to life among the Inuits, and that the natives indulged in games of skill much as we do. Gilder tells of the men playing the game of nu-glew-tar, which demands a quick eye and alert, accurate movements: "A small piece of bone is suspended from the roof by a line made of walrus hide, and a heavy weight dangles below it to keep it from swinging. ”

“ The Inuits are a very impassive race, and it was amusing to see the cool way in which Urio and his wife shook hands, as though they had been parted twelve days instead of twelve months. Urio showed more affection towards his child, with whom he rubbed cheeks in the manner peculiar to the Inuits. But if the young wife was undemonstrative at meeting with her husband, she got into transports of joy at the sight of the numerous presents which friends of her husband in Dundee had sent out to her. ”

“ This did not excite me as a matter extraordinary, as I knew that the whalers now visit every year the inlet at the north, called 'Northumberland Inlet' (the 'Cumberland Straits' of Davis) , and distribute freely among the Innuits various articles of civilization, especially cast-off calico dresses that they have brought from the States or from England, which are highly prized by the Innuit women. It is rare to find, at the present day, a native family that does not possess something of the kind. ”

“ Then, indeed, is the sadness and the distress of the white men sharply contrasted with that great joy and happy anticipation of an Innuit who feasts his eyes and gloats in fancy over the abandoned vessels as they lie riven by ice upon those shallow strands of Icy Cape or Point Barrow. ”

“ His father did not see them, but the first Innuits, who saw them, told other Innuits so, and so it continued to his day. Old Innuits tell young Innuits; and when they get to be old, they in turn tell it to the young. "When our baby boy," said he, "gets old enough, we tell him all about you, and about all those kodlunas who brought brick, iron, and coal to where you have been, and of the kodlunas who built a ship on Kodlunarn Island. When boy gets to be an old Innuit he tell it to other Innuits, and so all Innuits will know what we now know." ”

“ There are less than sixteen hundred Indians living over the entire Yukon region—a fact which speaks eloquently for an exceeding scantiness of the population of that vast landed expanse of this interior of the Alaskan mainland—a great arctic moor north of the Kvichpak, which is a mere surface of slightly thawed swale, swampy tundra, lakes and pools, sloughs and sluggish rivers, in the summer solstice, while the wildest storms of frigid winds, laden with snow and sleet, career in unchecked fury over them during winter. ”

“ Our sledge went fast, the dogs being good ones, with an excellent Innuit driver, Ning-u-ar-ping, the son of Sampson and Kokerjabin. On the smooth clear ice, which extended from Sampson's village to where we had first halted on our way up, our progress was very rapid. As we passed the island where we had spent the night before meeting the Innuits, I saw our igloo still standing. A little farther on, I observed to the north a peculiar mark—the work of Nature—by the west side of the entrance to Newton's Fiord, standing out boldly upon one of the mountains. ”

“ They call themselves Innuit, “people,” a term the equivalent of which is the usual expression applied by American natives to their own particular stock.
The Innuit are at present essentially a maritime and arctic nation, occupying the coast and adjacent islands from the Straits of Belle Isle on the Atlantic to Icy Bay, at the foot of Mount St. Elias on the Pacific, and extending their wanderings and settlements as far up Smith’s Sound as N. Lat. 80°, where they are by far the northernmost inhabitants of the earth. ”

“ They are vaguely divided into two tribes or sub-tribes, known respectively as Unalaska and Atka. They are strong and agile, capable of enduring great fatigue and extremes of heat and scold, and are peaceful and cheerful. They subsist by hunting and fishing, using implements of wood, ivory, bone, and stone, with the two types of Eskimo water craft (kayak and umiak) ; their summer habitations are tents or huts like those of the mainland Eskimo, while in winter they occupy huts of stone, snow, or other material, or (especially on Fox Island) underground dwellings. ”

“ There we saw the usual circles of stones, always to be seen where Innuits have had their tupics (summer tents) . We saw seal, walrus, tuktoo (reindeer) , meituk (duck) , and various other bones in abundance, some moss-aged, and some nearly fresh, of not more than two or three years' exposure. Here we found also pieces of wood, some with the ends charred, small pieces of tuktoo skins, and one relic of civilization—a piece of an old calico dress! ”