When white men moved into the Arctic country, Eskimos borrowed many
modern inventions, such as guns and stoves, and they changed many of
their old ways of living. But they still think they are luckier than
people who live where houses are big and hard to build and the hot
summers are long.
Summer in Eskimo land is often hot, but it's always short. For several
weeks the sun shines night and day. Winter lasts for more than half of
every year up there, and for several weeks the sun doesn't shine at
all--it's dark night twenty-four hours a day.
A great many customs in the warmer parts of the world seem strange and
silly to the Eskimos. They think they do things the way people should
naturally do them. In fact, they call themselves The People.
[Illustration: ~an ivory comb~]
The fringe of land where The People spend their lives belongs to
different countries now. Part of it belongs to the United States, part
to Canada and Denmark and the Soviet Union. But The People are still
Eskimos. They all talk the Eskimo language wherever they live.
[Illustration]
Their language is one of the hardest in the world to learn. In order to
speak it, you must know many more words than most people ever learn in
order to speak English. In the old days Eskimos had no alphabet and no
way of writing down their language. But today many of them can read and
write, and there are even books and newspapers in Eskimo.
[Illustration]