ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO
"Behold, I sing a pagan song of old,
And out of my full heart,
Hold forth my hands that so I would enfold
The Infinite thou art.
What matter all the creeds that come and go,
The many gods of men?
My blood outcasts them from its joyous flow."
--_A Pagan Hymn_.
"The Eskimo is a short, squat, dirty man who lives on blubber," said
text-books we had been weaned on, and this was the man we looked for. We
didn't find him.
It was at Arctic Red River, one hundred and ninety miles of river-travel
since we cut the Polar Circle, that we came upon our first Eskimo, the
true class-conscious Socialist of Karl Marx, the one man without a
master on the American continent. A little band of Kogmollycs they were,
men, women, and kiddies, who had come in to trade silver-fox skins for
tobacco and tea at the Post of the Hudson's Bay Company.
On the rocks they sat, waiting for the new steamer to make her landing,
and much excited were they over the iron bowels of this puffing kayak of
the white men. An Eskimo generally lets you know what he thinks, and
this is a basic difference between him and the Indian. An Indian is
always trying to impress you with his importance; he thinks about his
dignity all day and dreams of it at night. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is
a man who commands your respect the moment you look at him, and yet he
is withal the frankest of mortals, affable, joyous, fairly effervescing
with good-humour. His attitude toward the world is that of a little
half-Swiss, half-Chinese baby friend of mine who, in an ecstacy of
good-will when she saw her first Christmas-tree, clutched me tightly
round the neck with, "Everybody are my friend."
One of the Kogmollycs, rejoicing in the name of Wilfrid Laurier, strode
on deck with the swing of a cavalryman and signified his willingness to
trade. Loading down my hunting-coat with pictures, pipes, tobacco,
looking-glasses, needles, files, knives, I climbed over the cliffs with
him to his hut. Down on the floor we sat. Wilfrid put his treasures
between his knees before him, I sat opposite, and the barter began.
"What for this fellow, huh?" and he held up a piece of carved ivory, a
little triangular mincing-knife, a fur mat that his wife had made, or
the skin of a baby-seal. The first thing he asked for was scented soap,
the ring that I was wearing, and my porcupine-quill hat-band which
looked good to him; every exchange was accompanied with smiles, each
bargain sealed with a handshake.
Wilfrid Laurier is doing his part toward bridging the old chasm of
animosity existing between the Eskimo and their next-door neighbours,
the Loucheux Indians to the South. Wilfrid, in taking to himself a
Loucheux woman to wife, has done what the Seventh Henry of England did
when he married Elizabeth of York. Wilfrid's son and heir holds the same
place in Northern history as did Henry VIII, who united in himself the
claims of the rival Roses of York and Lancaster.
[Illustration: A Kogmollye Family]
Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko asked us into her hut, where we reclined on fur mats
while the whole family, wreathed in smiles, tumbled over themselves to
do us honour. One by one they danced for us, stopping to tell their
names and to ask ours. "Major Jabussy," "Missa Blown," they got the
names all right but applied them promiscuously, and then went into
roars of laughter at their blunder. The merriment was infectious. Let no
one waste further sympathy over the poor benighted Eskimo of this
Canadian North. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is, with perhaps the one
exception of an Arab I fraternized with in Chicago at the World's Fair,
the most splendid specimen of physical manhood I have ever seen; in
physique he stood out in splendid contrast to the Europeans and
Americans who were investigating him and his. Arrow-straight and six
feet tall, mark him as he swings along the strand. His is the carriage
and bearing of the high-bred Tartar. This man has "arrived"; he has an
air of assuredness that in the drawing-rooms "Outside" you seldom see.
The Eskimo of the Arctic foreshore are of two tribes: the Kogmollycs to
the east of the Mackenzie mouth, the Nunatalmutes, Dwellers in the
Hills, or Deermen, originally from the interior to the West, but now for
the great part making their home at Herschel Island, eighty miles from
the Mackenzie delta, attracted there by the opportunity of working for
the American whalers.
One of the striking figures of the North is Oo-vai-oo-ak, headman of the
Kogmollycs, living in dignified happiness with his children and his two
wives. This second wife was the cause of much comment among us. How did
she happen? It was this way. Mr. Oo-vai-oo-ak married Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak
the Elder when they were both young. Children were born to them, the big
seal was plenty, succulent beluga-steaks graced the board, and the years
followed one another as smoothly as glacial drift or the strip of
walrus-blubber that the last baby drops down its red gullet as a plummet
sinks in a well.
One day after a big hunt, as Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak placed before her lord
the matutinal mess of whale-skin boiled to that particular rubber-boot
consistency which was his taste, she said, "I'm not as young as I was,
you entertain much, the household cares are heavy, I'd like you to get
another wife to help me with the work." Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak chewed upon
the whale-skin and the suggestion of his spouse. Out in his kayak,
dodging the icebergs, he turned it over in his mind for half a day; and
as the outcome of his cogitations Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger, a
rollicking and comely maiden, joined the family circle.
How does it work out? For ten days I sat round their hospitable fire
trying hard for the viewpoint of each member of this Farthest North
family of fellow-Canadians. I have lived under many roof-trees, but
never have I seen a more harmonious family, nor a ménage of nicer
adjustment. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder, full of the mellow juice of
life, waggish and keen, "quick at the uptak'," as the Scotch say,
presides over her household with dignity, never for a moment relaxing
her hold on the situation. Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak wisely leaves the interior
economy of the household in the hands of the women. He is the quiet,
dignified gentleman with an easy manner that courtiers and
plenipotentiaries extraordinary might envy. His six feet two inches of
height, magnificent physique and superb carriage would mark him out as a
man of distinction at any race-course, polo-meet, or political reception
where men of the world forgather.
Observing the small, strong, exquisitely-formed hands and feet of the
Oo-vai-oo-aks, the almost-white complexions dashed with ruddy scarlet,
the easy grace that even the children have, and, above all, the simple
dignity which compels respect, one recognizes here an ancestry harking
back to Old World culture and distinction.
[Illustration: Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak Family]
How does the young wife fit in? No suffragette need break a lance for
her, demanding a ballot, dower-rights, and the rest of it. She is happy
and busy. All day long she sings and laughs as she prepares the family
fish and feast of fat things, she pays deference to her co-wife, romps
with the children, and expands like an anemone under the ardent smile of
her lord. When the grave question was under discussion regarding the
exchange of her pendant bead-and-shell ear-rings for a pair we had
brought from the shops of the white men, the two spouses discussed the
matter in all its phases earnestly together, as chummy as two
school-girls.
The Oo-vai-oo-ak family was a puzzle to the on-lookers, who sought in
vain for some one of the three contracting parties to pity. They were
all so abundantly happy, each in his or her own way, that Walking
Delegate could find no crack here for the opening wedge of discord. If
no one is to be pitied, then surely for this new departure in matrimony
there must be some one for the virtuous to blame. But why?
Kipling declares, "There's never a law of God or man runs north of
fifty-three." The Eskimo has worked out his life-problem independent
quite from the so-called civilisations evolved to the south of him. He
is his own man.
In the rest of America and in Europe we have formulated a rule of "One
man, One wife," allowing an elasticity of the rule in Chicago and
elsewhere, so that it may read, "One man, one wife at a time." Are we so
sure of results that we are in a position to force our rule upon the
Eskimo?
Following the animals that God has ordained shall be their daily bread,
in little communal bands they thread the silent places of the North. On
the Arctic foreshore we have a people different to all other peoples;
here is no inherited wealth, no accumulation of property. A man's skill
as a hunter determines his ability to support others, the pursuit of
seal is the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In
many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women
outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and
provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo
is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large
families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now,
the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and
provide for one wife and three children, leaving on the community a
floating sisterhood of unattached females, or is it more sane and
generous for the Northland Nimrod to marry as many wives as he can
comfortably support, and raise up olive-branches to save from
extermination the men of the Kogmollycs, the honourable people of the
Nunatalmutes?
The fact that the women prefer a vulgar-fraction of a man, an Eskimo
equity in connubial bliss, to spearing walrus on their own account is a
significant factor in the problem. And before we piously condemn either
the lord or the lady in the case, it is well that we adjust our judgment
to the latitude of 68° North and take cognizance of the fact that no
seductive "Want Columns" in the daily press here offer a niche whereby
unappropriated spinsters may become self-supporting wage-earners as
chaste typewriters, school-teachers, Marcel-wavers, or manicurists. To
keep the vital spark aglow you must kill walrus and seal in your own
proper person or by proxy, for no other talent of body or grace of mind
is convertible into that sustaining meat and heating blubber which all
must have in order to live.
Economically, then, a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a
man to hunt for her. Ethically, it works out beautifully, for each
partner to the hymeneal bargain is fat and full of content, happiness
fairly oozing out of every oily pore. And is not happiness the goal of
human endeavour, whether a man seeks it amid the electric lights, subtle
perfumes, and dreamy waltz-music of a New York ballroom, or finds it
seated with his community wives on a hummock of ice under the Aurora?
I wouldn't like to picture our cousin the Eskimo woman as being always
content with a circulating decimal of a husband instead of a whole unit,
nor would such presentment be just. The shield, like most shields, has a
reverse. Last winter, at the Mackenzie Delta, one Eskimo bride of
seventeen took her fourth consecutive husband. She is dark but comely,
but truth will not carry the analogy further. I have yet to see the
Eskimo who is like a bunch of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Three
winters ago, at Baillie Island, the three-times-widowed one had both her
feet amputated as the result of exposure to cold.
In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate
to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her
brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes. The wedding breakfast
consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat). The
ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests
present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do's bungalow is ten by twelve, one
needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as "odours of Edom and
offerings Divine."
The festivities began to warm up about midnight. An old chap, with a
retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight
suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands
above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance. His wife, a
gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in
the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the
air being confined to three notes. After each line came the chorus twice
repeated,
"Ai, yea, yae! Yae, yae, ya--yae!"
Dancing was kept up to an early hour. Overcome by the air, respiratory
and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride,
pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.
By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most
admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most
misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America. The
Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known
but little of other bands than his own. Yet sometimes they met. There is
an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line
between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty
miles west of Herschel. For years this was a trading rendezvous for four
peoples: the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo,
and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of
Barter Island. To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days
brought their most precious medium of exchange,--a peculiar blue jade,
one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins. And thereby hangs a
tale. Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so
the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi's
ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.
This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and
merriment. In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old
men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious
oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and
courtesies with their half-known kin. The barter consummated, these
Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of
delight. No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no
red-hots nor "fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled
and f-five a bag!", but the Arctic concomitants of these,--boiled
beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that
smells to high heaven. Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in
the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island. It is only the
counters that are different.
Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down
into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and
fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the
world forgot. The white men who reached the Eskimo land from the south
were discoverers following to the sea the three great rivers that
disembogue into the Polar Sea: the Mackenzie, Coppermine, Back or Great
Fish. The first of these explorers was Samuel Hearne who, in 1771,
followed the Coppermine to the Frozen Ocean. For the northern natives
their first contact with white explorers was a disastrous one, for at
Bloody Falls on the Coppermine Hearne's Indians set upon the only band
of Eskimo they saw and almost exterminated them. Sir John Franklin in
1820 was more happy. He says, "The Eskimo danced and tossed their hands
in the air to signify their desire for peace; they exhibited no hostile
intention; our men saluted them by taking off their hats and making
bows." Back, who explored the Back or Great Fish River in 1834, has this
tribute of respect and appreciation. He says, "I called out '_Tima_'
(Peace), and putting their hands on their breasts they also called out
'_Tima_.' I adopted the John Bull fashion of shaking them each heartily
by the hand; patting their breasts, I conveyed to them that the white
man and the Eskimo were very good friends. They were good natured, and
they understood the rights of property, for one of them having picked up
a small piece of pemmican repeatedly asked my permission before he would
eat it."
Through all these years, if we except the noble devotion of the Moravian
missionaries on the northeast of Canada and the splendid Christianity of
such men as Bishop Bompas who sought them from the south, no one visited
the Eskimo from the outside with the purpose of doing him good, but
rather with the idea of exploiting him. Yet, from the days of Sir John
Franklin and Sir Alexander Mackenzie to the recent voyage of Amundsen,
the spontaneous tribute of every man who has met them, talked with them,
and received their hospitality is the same. The Eskimo is generous, and
his word is worth its full face value. What we have done for the Eskimo
is a minus quantity; what he has done for us is to point a splendid
moral of integrity, manliness, and intrepid courage.
Indians beg and boast, the Eskimo does neither. With no formulated
religion or set creed, he has a code of ethics which forbids him to
turn the necessity of another to his own advantage. Amundsen's farewell
to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, "Goodbye, my
dear, dear friends. My best wish for you is that civilisation may never
reach you."
The trite saying is that the Loucheux Indians forced the Eskimo north,
"keeping them with patient faces turned toward the Pole." But the Eskimo
has a better country than the Loucheux has, for it is less rigorous and
it produces more food stuffs. The Loucheux at Fort Macpherson knows what
it is to experience a temperature of 60 below Fahr., while at the coast
it doesn't drop below 55.
The Eskimo has two fields in which to hunt food,--the land and the sea,
with fish the great staple; and both fresh and salt-water fish are his,
that in the mouths of the great rivers being better than what the
Loucheux gets higher up. If the Eskimo wrote copy-book lines, the most
insistent one would be, "Lose your matches, throw away your guns, but
hang on to your fish-net."
Through the years there was bad blood and mutual distrust between Eskimo
and Loucheux. The last pitched battle occurred in the 60's, when of the
contestants only two Loucheux escaped and not one Eskimo was killed. The
Hudson's Bay Company officer at the close of the fight called together
the relatives of the slain Loucheux, upon whom rested the duty of
revenge, and out of The Company's stores paid in trade-goods the
blood-price of the slain. Since then both peoples have traded at Forts
Macpherson and Arctic Red River, maintaining a sort of armed peace, but
with no deeds of violence. The Loucheux Indian, his wives, his babies,
and his slab-sided dogs suffer from starvation almost every winter. In
the whole history of the Eskimo there is not an authenticated story of
one of this people having starved to death. Once more we protest against
misapplied sympathy. However it may have been in the past, the Eskimo
stays on the coast to-day because it is to him "God's country" and not
because any hostile Loucheux sends him there.
For the past twenty years the men on the American ships have employed
the Eskimo to aid them in the whaling industry, picking up different
bands all the way from Bering Sea eastward as they sail in from the
Pacific, and depositing each group at their individual beaches as the
ships take out their rich spoils of baleen and oil at the close of the
season. The Eskimo has proven a valued aid to this industry; how has the
intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the
Eskimo?
Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta
region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of
that number. The causes? White men's diseases: scarlet fever,
consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling
decrease. Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though
consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian,
measles perhaps more than all. Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal
than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.
What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them
making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic,
so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole
horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but
call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates
once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and
molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches. To the credit side
of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the
Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.
The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by
marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the
whaling-ships. Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its
changed culture characteristics. But as a more far-reaching result of
the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the
Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo
mothers, and, for "floating fathers," marking their escutcheon with
every nationality under the sun,--American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian,
Italian, Portuguese, Lascar. This state of things startles one, as all
miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is
different from all others. In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a
Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or
Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one.
There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo
"wives" outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this.
One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken
"outside" by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or
eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior waterways south
to some mission-school, Anglican or Roman. As a rule, the
marriage-contract is "good for this season only," and the wife and
children bid their quondam husband and father farewell, smiling at him
with neither animosity nor reproach as the boats go out.
What is then the ice-widow's condition? Is she an outcast among her
people? No, you must remember that neither the matrimonial standard of
Pall-Mall nor Washington, D.C, obtains here. The trade-ticker of the
erstwhile wife of the whaler ticks skyward in the hymeneal Lloyd's; she
is much sought of her own people. Has she not gained in both kudos and
capital? The knowledge which she must have acquired from the white man
of whalers' ways of trading is supposed to be of monetary use to her
second lord. Moreover, the tent, utensils, and cooking-kit which she
shared with her spouse from the ships makes a substantial dower when she
again essays Hymen's lottery.
Eskimo women are neither petulant nor morose. With the men they share
that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a
child which makes such a rare and winning mixture. In moving among the
half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness
forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall
below the standard of the thorough-bred natives. About the morals, the
ethical, or mental standards, we venture no comparison, for heredity
plays such strange tricks. The whole condition is formative, for the
blending of races has been going on scarcely long enough for one to see
and tabulate results. The influence of the mother will be longer applied
and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in
this is their hope. For years we have been repeating the trite, "The
sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and
fourth generation;" it remained for Charles Dickens to ask, in his own
inimitable way, if the virtues of the mothers do not occasionally
descend in direct line.
We respect the Eskimo for many things: for his physical courage as he
approaches the bear in single combat, for his uncomplaining endurance of
hardships, for his unceasing industry, the cleverness of his handicraft,
his unsullied integrity, sunny good-humour, and simple dignity. But,
most of all, he claims my respect for the way he brings up his children.
"A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure," is a pretty theory,
but Charles Lamb reminds us that each child must stand on his own
footing as an individual, and be liked or disliked accordingly. In the
igloo and the tupik the child has his own accorded place and moves in
and out of the home and about his occupations with that hard-to-describe
air of assuredness that so distinguishes his father and mother.
The Eskimo child accepts himself as the equal of any created thing, but
there is nothing blatant about him, nor is his independence obtrusive.
He is born hardy, and lives hardy, trudging along on the march in his
place beside the grown-ups. Each Eskimo man and woman is an independent
entity, free to go where he pleases. There is no law, no tribunal, no
power to limit or command him, but instinctively he observes the rule of
doing as he would be done by, and he teaches his child the same Golden
Rule. A boy or girl is never considered an encumbrance and is readily
even eagerly adopted if his own parents die. The Eskimo child is ushered
into the earthly arena with no flourish of trumpets, for his coming is
but an incident of the journey if Fate has decreed that he should be
born when the family is on the march. The hour's stop for the mid-day
meal often sees a new little valiant soldier added to the ranks of the
clan and starting his traverse of Arctic trails. If the baby is born
while the family is in camp, mother and babe separate themselves from
the rest of the family for a month, no one being allowed to look at,
much less fuss over, the little stranger.
Naming an Eskimo baby is fraught with significance. If the last grown
man who died in the band was one revered, one whose footsteps are worthy
to be followed, the name of the departed clansman is given to the
newborn child. The belief is that the spirit of the dead man hovers
around the community and immediately upon the birth of the child takes
possession, a re-incarnation in the baby-body. Withdrawing itself in
twelve months' time, the spirit of the ghostly god-father lingers by to
influence the character and destiny of the growing child.
We trace a well-known nursery rhyme to the igloo of the Eskimo. The
summer-born baby dispenses with clothing for the first six months of its
earthly pilgrimage, cuddling its little bare body close to its mother's
back under her _artikki_, or upper garment, which has been made
voluminous to accommodate him. But the husky babe who comes when King
Wenceslaus looks out on the Feast of Stephen has his limbs popped into a
bag of feathers before his mother takes him pick-a-back, or else he is
wrapped in a robe of rabbit-skin. So we see that it was an Eskimo mother
who first crooned in love and literalness,
"By-o, Baby Bunting,
Daddy's gone a-hunting,
To get a little rabbit-skin,
To wrap his Baby Bunting in."
Mother-love is a platform upon which even ancestral enemies can meet.
While I sat cross-legged (and, like cotton, absorbent) last summer
enjoying the hospitality of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, to us entered a
beautiful-faced Loucheux Indian mother with a pair of twins
pendant,--rollicking chaps. The younger Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak dropped on the
floor her lord's boot which she had been dutifully biting into shape and
jumped up to greet her visitor. There was no mistaking that smile of
hospitality. Snatching from the visitor one of her baby boys, the young
hostess kissed and cried out to it with an abandon of maternal joy, the
culminating point of which was feeding it from her own breast. Thus, in
one instance at least, has the ancient feud of Loucheux and Eskimo died.
A baby Eskimo is nursed until it is two years old or older, and learns
to smoke and to walk about the same time. The family pipe is laid upon
the couch, and papa, mamma, and the children take a solacing whiff as
the spirit moves them. These pipes are identical with those used by the
Chinese, and hold but half a thimbleful of tobacco, the smoke being
inhaled and swallowed with dreamy joy.
The hardihood of Eskimo children is scarcely believable. It is not
unusual for children of six years to trudge uncomplainingly for
twenty-five miles by the side of their elders; and we came to know a
little seven-year old chap who was quite a duck-hunter, and who went out
every day alone and seldom came back without at least two brace. At
eleven years, with his watertight boots, spear in hand, and coil of line
on his back, he takes up the Innuit man's burden, and does it with an
air both determined and debonair. If you ask a mother if she does not
think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with
the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam,
and says, "The First Innuits [Eskimo] did so."
These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their
play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North,
as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their
vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no
molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a
walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was
neither Rugby nor "Soccer," but there seemed to be a good deal of
tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball,
down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft
parts of his anatomy. "You're angry, now," said a Major of the Royal
Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. "No, sir," said the under
dog, with difficulty protruding his head, "I never get mad when I play."
The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders.
It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated
difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on
each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his
adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound
by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to
him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy.
All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a
row of "heathen" Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind,
for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted
discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the
ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball
diamonds, and "sport" carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line
of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and
out among the camps of the Eskimo,--"Self-reverence, self-knowledge,
self-control."
[Illustration: Farthest North Football]
What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude
imitations of their elders. And they play "house," and "ladies," and
"visiting," just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas;
but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up
in her mother's long dresses.
[Illustration: Two Spectators at the Game]
When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in
spring after the long six months' night, it is the pleased prerogative
of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time
that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat's-cradle
are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the
meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and
south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the
anxiously-waiting Eskimo. The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game,
help, too, to hasten its return. When the sun forgets you for six
months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever.
The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any
suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are
finished and the new hunts not yet begun. "I'll eat my hat" is an empty
threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing
pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.
At the Mackenzie delta last year, Roxi the Eskimo came in and told me
this sad story. Six weeks before, a party of Eskimo had left Baillie
Island with dogs for Kopuk. On their way they found a dead whale and
cooked and ate of it; the next day they found another and again
indulged. After travelling twenty-five miles, the whole party was taken
violently ill, and six adults and two children died, leaving only one
little girl alive. There for three days and four nights she remained,
alone in the camp of the dead, until by the merest chance a young
Eskimo, attending his line of traps from Toker Point, stumbled into the
silent camp.
One can faintly glimpse at, but must utterly fail to grasp, what that
little girlie suffered mentally. We picture her sleeping, sobbing,
waiting in that snow-hut in the silences, surrounded by the still bodies
of every one she loved on earth. The sequel of the story is as sad as
its first chapter. The band of Eskimo to which the rescuer belonged went
in their turn and ate of this stranded whale, with the result that
A-von-tul and Ita-chi-uk, two youths of twenty or twenty-one, died, too,
and with them a little four-year-old girl. The drift whale must have
been poisoned either by ptomaine or by the remnants of the highly
compressed tonite, the explosive used by the whale-hunters.
[Illustration: An Eskimo Exhibit
A--Eskimo woman's head-dress of reindeer skin.
B--Skin of the baby seal, its shimmering whiteness used by the
missionaries to typify the Lamb of God, the word "Lamb" having no
meaning to an Eskimo.
C--Ornamental skin mat, the work of an Eskimo woman.
D--Quiver of arrows used by Eskimo boys.
E--Model of Eskimo paddle.
F--Skin model of the _Oomiak_ or Eskimo woman's boat.
G and H--Eskimo pipes of true Oriental type, the bowl holding only half
a thimbleful of tobacco.]
As we visit in friendly wise the Eskimo and their children, a feeling of
loving admiration and appreciation tightens round our hearts. We had
never heard a harsh word bestowed upon a child, no impatient or angry
admonition. If a boy gives way to bursts of temper, and this is rare, he
is gently taken to task, reproved, and reasoned with _after_ the fit of
passion is over. Certainly, without churches or teachers or schools,
with no educational journals, and no Conventions of Teachers, with their
wise papers on the training of "the child," the Eskimo children we saw
were better behaved, more independent, gentler, and in the literal sense
of the word, more truly "educated" than many of our children are.
Instinctively you feel that here are boys and girls being trained
admirably for the duties of life, a life that must be lived out in stern
conditions.
Perchance, floating down on the Aurora, has come to the Eskimo a glint
of the truth that has passed us by, the truth that God's own plan is the
family plan, that there are life lessons to learn which, by the very
nature of things, the parents alone can impart. Teaching children in the
mass has its advantages, but it is the family after all and not the
fifty children in a school grade which forms the unit of national
greatness.