"They be like to Tartars, with long blacke haire, broad faces,
and flatte noses, and tawnie in colour, wearing Seale skinnes …The
women are marked in the faces with blewe streakes downe the
cheekes, and round about the eies".
- An officer on Frobisher's 1576 search for the Northwest
Passage
Distinct from all other Canadian aboriginal peoples by virtue of
their culture, language and Asiatic physical features, the
Inuit are the dominant people of a territory that
extends all the way from northern Alaska to Greenland. Nowadays
increasingly confined to reserves, they once led a nomadic
existence in one of the most hostile environments on earth,
dwelling in domed igloos during the winter and skin
tents in the summer, and moving around using kayaks (
umiaks ) or dog sleds ( komatik ). The latter
were examples of typical Inuit adaptability - the runners were
sometimes made from frozen fish wrapped in sealskin and, in the
absence of wood, caribou bones were used for crossbars.
Their prey - caribou, musk ox, seals, walruses, narwhals, beluga
whales, polar bears, birds and fish - provided oil for heating and
cooking, hides for clothing and tents, harpoon lines, ivory and dog
harnesses. Using harpoons, bows and arrows and spears, ingenious
hunting methods were devised: to catch caribou, for example, huge
inuksuits , piles of rocks resembling the human form, were
used to steer the herd into a line of armed hunters.
The Inuit diet was composed totally of flesh, and every
part of the animal was eaten, usually raw, from eyeballs to the
heart. Delicacies included the plaited and dried intestines of
seals and whole sealskins stuffed with small birds and left to
putrefy until the contents had turned to the consistency of cheese.
All food was shared and the successful hunter had to watch
his catch being distributed amongst other families in the group, in
accordance with specific relationships, before his own kin were
allowed the smallest portion. Starvation was common - it was
not unusual for whole villages to perish in the winter - and
consequently infanticide , particularly of females, was
employed to keep population sizes down. Elderly people who could
not keep up with the travelling group were abandoned, a fate that
also befell some offenders against the social code, though
the usual way of resolving conflict was the song-duel ,
whereby the aggrieved would publicly ridicule the behavior of the
other, who was expected to accept the insults with good grace.
Making clothes , most often of caribou hide, was a task
assigned to women and was as essential to survival as a
man's ability to hunt. Older women also tattooed the faces
of the younger ones by threading a sinew darkened with soot through
the face to make lines that radiated from the nose and mouth. Women
were usually betrothed at birth and married at puberty, and both
polygamy and polyandry were frequent - though female infanticide
made it rare for a man to have more than two spouses.
Communion with supernatural spirits was maintained by a
shaman or angakok , who was often a woman, and the
deity who features most regularly in Inuit myth is a goddess called
Sedna , who was mutilated by her father. Her severed fingers
became seals and walruses and her hands became whales, while Sedna
lived on as the mother and protector of all sea life, capable of
withholding her bounty if strict taboos were not adhered to.
These taboos included keeping land and sea products totally
separate - and so seals could never be eaten with caribou and all
caribou clothing had to be made before the winter seal hunt.
Although sporadic European contact dates back to the
Norse settlement of Greenland and some Inuit were visited by early
missionaries, it wasn't until the early nineteenth century that the
two cultures met in earnest. By 1860 commercial whalers had
begun wintering around the north of Hudson Bay, employing Inuit as
crew members and hunters for their food in return for European
goods. Even then, the impact on the Inuit was not really
deleterious until the arrival of American whalers in
Canadian waters in 1890, when the liberal dispensing of alcohol and
diseases such as smallpox and VD led to a drastic decline in
population .
By the early decades of the twentieth century fur traders
were encouraging the Inuit to stop hunting off the coast and turn
inland using firearms and traps. The accompanying
missionaries brought welcome medical help and schools, but
put an end to multiple marriages, shamanism and other traditional
practices. More changes came when Inuits were employed to build
roads, airfields and other military facilities during World War II
and to construct the line of radar installations known as Distant
Early Warning during the Cold War era. As well as bringing new
jobs , this also focused government attention on the
plight of the Inuit.
The consequent largesse was not wholly beneficial: subsidized
housing and welfare payments led many Inuit to abandon their
hunting camps and settle in permanent communities , usually
located in places strategic to Canada's sovereignty in the Arctic.
Without knowledge of the English and French languages, these Inuit
were left out of all decision-making and often lived in a totally
separate part of towns that were administered by outsiders. Old
values and beliefs were all but eroded by television and radio, and
high levels of depression, alcoholism and violence became the norm.
The 1982 ban on European imports of sealskins created mass
unemployment , and although hunting still provides the
basics of subsistence, the high cost of ammunition and fuel makes
commercial-scale hunting uneconomical.
All is not gloom, however. Inuit co-operatives are increasingly
successful and the production of soapstone carvings -
admittedly a commercial adulteration of traditional Inuit ivory art
- is very profitable. Having organized themselves into politically
active groups and secured such land claims as Nunavut, the
Inuit are slowly rebuilding an ancient culture that was shattered
in under half a century.