Eskimo

"Before Europeans came, Bishop Reeve thought, his Athapaskans must have been among the healthiest peoples in the world. But many of them died young nevertheless. At childbirth the mortality was high, especially for babies but also for mothers. Accidents were many in childhood and youth, indeed throughout life. Though famines came seldom, the wiping out of small groups by starvation was frequent. Murders occurred, but not as often as among whites. Women who survived the childbirth period, and their male contemporaries, would more likely die from old age than from disease.

The problem of whether old age descended upon Indians sooner or later than upon whites, the bishop thought, could be discussed only with regard to probabilities, since undisputed facts were hard to come by. He had read in the books of some explorers, and in some Hudson's Bay Company reports from early traders, that old age was supposed to afflict the native prematurely. But himself he was unable to see how those writers could have found this out, even if their interpreters were of the best. For the very idea of counting years, to keep track of a person's age, was foreign to native thinking and had been brought into the Athapaska country by these same Europeans. The only fact that a Mackenzie River Indian could know about anybody's age, and the only thing he could have told anybody, was which of his neighbors were older than others.

By the time he discoursed with us in 1906, Bishop Reeve had been pondering matters of northern Canadian native health and longevity for thirty-seven years, starting in 1869. During the scores of hours in which the bishop shared his knowledge and thinking with us, I gradually came to understand how he classified the diseases and derangements which he believed were derived from Europe and which he chiefly blamed for changing the Athapaskans from healthy to sickly, and for reducing the population of the northern third of our continent from several millions to fewer than one hundred thousand. His grouping of these presumed imports seemed to be:

1. Cataclysmic germ afflictions that swept away the robust and the weak indiscriminately.

2. Insidious germ infections to which the strong were resistant.

3. Sicknesses which probably were not due to a germ freshly introduced by Europeans but which likely were caused by a deleterious way of life introduced from Europe.

Diseases of Europeanization. These included a dozen maladies such as cancer, rickets, scurvy, and tooth decay. Their recent appearance among the Athapaskans was charged by the bishop to the introduction of such foods as bread and sugar, and to such new food-handling methods as the preservation of meats with salt and the overcooking of fresh foods."

Bishop Reeve seemed a little doubtful about the heroic Marsh technique when it was used against a germ disease like tuberculosis. But against another group of ills he felt sure the native life was a panacea, preventing those derangements which he believed to be caused by eating the wrong foods or by not eating the right ones. This baker’s dozen or so of diseases he thought nutritional. I consider his full list farther on, along with some additions contributed by Alaskan and Canadian medical missionaries. I shall now select three from this lot, because in 1906 everybody along the Mackenzie River system was talking about them, as part of what they had to say about the Klondike Gold Rush.

Stefansson 1960

From Artic Passage Book - Page 135 Physical Hardcover:

Captain Frederick A. Barker of the Japan was one of the few whaling men to cry out against the wholesale destruction of the walrus herds of the Bering Sea. In a letter to the Whalemen's Shipping List and Merchants Transcript he warned New England whaling men that the practice "will surely end in the extermination of this race of natives who rely upon these animals alone for their winter's supply of food." 28 If the butchering of the walrus did not cease, the fate of the Eskimo was inevitable: "Already this cruel persecution has been felt along the entire coast, while a wail like that of the Egyptians goes through the length and breadth of the land. There is a famine and relief comes not." 29 Eskimos had often asked Barker why the white men took away their food and left them to starve, and he had no answer to give them. They told him of their joy when the whalemen first began to come among them, and of their growing despair as the hunters began to decimate the walrus. "I have conversed with many intelligent shipmasters upon this subject," wrote Barker, "since I have seen it in its true light and all have expressed their honest conviction that it was wrong, cruel and heartless and the sure death of this inoffensive race." 30 Captains had told Barker that they would be glad to abandon walrus hunting if the ship owners would approve it, "but until the subject was introduced to public notice, they were powerless to act." 31 It would be hard to give up an enterprise that provided 10,000 barrels of oil each season. My advocacy "may seem preposterous and meet with derision and contempt, but let those who deride it see the misery entailed throughout the country by this unjust wrong." 32 

Captain Barker was not the only shipmaster to appeal for an end to the walrus slaughter, but he knew better than to most what was happening to northern natives. Barker had taken his Japan into the Arctic Ocean in 1870 and had made a good catch. Whales were plentiful and the weather was good, so Barker was reluctant to return south through the Bering Strait. As the days grew colder and the shore ice thickened, Barker was forced to give up the chase and work the Japan toward the strait. Unfortunately, he encountered heavy fog which slowed his progress, then a storm which buffeted the Japan for four days. On October 9, 1870, the Japan was off East Cape, Siberia, and in serious trouble. "The gale blew harder, attended by such blinding snow that we could not see half a ship's length." 33 Although Barker had taken in most of his sails, the Japan was racing at breakneck speed before the gale. "Just then, to add to our horror, a huge wave swept over the ship, taking off all our boats and sweeping the decks clean." 34 

The situation was critical. Barker steered for the beach and hoped for the best. An enormous wave hit the Japan and drove it upon the rocky shore. Miraculously, all the men got ashore safely, but their travails were just beginning. The weather was bitterly cold, and clothing and provisions had to be recovered from the disabled ship. Barker and his men struggled through the surf to the ship and back to the shore again and suffered fearful consequences. All were severely frostbitten, and eight of the thirty-man crew died in the effort. Natives came to the mariners' assistance. Barker was dragged out of the breakers, breathless and nearly frozen, loaded onto a sled, and taken to village. "I thought my teeth would freeze off." 35 Barker scrambled out of the sled and tried to run, hoping the exertion would warm him. Instead he fell down as one paralyzed. The natives picked him up and put him on the sled once more. 

In the village the survivors received tender care. "The chief's wife, in whose hut I was," wrote Barker, "pulled off my boots and stockings and placed my frozen feet against her naked borom to restore warmth and animation," 36. With such care the seamen who had not died on the beach recovered. But for the natives "every soul would have perished on the beach... as there was no means at hand of kindling a fire or of helping ourselves one way or the other." 37 

Barker and his men wintered with the Eskimos, They had no choice in the matter as the entire whaling fleet had returned south before the Japan started for Bering Strait, It was during these months that Barker leaned someching of the Eskimos' way of life and became their advocate. Except for a few casks of bread and flour that had washed ashore, the seamen were entirely dependent upon their hosts. The men ate raw walrus meat and blubber that was generally on the ripe side. The whalemen did not relish their diet, but it sustained them. Prejudices against a novel food inhibited Barker for a time. He fasted for three days. "Hunger at last compelled me and, strange as it may appear, it tasted good to me and before I had been there many weeks, I could eat as much raw meat as anyone, the natives excepted." 38 Barker soon understood that the natives were short of food. "I felt like a guilty culprit while eating their food with them, that I have been taking the bread out of their mouths."39 Barker knew and the Eskimos knew that the whalemen's hunting of walrus had reduced the natives to the point of famine, "still they were ready to share all they had with us." 40 Barker resolved to call for a prohibition of walrus hunting when he returned to New Bedford and further resolved that he would never kill another walrus "for those poor people along the coast have nothing else to live upon." 41 

In the summer of 1871 Barker and his men were rescued when the whaling fleet returned. Some recompense was made to the Eskimos for their charity; they were given provisions and equipment from the ships. The natives plight was observed by other captains too. One wrote a letter to the New Bedford Republican Standard to describe the "cruel occupation" of walrus killing. Most of those killed were females which were lanced as they held their nursing offspring in their flippers "uttering the most heartrending and piteous cries."' 42 Many whalemen felt guilty about this butchery, and they had to have very strong stomachs to carry out the bloody job under such circumstances. "But the worst feature of the business is that the natives of the entire Arctic shores, from Cape Thaddeus and the Anadyr Sea to the farthest point north, a shoreline of more than one thousand miles on the west coast, with the large island of St. Lawrence, the smaller ones of Diomede and King's Island, all thickly inhabited are now almost entirely dependent on the walrus for their food, clothings, boots and dwellings." 43 Earlier there were plenty of whales for them, but the whales had been destroyed and driven north. "This is a sad state of things for them." 

Other captains reported that they had seen natives thiry to forty miles from land on the ice, trying desperately to catch a walrus or find a carcass that had been abandoned by the whalemen. "What must the poor creatures do this cold winter, with no whale or walrus?" 45 Such appeals might have been effective eventually, though whether they would have led to a prohibition of walrus killing in time to spare the northern natives from famine is unlikely. But events took an unexpected turn in 1871: The ships which passed through the Bering Strait that season did so for the last time. The entire fleet was caught in the ice near Point Barrow, as the men including the Japan survivors-hunted walrus and whale. Thanks to the Revenue Marine, the seamen were saved, but the ships were lost. This disaster, coming six years after the Shenandoah's destructive cruise, dealt the whaling industry a blow from which it never recovered. But it may have saved the walrus and the northern natives from extinction. It was clear enough to the Bering Sea natives that they had benefited by the loss of the fleet. As an Eskimo or Chukchi of Plover Bay put it to a whaling captain when word of the loss reached Siberia: "Bad. Very bad for you. Good for us. More walrus now." 46

The search of Terror Bay was an extremely difficult one owing to the many long finger-like points that constituted its interig outlines. While only about ten to twelve miles between its bounding capes its contour furnished me with nearly ninety miles of very bad walking, which took seven days to complete. The game (luckily for us) was very plentiful in the neighborhood. On one day alone I saw no less than thirty-four reindeer grazing among the different valleys through which I passed. Colonel Gilder killed five. Without leaving the route of my other duties I killed three. Some had an abundance of substantial food and, better than all, its condition was rapidly improving from the lean stringy quality which characterized our spring supply of venison. 

The Arctic reindeer is an awkward clumsy animal, and when trotting along, unless closely pursued, it goes stumbling over the grough ground in a manner that often leads the amateur hunter, (who perchance has risked a long shot at him) into the belief that his fire has been effective. But the reindeer was the most reliable game in which dependence for regular continuous subsistence can be placed. Without the reindeer my expedition of from nineteen to twenty-two souls and forty to fifty dogs could not have accomplished the journey it did, having only about a month's ration when it started at Camp Daly. I have never enountered a larger band than some three  or four hundred which I saw on the Seroy Lakes, near North Hudson Bay in the autumn of 1878. During the subsequent autumn on King William Land, I saw no less than a thousand in a single day. 

When first thrown wholly upon a diet of reindeer meat, it seems inadequate to properly nourish the system and there is an apparent weakness and inability to perform severe exertive, fatiguing journeys. But this soon passes away in the course of two or three weeks. At first the white man takes to the new diet in too homeopathic a manner, especially if it be raw. However, seal meat which is far more disagreeable with its fishy odor, and bear meat with its strong flavor, seems to have no such a temporary debilitating effect upon the economy. The reindeer are scattered during the spring and summer which is the breeding season, but as the cold weather approaches they herd together in vast bodies. 

Toolooah, my most excellent Innuit hunter, never failed to secure one during every hunt. I knew him to kill seven out of a band of eight reindeer with the eight shots in the magazine of his Winchester before they could get out of range. On ten different occasions he killed two deer at one shot and once three fell at a single discharge. The number of times he dispatched one and wounded others, or wounded two or even three at a single shot, which he afterwards secured, seemed countless.

That he supported an average of nine souls (not counting double that number of dogs dependent upon him for about ten months), coupled with a score of 232 reindeer during that period, besides a number of seal, musk-ox and polar bear, demonstrates his great abilityas a hunter in these inhospitable climes.

On our journey a thorough search was made of that portion of the coast that Frank and Henry had not previously looked over,  but nothing rewarded either our or their labors except an oar found

near the head of Washington Bay. Our trip was also our first continued experience with a raw meat diet and, whenever the weather was sufficiently cold to freeze it into a hard mass, we

found it not altogether unacceptable. Raw versus cooked meat brings up the interesting subject of the different methods of eating by the Innuits, and we no longer considered ourselves aliens in this

foreign land.

Our canvas tent becoming very uncomfortable, on account of the intense cold, we had a large ice igloo constructed into which we moved on the first of November, and found it decidedly more habitable. The last cold snap commenced to bring in the scattered native hunters to erect their winter quarters and Camp Daly, a la glace began to assume a very lively aspect. A summation of the autumn's hunting showed that between two and three hundred deer had been killed, so we felt relieved of all anxiety in regard to a winter's supply of the very best of all Arctic meat. A plentiful supply of reindeer skins was assured for winter clothing and bedding, and of the very best too, for the skins secured in October are superior to those taken later in the year, the hair being less liable to come out, and not so heavy as to render the clothing impliable. After January the reindeer skins are worthless and are thrown away by the native hunter until about the middle of August, when all of the winter's hair has shed and the short summer coat is then in its prime. From it is made all the native underclothing, or that which is worn with the hair towards the body. For about the middle of September until the first of October the skins are valuable for outside clothing, worn hair-side out, and for bedding and from this later they steadily deteriorate,

By February 1, 1879, the few Inuits at Camp Daly had moved over to Depot island, it being more available for walrus hunting in the ice-flow, which season was then just commencing. For the first time among these savage sons of old Boreas I was brought in contact with one of their superstitions that caused me no little annoyance. When the reindeer hunting season is over the walrus and seal come into the Esquimaux market, completely excluding the reindeer, which from that date becomes forbidden fruit. The Inuit who has relinquished reindeer meat tears down his old igloo and builds a new one, as he must not hunt or eat walrus or seal or work on sealskin clothing in an igloo where the now discarded deer has been eaten or clothing made from his hide. 

Now I found it impossible to procure any reindeer meat for self or for dog-feed while I lived in my present igloo. If I would only build another, which they beseeched me to do, even on the site of the present one, they would bring me plenty. Natives came over daily but brought no meat and we finally had to take the dogs over to Depot Island, where the natives allowed them to be fed. 

This superstition is founded on the belief that there exists two Gods antagonistic to each other, one ruling the seas and all in them, and the other the land with all its beasts and birds, and they must appease their respective divine jealousies by holding true allegiance to only one at a time.