Religion

From Slave Lake north to the Arctic Ocean there are no interrup tions to navigation and our travel proceeded smoothly and without adventure. Here and there we passed Indian lodges on the shore and Indian cabins, and on an average every two hundred miles a Hudson's Bay post, where a mission is also located. 

The two churches that have workers in the field are the Roman Catholic and the Church of England, both of them doing considerable useful work. The Church of Rome has a much stronger hold upon the people, partly, no doubt, because of its earlier introduction into the country, and because also of its greater resources it is doing more work. After many years of observation of the labors of missionaries I am inclined to the view that with the other churches the excellence of the results depends primarily upon the individual at any particular place, but that the Church of Rome has a system which produces results to some degree independent of the personality of the man. One weakness of other missionaries in general is that they come from cities and other places with crystallized notions of exactly what must be done and exactly how every one must live and act under no matter what conditions. The fundamental precepts of Christianity apparently seem to many of them to be linked with certain purely local customs of the city from which they happen to come, and they emphasize both equally. The three commandments, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy,” and “Thou shalt eat thy potatoes with thy fork,” impress themselves with equal vividness upon the aborigines and are likely to be considered by them to be means of grace of coordinate value. But the missionaries of the Church of Rome seem less concerned about these inessentials. They are no less concerned than the missionaries of other churches about getting the Indian to change his religious views, but they seem less inclined to waste their strength in trying to persuade him to change the color of his coat. The net result of this difference is shown to be entirely in favor of the Roman Church. These natives have, through the evolution of centuries, been ground into such perfect adjustment to their environment that the more you disturb this adjustment the more disastrous the result will be to the physical welfare of the native. 

Both the English Church and the Roman have schools in the Mackenzie district the English at Hay River and the Roman at Fort Providence. At both places are men and women doing conscientious and self-sacrificing work, and at both places numbers of Indians are learning to read and write, but nevertheless it seems to most observers that the labor and expenditure of money are scarcely justified by the results. You have everywhere the Indians of the old type, who are ignorant of book learning but who still retain some of the integrity and self-respect of their ancestors. These men on the whole seem to be more self-confident and self-reliant than the educated ones, and are more likely to be making not only a living but also an honest living. Somehow it seems that one of the first things an Indian learns in school is contempt for the ways of his ancestors; but after all, the ways of his ancestors are the only ways that can prevail in that country. Hunting and fishing are the necessary occupations of every man, and the sewing of clothes and the preparation of food are equally the inevitable work of the women. When a man who has no occupation other than that of hunter open to him gets to feel that he is above that occupation, the community has lost much and no one has gained anything.

But though we were all in a hurry to get to Herschel Island, we had to remain at Shingle Point several days on account of strong head winds. Then one day when I awoke in the morning I could see by the way in which the wind bulged in the east side of my tent that the hoped - for fair wind had come at last. I lost no time in awakening my companions, but before we had breakfast prepared, a number of the other Eskimo came to see us and asked whether we intended starting for Herschel Island that day. My answer was that of course we did, at which they seemed very well pleased and returned to their respective camps, struck their tents and got everything ready for the start. When breakfast was over I said to my Eskimo that we would start now, but they replied that they could not be the first to start, but would be glad to start if some other boat led off. They explained to me then that they were no longer heathen, as they had been two years ago when I was among them ; that they now knew God's commandments and were aware of the penalties which awaited the Sabbath-breaker. I asked them what difference it would make who started first. The reply was that God punished those who took the lead in evil-doing, and if some one else was willing to take the lead and risk the punishment, they were perfectly willing to take advantage of the fair wind and sail along behind. Dr. Anderson and I at once suggested that we could sail the first boat, and our Eskimo could come in the second ; but they said that a subterfuge of that sort would avail nothing, that they were members of my party, and the punishment would fall on the party as a whole. They suggested , however, that I go around to the tents of the other Eskimo and see if I could not induce some of them to start out so that we could follow. I accepted this suggestion , but in tent after tent I got everywhere the same answer : “We are no longer heathen; we know the punishment that awaits the Sabbath-breaker. We were hoping that you would sail first, but as for us, none of us are willing to take the responsibility.” And so we sat there all day through a fair wind, all of us eagerly willing to go, but all of us unwilling to lead off in any “evil-doing.” Finally, towards sundown, a whale boat was seen coming from the east . It turned out to be the boat of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, under command of Sergeant Selig . We signaled to them. I told Sergeant Selig our predicament, and found, as I expected , that he was willing to help us out by stopping to eat a meal with us, and thus becoming one of our party, and then leading off in such a way that it became evident he took all responsibility upon himself and his boat. As soon as this fact was made known, there was great rejoicing in camp. Every tent was quickly struck, and all the boats loaded, and when Sergeant Selig set sail we all followed him. But it was now near evening, and the wind fell with the sun. We had sat through a fair wind that could easily have taken us to Herschel Island, and now instead we had to row a large part of the way and finally, toward morning, to tack against head winds. Monday morning we passed King Point, where Amundsen wintered 1905–1906, and photographed the ruins of his house which the sea has since completely swept away, and the grass grown grave of 'Wiik, the magnetician whose painstaking work brought so much credit to Amundsen's expedition. We reached Herschel Island at noon on Wednesday, to find, however, that the whaling ships had not yet arrived . 

This was our first conflict with Christianity, and we had come off second best, as many others have done who have set themselves against the teachings of religion. The Eskimo had of course, when I was with them two years before, a religion, but it had not been Christianity. One frequently hears the remark that no people in the world have yet been found who are so low that they do not have a religion. This is absolutely true, but the inference one is likely to draw is misleading. It is not only true that no people are so low that they do not have a religion, but it is equally true that the lower you go in the scale of human culture the more religion you find, and that races on the intellectual level of the Eskimo have so much religion that a man scarcely turns his hand over without the act having a religious significance. Every event in life, every possible circumstance, has its appropriate religious formula . When I was with the Eskimo in 1907, they had not yet been Christianized, although Mr. Whittaker and other missionaries of the Church of England had been working among them for the better part of fifteen years. It was then said by Eskimo and whites alike that there were perhaps half a dozen Alaskan Eskimo living in the Mackenzie district who had been converted, besides one Mackenzie Eskimo who was married to an Alaskan Christian woman. That was the condition when I left the Mackenzie in September, 1907. When we returned in July, 1908, we found every man, woman, and child converted. 

This seems a rather sudden thing, especially as the missionaries had had so little influence for the many years preceding. But it appears that the spread of Christianity among the Eskimo was as the spread of a habit or a fashion, much indeed as it was in certain of the northern European countries, the history of which is well known to us. In a general way it seems true that Christianity first got its foothold in Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, due largely, I have been told, to the work of the Moravian Mission. From there the fashion seems to have spread both northward along the coast to Point Hope and northeastward up the Kuvuk and Noatak rivers, thence across the Arctic Mountains and down the Colville to the coast. Christianity, then, came to the Eskimo of Point Barrow from two sides; they heard of it from the Point Hope Eskimo to the west and from the Colville Eskimo to the east, and they, although mis sionaries had been laboring among them for many years, seem to have been suddenly converted. Apparently they felt this way about it: if it is good enough for the Point Hope people and the Colville people, it ought to be good enough for us. And when in the winter of 1907–1908, the Mackenzie River Eskimo heard that all of the people to the westward had accepted the faith, they seem to have felt that it was about time for them to do so too, and they were converted in a body.

Our first experience with the Sunday taboo was at Shingle Point, about fifty miles east of Herschel Island, in July, 1908. Dr. Anderson and I, with our Eskimo and two whale-boats, had arrived there at the boat harbor one evening. Each Eskimo family had its own whale-boat, and we were all bound for Herschel Island and anxious to reach it, because we feared that any day the whaling fleet might arrive from the west, put into the Herschel Island harbor for a day, according to their custom, and pass on to the east, and all of us were anxious to be there to meet the ships. 

The morning after we reached Shingle Point and for several days after that it blew a steady head-wind, and we were unable to proceed. We were getting more impatient each day and more worried, for the wind that was foul to us was fair to the whaling-ships, and would bring them in and take them past without our seeing them, we feared. When our impatience to be moving had grown to a high pitch, we awoke on a Sunday morning early, to find a change of wind. It blew off the land, and the weather was therefore propitious for travel. Some of our Eskimo neighbors paid us an early morning visit, and inquired whether we were going to start for Herschel Island that day. My answer was that of course we were, at which they were evidently well pleased; and when we had eaten breakfast a good many of them had struck their tents and were loading the camp gear into the boats. After our breakfast was over I said to our Eskimo that now we would start, but they replied that they could not do so unless someone started off first, in which case we could follow. Considerably astonished, I asked them why that should be so. They replied it was Sunday, and a person who led off in Sabbath-breaking would receive punishment. Accordingly, they said, if any one was found who was willing to start, they were willing to follow; but they would not lead off, for then the sin would be on their heads, and they or their relatives would be punished. 

As many of the Eskimo boats were already loaded, I at first thought it would be a question of but a few moments until someone would start, for these people had all been heathen when I had lived with them the previous autumn, and I could not at once grasp the fact of the new sacredness of the Sabbath, which had been a neglected institution half a year before. But it turned out that of all our impatient party no one dared to start. II went went around around among them from boat to boat, inquiring whether they were not going to launch out. The answer of each boat crew was that they would not start out first, but they would follow me if I started. 

After talking over with Dr. Anderson the necessity of doing something, I suggested to our own Eskimo servants that Dr. Anderson and I alone would sail one of our whale-boats and lead off, and they could follow in their boat; to which they replied that a subterfuge of that sort would avail nothing, for they belonged to my party now, and would (so long as they were of my party) have to suffer the penalty of any wrongdoing of mine. If I insisted upon sailing that day, they would have to sever their connection with us in order to escape the penalty of our desecration of the Sabbath. So we accordingly had the choice of losing the services of our Eskimo, which for the future were indispensable to us, or of letting the fair wind blow itself out unused, which we did. 

I spoke to Ilavinirk about the fact that he and I, less than a year before, had traveled together on Sunday, to which he replied that at that time he was not a Christian, and although he had heard of heaven and hell, he had not then realized the situation or the importance of good conduct; but that now he realized both fully, as did all his countrymen, and not only did he not care to brave the Divine punishment, but also he was unwilling to become an object of the disapprobation of his countrymen. (I believe that in fact the latter reason was with Ilavinirk quite as strong as the former, for on other occasions when none of his countrymen were around he often followed my lead in breaking the Sabbath.) 

The good wind blew all day, and there we stayed, all of us eager to reach Herschel Island, and each of us unwilling to be the first to break the divine law. Toward sundown the situation was changed by the arrival from the east of a whale-boat manned by Royal North west Mounted Police, a party of whom were on their way from Fort McPherson to Herschel Island. We signaled them to come ashore, and they had tea with us. Afterward, when they set sail, all of us followed them, for by landing and taking tea with us they had joined themselves to our party, and it was therefore they and not we who broke the Sabbath when they started off, with our boats close behind. By the time we finally got off the fair wind had nearly spent itself, and most of us had a good deal of trouble in getting to Herschel Island by beating and rowing, which is a detail.

The ethnologist has this advantage over other scientists who go to the polar regions, that he has a good field for investigations wherever he is not alone. The navigator is hampered by the winds and seasons; the secrets that the geologist tries to decipher are covered up in winter by a blanket of snow; but the ethnologist can learn something about human nature wherever he has companions, and strange and unpleasant situations are likely to bring out peculiar and interesting phases of character. For our Eskimo our present situation was not essentially peculiar, however; they are used to being overtaken by winter in places that do not suit them, and they simply put up with it as a matter of course. Their life goes on in the ordinary way, in the search for and the preparation of food, in the making of clothing, and in the exercise of their religious observances. My notebook for this period is therefore not barren. I recorded folk-lore stories which my Eskimo told each other in the evenings when the day's hunting for marmot was over. I noted that Nogasak's milk teeth were pulled out by her mother with a piece of sinew and that they were not thrown away but were put carefully inside of pieces of meat and fed to dogs. It is a matter of wise forethought to do this, for were some evilly disposed man to get hold of one of your teeth, he could practice magic on you by practicing it on the tooth. This is the sympathetic magic known to many primi tive peoples. You freeze a man's tooth, or a paring of his finger nails, or a lock of his hair, and you give him chills ; you put these, or any other parts from his body, near a fire, and he suffers with a fever; you let them drop, and he is likely to have a fall in the mountains and to break some of his bones if not to kill him self. Some Eskimo therefore will burn a tooth, put it into a marmot hole, or throw it into the sea; but the Mackenzie River Eskimo believe the safest way is to feed the tooth to a dog. 

I learned also why it is that animals allow themselves to be killed by men . The animals are much wiser than men, and know every thing in the world , -including the thoughts of men; but there are certain things which the animals need, and which they can get only from men . The seals and whales live in the salt water, and are there fore continually thirsty . They have no means of getting fresh water, except to come to men for it . A seal will therefore allow himself to be killed by the hunter who will give him a drink of water in return ; that is why a dipperful of water is always poured into the mouth of a seal when he is brought ashore. If a hunter neglects to do this, all the other seals know about it, and no other seal will ever allow himself to be killed by that hunter, because he knows he is not going to get a drink . Every man who gives a seal a drink of water, and keeps this implied promise, is known by the other seals as a depend able person, and they will prefer to be killed by him. There are other things which a seal would like to have done for it when it is dead, and some men are so careful to do everything that seals want that the seals tumble over themselves in their eagerness to be killed by that particular man. The polar bear does not suffer from thirst as much as the seal, for he can eat the fresh snow on top of the ice. But polar bears are unable to make for themselves certain tools which they need. What the male bears especially value are crooked knives and bow-drills, and the female bears are especially eager to get women's knives, skin scrapers, and needle cases ; consequently when a polar bear has been killed his soul (tatkok) accompanies the skin into the man's house and stays with the skin for several days (among most tribes, for four days if it is a male bear, and for five days if it is a female) . The skin during this time is hung up at the rear end of the house, and with the skin are hung up the tools which the bear desires, ac cording to the sex of the animal killed . At the end of the fourth or fifth day the soul of the bear is by a magic formula driven out of the house; and when it goes away it takes away with it the souls of the tools which have been suspended with it and uses them thereafter. 

There are certain manners and customs of humanity which are displeasing to polar bears, and for that reason those customs are carefully abjured during the period when the soul of the bear is in the man's house. The bear, in other words, is treated as an honored guest who must not be offended . If the bear's soul has been properly treated during his stay with the man, and if he has received the souls (tatkoit) of implements of good quality, then he will report those things in the land of the polar bears to which he returns, and other bears will be anxious to be killed by so reliable a man. If the wives of certain hunters are careless about treating the souls of the bears properly while they are in their houses, this will offend the bears quite as much as if the man who killed them had done it, and this may cause an excellent hunter to get no polar bears at all. Certain women are known in their communities for this very undesirable quality, and if a woman becomes a widow, her reputation for carelessness in treating the souls of animals may prevent her from getting a good second husband.

Our main purpose here is not to elucidate or to present conclusions, but rather to present facts which happen to be chiefly in the form of anecdotes; but the foregoing has seemed necessary to give the reader a point of view from which the evidence can be interpreted. To see the bearing of the facts clearly we must keep sight of the two things of main importance: namely, first, that the ideas which the Eskimo has of the new religion are dictated by his environment and colored by the habits of thought developed under the old religion; and, second ( and most important), that he looks upon the missionary as the mouth-piece of God, exactly as the shaman was the mouthpiece of the spirits; bearing these things in mind, we shall glance at the history of the spread of Christianity in Alaska. 

Most of the abstract and strange ideas of which the Eskimo of even the civilized north coast of Alaska have knowledge have been presented to them first by missionaries, who generally precede the school-teacher into distant fields, yet we shall draw our first case for consideration from an Alaskan public school. The winter of 1908, and for a year before that and a year after, the government school teacher at Point Barrow was Mr. Charles W. Hawkesworth. Mr. Hawkesworth was a New Englander, a graduate of Bowdoin, a fine type of man of the sort that is rare even in New England and yet typical of New England. He said, and I agreed with him, that he thought the Eskimo boys and girls at Barrow had as much native intelligence as boys and girls of a similar age and the same grade in school in Massachusetts or New Hampshire. But I told him that, admitting all that, I did not believe they were getting from the books which they read and the lectures which he delivered to them the same ideas that pupils in a Massachusetts school would get, for their environment was so essentially different from that described in the books that many a thing which is a plain statement to a boy in Massachusetts must be to the boy, of northern Alaska a riddle without a key. Apparently Mr. Hawkesworth did not fully agree with me in this, but an examination in United States history which he held shortly after gave results which bore out my contention fairly well. He had been lecturing for several weeks on the causes of the war with England, and his pupils had in connection with these lectures read the ordinary assigned reading required of pupils of the eighth and ninth grades. Among other things, they had heard much of the “ Boston Tea Party” and of the events that preceded and followed. One of the questions in the examination was, “ Why did the American colonists go to war with England ? ” and one of the brightest Eskimo boys wrote the following answer : “ It was no wonder that the Americans got angry at the English, for the English were so mean they put tacks in the tea they sold the Americans. ' The point is obvious. Had the lectures and reading been on the Pure Food and Drugs Act, every pupil in the Barrow school would have understood, because the adulteration of food by traders is to them a familiar thing; but taxation, with or without representation, was a foreign idea and essentially incomprehensible. And if taxation is incomprehensible when presented by a schoolmaster, our abstract religious concepts are no less so when expounded by a missionary. 

The Christianity which exists in the minds of the missionaries being as essentially incomprehensible to the Eskimo as our abstract political and scientific ideas and complex social organization, the missionaries at first naturally accomplished little. At the mouth of the Mackenzie River, for instance, when I was there first in the winter of 1906–07, the missionaries of the Church of England had been already for more than a decade without making a convert. The people were still unconverted in September, 1907, when I left the district. When I returned in June, 1908, they had been Christianized to the last man. 

I am not sure where Christianity started in Arctic Alaska, but I believe it to have been in Kotzebue Sound. So soon as the people here were converted, there grew up among them what might be called an Eskimoized Christianity, in other words, Christianity comprehensible to the Eskimo. The real Christianity had had great difficulty in taking root, but this new form spread like the measles. It went northwest along the coast to Point Hope, and northeast across the mountains to the Colville River, so that when I reached the Colville in October, 1908, every man there had become a Christian, although they had had no direct dealings with white missionaries.  

I was considerably astonished ( in October, 1908 ), on entering the first Eskimo house at the mouth of the Itkillik, a branch of the Colville, to have set before me a wash-dish and towel, and to have my host recite a lengthy prayer over the wash-dish, in order, as he said, to make the water suitable for my use. According to my custom, I declined the use of the basin and towel, even after they had been consecrated, telling my host that a boiled towel would have been much more attractive to me than a consecrated one; for here, as everywhere else among the civilized Eskimo, one must be on his guard against the contagious skin and eye diseases of civilization that spread in no way faster than by the use of common towels. 

After my Eskimo companions had washed (from ancestral custom they were inclined to accept every new taboo as a matter of course), another prayer was recited over the basin and towel, and then a lengthy grace was said over the food before we commenced eating, as well as a separate one over the teacups, which were brought in at the end of the meal. Finally, thanks were offered at the close. I asked my host from whence he got these prayers and these new ideas, and he said that they came over the mountains from Kotzebue Sound, brought by a man well versed in the new religion and the possessor of a great many efficient prayers. The best prayer of all which this man had brought, and the most useful, our host told us, was one for caribou. The Colville people had used it the first year with such success that they had killed as many caribou as they had any need for. This was three years ago, and last year the prayer had not worked so well, while this year it had seemed to be of no use at all. The hunting had been very poor indeed. By the gradually decreasing efficiency of this prayer our host had been led to suppose that prayers, like white men's rifles and other things which they bring, had their full efficiency only while new, and no doubt gradually wore out and finally became useless. ( This, by the way, can scarcely be said to be in the terms of the old religion, for it was believed that the older a charm was the greater its power. They had apparently transferred their experience with the white man's shoddy trade goods to the realm of his religion.) Now that this prayer, after three years' use, had lost its power over game, our host inquired anxiously if we did not know a good one from the Mackenzie River missionary, of the general efficiency of whose prayers the Colville people had heard much. I knew no such prayer, and neither did Natkusiak, but Akpek announced he had a fairly good one. When this fact became known, the village lost interest in the two of us in large measure, and concentrated it on Akpek, who was fêted and invited about from house to house, always followed by a crowd of people eager to learn from him the new prayer to have it ready for the caribou hunting in the spring.