Religion

A shaman among the Eskimos is in his own person no wiser than you or I. In every -day life he is quite as likely to do foolish things, quite as liable to be wrong ; but when he goes into a trance his own spirit is superseded by the familiar spirit which enters his body, and it is the familiar spirit which talks through the mouth of the shaman. It is only then that his words become wisdom, on which you may rely unthinkingly. When in a trance the shaman is the mouth-piece of a spirit, and at any time, by the use of the formulæ by which the spirits are controlled, he can get them to do his bidding, be it good or ill. For that reason the shaman is deferred to, irrespective of whether you like him personally or not, and without regard to what you may think of his character and natural abilities, except that the more you fear he may be disposed to evil actions, the more careful you are not to give him offense, and to comply with everything he commands or intimates, for (being evilly disposed) he may punish you harshly if you incur his displeasure. 

Just as in Rome the priests of the new religion took the place of the priests of the old, so among the Eskimo the missionary under the new dispensation takes the place of the ancient shaman of the old régime. When he speaks as a missionary, he speaks as the mouthpiece of God, exactly as the shaman was the mouth-piece of the spirits. The commands he issues at that time are the commands of God, as the commands of the shaman were not his own but those of the spirit which possessed him. And as in the old days the evilly disposed shamans were the most feared, similarly that one of all the missionaries known to me who is personally the most unpopular among his Eskimo congregation is also the one whose word is the most absolute law and whom none would cross under any circumstances. “ For,” think the Eskimo, " being a bad man, he may pray to God to make us sick or do us some harm."

We had here a striking example of how easy it is to be misled by native information. I had been led to believe in the spring that the Coronation Gulf people never had had any knowledge of the killing of bow-head whales, although they were familiar with the carcasses of those that had drifted up on their beaches. Neither had they apparently ever seen a live one, which is not strange, considering the two facts that bow -head whales are not only no doubt very rare in these waters, but the people themselves are always inland in the summer time and are therefore not in a position to see the whales even if they might come into these waters in July or August. But here at this village and now for the first time, after vain inquiries all summer, we heard various stories of whale killings, most of them , however, centering about a single man whom they called Kaplavinna. They told how this person had on occasion even killed several whales in one day, and how he had a very large boat. This again was new information, for up to that time we had heard nothing about anything but kayaks. In the spring, in fact, the people had seemed to be un familiar with the very name of umiak. 

I listened to several of these stories with great wonder and asked many questions which were readily answered, but which threw no great light on the subject, until it occurred to me to ask one of the narrators, “ Who told you this story ? Did you get it from your father ?” The man said: “ No, I got it from Natjinna. ” Now Natjinna had been a camp follower of ours all summer, and I had asked him specifically in the spring both about bow-head whales and umiaks and he knew nothing about either. It seemed strange to me that Natjinna should have misled me so in the summer, and I made up my mind to take him to task for it when I saw him. Two or three weeks later, when I happened to meet him, I asked how was it that in the spring he had been unwilling to tell me anything about whales or big boats and now he told long stories to others about them. “Oh, but those were the stories that Natkusiak told me,” he answered. 

It turned out on investigation that my own man, Natkusiak, was the fountain-head of all these stories, and that the redoubtable whaler Kaplavinna was none other than Natkusiak's former employer, Captain Leavitt of the steam whaler Narwhal. These were the local versions, changed to fit the circumstances and geography of Corona tion Gulf, and translated into terms comprehensible to the Copper mine Eskimo. I had heard Natkusiak telling these stories a previous spring, but the versions that came to me a year later were so changed that they were not recognizable, and had been so thoroughly localized graphically that the narrators could tell me off just which Coronation Gulf headland the adventures had taken place. 

When Natkusiak told these stories, as I noticed on many occasions, he never made any allowances for the fact that he was dealing with things entirely strange to the local people. He discussed davits, masts, sails, anchors, harpoon guns, dynamite bombs, the price of whalebone and the like, exactly as he would have done in his own home village at Port Clarence where these are all familiar topics and matters of everyday conversation. The very names of these things as well as the concepts behind them were absent from the vocabularies and the minds of the local people, and the ideas which they therefore got from Natkusiak's truthful stories were very far from those which would have been gained from the same narratives by a people whose everyday experiences made them comprehensible. 

From the seeds sown here by Natkusiak there had grown up a local myth about Kaplavinna and his whaling adventures, myth which Natkusiak himself would have had fully as much trouble as I in recognizing, —just exactly as the discussion of the Christian religion by a missionary and of a strange social and political system by a school teacher gives rise to the most astounding ideas in the minds of the Alaskan Eskimo. Very likely it was thus from the preaching of an early missionary among them that some Indian origi nally evolved upon the model of Jehovah the Manitou idea, which people nowadays use to prove that the tribes of the New England wilderness were familiar with the conception of a single superior being.

Another story which we picked up at this time was that of the Imnait. These were vague and mysterious animals living in an unknown land to the west, which is also inhabited by the Kiligavait. This story did not give us nearly so much trouble in identifying it as did that of Kaplavinna, for the name of the monster was a correct reproduction of that used by my own Eskimo in the previous year in telling their adventures in mountain sheep hunting. Mountain sheep, of course, are found nowhere east of the Mackenzie River, and could not, therefore, be directly known to the Coronation Gulf Eskimo. These people were also unfamiliar with the dangers involved in the possible snow-slides and other peculiar conditions of mountain hunting. They had received from Natkusiak the general idea that mountain sheep hunting was dangerous, and being unable to ascribe any danger to the mountains as such, they had transferred the dangerousness of the snow-slides and precipices to the sheep themselves; and the hairbreadth escapes from death in snow-slides which Natkusiak had described became in their version hairbreadth escapes from the teeth and claws of the ferocious mountain sheep. The kiligavait, which they had associated with the mountain sheep in these narratives, were nothing but the mammoth, known to all branches of the Eskimo race by name at least, and known here also, according to what we were told, by the occasional finding of their bones. Of course Natkusiak had told nothing about mammoth hunting, but the mysterious mountain sheep naturally allied themselves in their minds with the also mysterious mammoth, and were therefore to be coupled together in recounting the same adventures. Thus we had a side-light, not only upon the origin of myths among primitive people, but also upon the startling rapidity with which they grow and change their form. 

Along with these stories of Kaplavinna and the mountain sheep we were also told no doubt essentially truthful ones of the trading expeditions of certain men of this district to the lakes above the head of Chesterfield Inlet, as well as in all probability entirely fictitious accounts of how certain men had, during the last few years, made journeys to the moon. One of the local shamans had for a familiar spirit the spirit of a white man, and in séances spoke “ white men's language.” We were present at one of these séances; and when I said that I was unable to understand anything of what the white man's spirit said through the mouth of the woman whom he. possessed, it was considered a very surprising thing, and apparently inclined some of the people to doubt that I was really a white man as represented myself to be. 

Not only does our experience here show how myths may originate, but it also shows how history and fact become mixed with fiction, and how facts are likely quickly to disappear, as in reality they do It is impossible among the Eskimo, in the absence of extraneous evidence, to rely upon anything that is said to have happened farther back than the memory of the narrator himself extends. 

As we have remarked elsewhere, the mind of the Eskimo is keen with reference to their immediate environment, although of course unable to grasp things that are outside of their experience. This keenness is shown especially in the use which they make of practically everything that can be turned to account in their struggle against Arctic conditions. Wood is not especially scarce in Coronation Gulf; still, substitutes for wood have to be found now and then. We saw here a sled which illustrated remarkably the resourcefulness of the Eskimo in this matter. A man named Kaiariok, who is the son of Iglihsirk and of whom Hanbury speaks as being temporarily absent from his father's camp at the time when he visited it on Dismal Lake, found himself in the fall in need of a sled and with no wood out of which to make one. He then took a musk-ox skin, soaked it in water and folded it into the shape of a plank, pressed it flat and straight, and carried it outdoors where it could freeze. It froze as solid as any real plank, and then with his adze he went to work and hewed out of it a sled runner exactly as he would hew one out of a plank. On the upper edge of the runner he made notches for the crosspieces as he would had it been ordinary spruce, drilled holes for the lacings and put in wooden crosspieces, and made a sled which I had seen several times without discovering that it was in any way different from the ordinary wooden sleds. It was only one day when I was thinking of buying a sled that I discovered the difference. There were two sleds for sale, and I was told that one of them was better than the other because when the weather got warm it would still be useful, while the other one would flatten out and become worthless in warm weather and was therefore for sale for half the price of the first one. This cheaper sled turned out to be the musk-ox skin one, for which as an ethnological specimen I would have been willing to pay much more than the other, had there been any possibility of transferring it unchanged to a museum. There was, however, involved the same difficulty that has prevented in such places as Montreal the preservation of ice palaces from year to year. 

Of all things that these Eskimo told us, the one that surprised us most was the undoubtedly true statement that a ship manned by white men and strange Eskimo was wintering in Coronation Gulf. This we felt as the reverse of good news, for the natural feelings of sympathy that had grown up through a year of association with these people, who in their way were so infinitely superior to their civilized brethren in the west, made me regret that civilization was following so close upon our heels. We had come into the country in May, and evidently this ship must have come the following September. She was wintering, they said, in the mouth of a small river about half a day's journey east of the mouth of the Coppermine. Seeing she was there, we would of course pay her a visit. We were not in particular need of assistance from anybody, but still in a far country like this one is always willing either to help or to be helped, and there was no doubt that the meeting was likely to be both pleasant and profitable to all concerned. In other words, now that the ship was there we would make the best of a situation we regretted; we would make what use of her we could and be of as much use to her as possible, although had we had our way we should have wished her on the other side of the earth.

It is a theory which has been much in vogue among ethnologists that the fundamental reason back of the system of Eskimo taboos is that they are intended to keep the sea industries away from the land industries and the sea animals away from the land animals; the theory being that the Eskimo were once inland dwellers and accustomed only to land animals and hunting methods suited to the land, and that when they came down to the sea they found its requirements and its animal life so different from that of the land to which they were used that they conceived it necessary to keep the two rigidly apart and that taboos were therefore established. We have elsewhere pointed out that the western Eskimo consider that sudden death, pestilence, or famine will follow upon the sewing of caribou skin garments within a certain number of days after one of the large sea mammals has been killed. It is true among many tribes of Eskimo that caribou skin garments must not be made or mended on the sea ice. The flesh of caribou and of seals must not, among some tribes, be eaten at the same time, nor must the flesh of caribou be eaten on the sea at all. Under other circumstances when both may be eaten, they will have to be cooked in separate utensils and certain ceremonies have to be performed to cancel, as it were, the evil effects that might otherwise ensue. 

Here, however, everything was different. Not only did these seal hunters engage in the cutting up of the animals, but the meat was taken home and cooked in the same pots in which seal meat had been cooked and eaten; and not only the same day that seal meat had been eaten and the seals had been killed, but the seal meat and caribou meat were actually eaten at the same meal by the same individuals. One old man, however, said that he knew that it was not right to boil caribou meat in the same pot in which seal meat had been boiled unless you suspended the pot by a different string. His wife therefore took off the old greasy string which had served as a bale for the stone pot, braided a new sinew string, and swung the pot by that over the lamp. These Eskimo have various taboos relating to seal and to caribou, but none of those that I have seen in use or heard of, except in the case of this one incident of the string, had any tendency to keep the two apart.

When he got near he told me that he knew already who I was, and that very likely I knew who he was, for he was a man so much more unfortunate than other men that the story of his misfortune had traveled to distant places. No doubt I had heard the story, he said, but nevertheless he would tell it to me himself so that I might know it from his own lips and take warning from it and tell my friends to do the same. 

Many years ago his house had been standing by itself some distance from the village, but from where he stood beside the seal-hole watching for the seal to come up he could see several other hunters out sealing. The seal, when it came, proved to be a bearded one, but being a strong man he had been able to hold it and to kill it. Without any assistance he had with his ice pick enlarged the breathing-hole enough to pull the animal out. ( It was no mean feat, seeing that a bearded seal will weigh from six hundred to eight hundred pounds. ) Up to this time he had not thought of the other hunters, but now he looked around and saw that they were all far away, and while distinctly visible he felt sure that none of them had any idea what kind of a seal he had caught. ( The hunters' law does not require that the hunters within sight be summoned to share at the cutting up of a common small seal. ) When a bearded seal is killed all the hunters within view must be called in to share the prize. It had occurred to him that by keeping the thing secret (by pretending this was a common seal), he might keep the animal to himself, and especially the skin, for he knew that he could sell pieces of it to a neighboring tribe who seldom catch bearded seals, for numerous articles of value. Accordingly he secretly cut the animal up, gave out the story that he had killed only a small seal, and pledged his wife to secrecy; but the story leaked out as such stories will. People came to him and took away from him both the skin and the meat and reproached him bitterly. He now repented his act and felt crushed by the disapproval of his people, but his punishment was to be made even heavier, for within a year he began to lose his eyesight and in another year he was stone blind. Since then he, poor miserable man, had been blind and a charge upon the community. Thus it was sure to go with those who did wicked things; and while he felt sure that I was a good man, nevertheless to know his story would do me no harm, and he wished I would pass it on to others, warning them to avoid selfish ways. 

I had never heard this tale before, but Natkusiak told me later he had heard it from the Eskimo we had been with the previous summer. After this occurrence, whenever we told that we had visited this particular village, we were always asked whether we had seen the blind man, and then the story would be repeated to us, exactly as the blind man had told it, to illustrate how punishment comes to those who break the law