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?