PREFACE
The land of the Eskimo is the most inhospitable desolate portion of Mother Earth, inhabited by man. Well has the Eskimo need of his cheerful watch word, or salutation, of Aksuse, which means be strong.
The wind, the cold, the ice, the snow, the sterility of the land, and a hundred other forbidding conditions under which he lives, all call for strength. And strength he has both of body and soul and he fights the battle of life against the elements where any other race placed in his environment would surely perish. In one of Harry Whitney's hunting stories he tells of a hunting party of Eskimos who set out on a reindeer hunt. They encountered a blizzard of great intensity and all of the party but one grizzled hunter turned back. The white hunter was much worried about the missing man, who happened to be one of his particular friends, but when he mentioned his fears to the Eskimos they only laughed. "He is all right," they said. "He take care of himself."
The hunter found later that his fears were groundless.
When the Eskimo found himself overtaken by the blizzard, he simply dug a good-sized house in a snow bank and the dogs also dug in and he slept as comfortably as he would have at home in his own igloo.
The Eskimos are nominally Christian, those on the East coast of North America having come under the influence of the Moravian church in 1771. The Eskimos of the Alaskan peninsula probably felt the influence of the Greek church at about the same time as some of the most beautiful bells used upon the Greek churches in Asia were cast in Alaska, one hundred and fifty years ago.