Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

Other burial posts are scarcely less remarkable in variety of feature and coloring, and the whole collection would afford a rich harvest of specimens to any museum. Nearly all these figures are human effigies, though grotesque and misshapen, and drawn out of proportion. No images of animals or birds, which would have indicated the existence of totems and clans in the tribe, were to be seen; but here and there, over apparently neglected graves, a stick, surmounted by a very rude carving of a fish, a deer, or a beluga, indicative of the calling of the deceased hunter, could be discovered.

Petroff, who has made the only hand-to-hand examination ever conducted, by a white man, of the people of the Lower Kuskokvim, says that they resemble in outward appearance their Eskimo neighbors in the north and west, but their complexion is perhaps a little darker. The men are distinguished from those of other Innuit tribes by having more hair on the faces; mustaches being quite common, even with youths of from twenty to twenty-five, while in other tribes this hirsute appendage does not make its appearance until the age of thirty-five or forty. Their hands and feet are small, but both sexes are muscular and well developed, inclined rather to embonpoint. In their garments they differ but little from their neighbors hitherto described, with an exception of the male upper garment, or parka, which reaches down to the feet, even dragging a little upon the ground, making it necessary to gird it up for purposes of walking. The female parkas are a little shorter. Both garments are made of the skins of ground-squirrels, ornamented with pieces of red cloth and bits of tails of that rodent. The women wear no head-covering except in the depth of winter, when they pull the hoods of reindeer parkas over their heads. The men wear caps, made of the skin of an Arctic marmot, resembling in shape those famous Scotch “bonnets,” so commonly worn by Canadians.

AN INNUIT TOMB

Characteristic Method of Eskimo Burial on the Kuskokvim River: this Coffin contains the Bodies of a famous Reindeer Hunter, his Squaw, and two Children

Many young men wear a small band of fur around the head, into which they insert eagle and hawk-feathers on festive occasions. A former custom of this tribe, of inserting thin strips of bone or the quills of porcupines through an aperture cut in the septum, seems to have become obsolete, though the nasal slit can still be seen on all grown male individuals. Their ears are also universally pierced for an insertion of pendants, but these seem at present to be worn by children only, who discard them as they grow up. In fact, all ornamentation in the shape of beads, shells, etc., appears to be lavished upon their little ones, who toddle about with pendants rattling from ears, nose, and lower lip, and attired in frocks stiff with embroidery of beads or porcupine-quills, while the older girls and boys run almost naked, and the parents themselves are imperfectly protected against cold and weather by a single fur garment.

The use of the true Eskimo kayak is universal among the Kuskokvagmute, but in timbered regions of the upper river, in the vicinity of Kolmakovsky, the birch-bark canoe also is quite common. The latter, however, is not used for extended voyages or for hunting, but is reserved chiefly for attending to fish-traps, for the use of women in their berrying and fishing expeditions, and for crossing rivers and streams.

The only indigenous fruit which this large population of the Lower Kuskokvim can enjoy is that of the pretty little “moroshkie,” or red raspberry,[156] which grows in great abundance on its short, tiny stalks throughout all swales and over rolling tundra. These berries are saturated in rancid oil, however, before they are eaten to any great extent, being air-dried first and pressed into thin cakes; then, as wanted, they are pounded up in mortars and boiled, or simply thrown into a wooden basin (or kantag) of oil. Then the fingers, or rude horn spoons, are dipped in by happy feeders, who apparently relish this ill-savored combination just as keenly as one of our Gothamitic gourmands appreciates the flavor of a Chesapeake terrapin stewed in champagne.

FOOTNOTES:

[147] The Indians, or Koltchanes, of the Alaskan interior burn their dead. If anyone dies in the winter, the relatives carry that corpse everywhere with them, use it at night in the place of a pillow, and only burn it at the commencement of warm weather.