On the other hand, we know of several cases where men discarded wives who were unsatisfactory or made themselves disagreeable. For instance, the younger Tuñazu, when we first made his acquaintance, was married to a widow very much his senior, who seemed to have a disagreeable and querulous temper, so that we were not surprised to hear in the spring of 1882 that they were separated and Tuñazu married to a young girl. His second matrimonial venture was no more successful than his first, for his young wife proved to be a great talker. As he told us: “She talked all the time, so that he could not eat and could not sleep.” So he discarded her, and when we left the station he had been for some time married to another old widow.
In the case above mentioned, where the man with two wives discarded the younger of them, the reason he assigned was that she was lazy, would not make her own clothes, and was disobedient to the older wife, to whom he was much attached. As he said, Kakaguna (the older wife) told her, “Give me a drink of water,” and she said, “No!” so Kakaguna said, “Go!” and she went. He did not show any particular concern about it.
Dr. Simpson says, “A great many changes take place before a permanent choice is made;” and again, “A union once apparently settled between parties grown up is rarely dissolved.”[525] And this agrees with our experience. The same appears to have been the case in Greenland. Crantz[526] says, “Such quarrels and separations only happen between people in their younger years, who have married without due forethought. The older they grow, the more they love one another.”
Easy and unceremonious divorce appears to be the usual custom among Eskimo generally, and the divorced parties are always free to marry again.[527] The only writer who mentions any ceremony of divorce is Bessels, who witnessed such among the so-called “Arctic Highlanders” of Smith Sound (Naturalist, vol. 18, pt. 9, p. 877). Dr. Simpson, in the paragraph referred to above, says that “A man of mature age chooses a wife for himself and fetches her home, frequently, to all appearance, much against her will.” The only case of the kind which came to our notice was in 1883, when one of the Kĭlauwitawĭñmeun attempted by blows to coerce Adwû´na, an Utkiavwĭñ girl, to live with him, but was unsuccessful.
A curious custom, not peculiar to these people, is the habit of exchanging wives temporarily. For instance, one man of our acquaintance planned to go to the rivers deer hunting in the summer of 1882, and borrowed his cousin’s wife for the expedition, as she was a good shot and a good hand at deer hunting, while his own wife went with his cousin on the trading expedition to the eastward. On their return the wives went back to their respective husbands.
The couples sometimes find themselves better pleased with their new mates than with the former association, in which case the exchange is made permanent. This happened once in Utkiavwĭñ to our certain knowledge. This custom has been observed at Fury and Hecla Straits,[528] Cumberland Gulf,[529] and in the region around Repulse Bay, where it seems to be carried to an extreme.
According to Gilder[530] it is a usual thing among friends in that region to exchange wives for a week or two about every two months. Among the Greenlanders the only custom of the kind mentioned is the temporary exchange of wives at certain festivals described by Egede.[531]
Holm also describes “the game of putting out the lamps,” or “changing wives,” as a common winter sport in East Greenland. He also, however, speaks of the temporary exchange of wives among these people much as described elsewhere.[532]
I am informed by some of the whalemen who winter in the neighborhood of Repulse Bay, that at certain times there is a general exchange of wives throughout the village, each woman passing from man to man till she has been through the hands of all, and finally returns to her husband. All these cases seem to me to indicate that the Eskimo have not wholly emerged from the state called communal marriage, in which each woman is considered as the wife of every man in the community.