The Ancient Form of Sled as Described by the Oldest Hunters.
In the past when whales were plentiful and the whalebone of no value to the Eskimo, strips of whalebone were stitched together with whalebone thongs, and a flat sled formed. It was very strong and less liable to sink in the snow.
The struggle for existence in the Arctic has taught the Eskimo to utilise in the most ingenious ways resources at their disposal so limited that the marvel is so self-sufficing, so healthy, hearty and happy a civilisation, of its kind, could ever have been evolved.
Where these tribes have come so much in contact with other peoples, and even with well-meaning white enterprise on their behalf, that they have attempted to substitute for their old ways a method and mode of living indigenous neither to the climate nor to their own physique, they have invariably degenerated. The Eskimo of Labrador and Alaska have largely abandoned [[135]]the snow house for the log shack or sod hut, and have in consequence been decimated by tuberculosis. Everywhere, contact with “civilisation” has tended so to divorce these children of the North from their natural environment as to initiate their wholesale decline. It is only now, in “the last North of all”—in Baffin Land, Boothia Island, Victoria Land, and the rest—that the Eskimo retain their old ways and their old vigour. Their life and their type everywhere else has become mongrel and nondescript. While there can never, of course, be any question in believing and thinking man’s mind about the inestimable boon of Christianity and educating these people along the lines suggested by a sympathetic study of them on the spot, it seems to be very inadvisable to interfere with them, to “civilise” them too much after the unsuitable European model, to revolutionise the natural and suitable scheme of life they have so bravely and so ingeniously worked out for themselves during the uncivilised centuries of their existence in the bleakest and most inhospitable regions of the earth. [[136]]
CHAPTER X
Tribal Life
In their family and tribal life the Eskimo carry out a very smooth running sort of communism, the chief tenets of which are rigidly enforced peaceableness, open hospitality to the stranger, and a sharing of food and the necessaries of precarious existence among each other. Tribal government is wholly patriarchal in character. The Angakooeet, or chief conjurors—a class of men apart—hold the first place in public esteem and common council. After them the village is ruled by the successful hunters, who foregather with the former and with the aged and experienced, when it is a question of deciding where to go and what to do about the hunting, or change of encampment, or treatment of a delinquent.
The Eskimo have no idea of authority, except that which one man may exercise over another in virtue of his superior wisdom, experience, skill or strength. There has recently been some question of inaugurating a reindeer and musk ox industry on the vast moss pastures of the hinterland of Baffin Land, and the purport of much evidence given on this subject before a Royal Commission abundantly confirms the experience [[137]]of the present writer, and emphasises the remarks that have been made as to the inadvisability of rushing matters with regard to “civilising” the Eskimo, and radically changing his mode of life from that to which the conditions of his environment have hitherto formed him. Savage as these conditions are, the Eskimo has wrought out his own well-being, and in his native state is as happy and contented an individual as could be desired. He has his hard seasons of semi-starvation, when the hunting is poor; but even these are borne with cheerfulness and equanimity.