Caribou Hunting

William Kuptana: I remember being packed going inland in the summer. When we were out of food, we'd eat seal fat out of the pouch. My parents would also carry a sealskin bag filled with seal blood. We'd drink out of that when were thirsty.

While we were treking inland, food would become scarce. My parents killed a lemming and cooked it. I didn't want to eat it, but they talked to me so I had to eat it. I didn't want to be left behind. We'd keep walking and looking for caribou. When we'd come to a lake that was still frozen over, they would make an agluaq (fishing hole). Hook and spear were used to catch fish. By fishing, that would prevent us from starving. Also, when the ice is gone in the river, they would fish by using spears and wading in after them. 

After that, we would go wandering off into the land looking for caribou. We had no guns. Finally, when we found a small herd, the men would then build a small projection of stone slabs on a high point of land to act as a rouse to statle the fleeing caribou. The women would advance toward the caribou, humming as they approached the herd. As the caribou approached the lair where the men were hiding, the men would then kill the closest ones, the ones that they could reach.

The kill meant, "Feast." The family would eat everything: stomach, entrails, marrow. For instance, the entrails would be cleaned out and then cooked. After they were cooked, the entrails would be eaten with seal oil. The extra meat would be cut up to make dried meat. 

The warm summer months were not a time of plenty for the Copper Inuit. As Diamond Jenness (1922:123-124) noted: "The traveller will find scattered families reaming about from place to place, here today and gone tomorrow in their restless search for game. Days of feasting alternate with days of fasting according to their failure or success. No fowl of the air, no creature of the land, no fish of the waters is too great or too small to attract their notice at this time."

The scarcity of food in spring and summer was partially alleviated in the late summer/early fall(August and September) when caribou hunting accelerated. At this time of year the caribou are fattest and their hides are ideals for making clothes. Usually a number of families would cooperate in the hunting of caribou using caribou drives set up on the tundra. These drives usually consisted of rows of stone piles set up in tow converging lines. Women and children chased the caribou with lances and arrows. Another technique, more commonly used on the mainland, involved hunting caribou from kayaks at crossing places in lakes. If a caribou drive was successful, much of the meat would be dried and stored for use during the lean autumn months. 

First Hunt

William Kuptana: When I first killed a caribou, my biological father started wrestling with me as it is a custom to try to put a young hunter on top of the caribou corpse. After that, the hunting party told me to get the ulimuan [ a chisel-like instrument with a blade at a forty-five degree angle from the handle]. So I got one out of the pack-sack to open its head as it is a custom that a young man do that for a first kill. After I had chopped its skull, the elders started eating its inner membrane, or as it is usually called, the brain. Then, after the feast, the hunting party resumed their search for the tuktuvialuit (Banks Island Caribou). From spring to autumn, the hunting party would kill, store, and go on searching until it was too cold to hunt. Finally, returning to their wintering grounds, they'd wait for winter huddled in their sealskin tents for a time. 

Until the first decade of the twentieth century, contact with the Inuit of western Victoria Island and eastern Banks Island was sporadic. McClure, Collinson, Klengenberg, and Mogg offer little detailed information concerning the culture, population, or movements of the people they met. The published works of the noted anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson offer the first detailed information about the Copper Inuit.

Stefansson had been at Herschel Island on his first arctic expedition when Klengenberg returned in 1906 from his trading expedition to Victoria Island. As an anthropologist, Stefansson was most interested in the stories Klengenberg and his crew told about this "new group" of Inuit. Klengenberg reported that the people dressed in parkas with long tails in the back, that they used weapons and tools made out of copper, that most of them had never seen a white man (except for the very oldest, who reported seeing Collinson in the winter of 1851/1852), and that Victoria Island abounded in copper. Since Klengenberg had traded extensively with these Inuit, he was able to show Stefansson and others his collection of Kangiryuarmiut knives hammered out of native copper, finely made bows with sinew backing, quivers full of arrows tipped with copper, and dozens of suits of clothing expertly sewn with copper needles (Stefansson 1906).

In his book My Life with the Eskimo (1913), Stefansson writes of having arrived at a small island near the south shore of Prince Albert Sound:

From the top of the island the next morning I could with the glasses see a native village on the ice ten or fifteen miles to the northwest, approximately in the middle of Prince Albert Sound. When we approached it we saw this to be the largest village of our whole experience. It turned out that there were twenty-seven dwelling houses in it. We had, of course, seen the ruined trading village at Cape Bexley [on the southern shore of Dolphin and Union Strait], which had over fifty dwellings, bu these had been the houses of traders from half a dozen or more different tribes, while this turned out to be the one tribe of the Kanghirgyuargmiut, and they were not all at home either, for later on we visited another village of three houses of the same people, and a third village of four houses we never saw at all (Stefansson 1913: 278).

Stefansson and Natkusiak approached the village and were met several miles south of it by a group of three hunters who had been seal hunting on the ice. The three hunters seemed a little timid at first, but indicated that Stefansson and Natkusiak had come from the southeast, a country inhabited by their neighbors, the Puivlirmiut, "who were now and then in the habit of arriving by the same route as ours, and at this season of the year, for purposes of trade" (Stefansson 1913:279). Stefansson and Natkusiak assured them that they had originated from the southwest but were arriving from the southeast simply because they had been visiting the Haneragmiut to the south. Stefansson added that they belonged to the same group of people who had visited several years before in a large schooner--the Olga. The three hunters remembered the Olga and had liked its crew. 

First White Men

Willam Kuptana. The first encounter with white men was at Kangiqyuak[Prince Albert Sound]... That was the first time they ever saw white people. The white people were Billy Banksland[Natkusiak--actually an Inuk from Alaska] and his partner. That was also the first time the rifle was introduced to the Inuit. He advised the Inuit that the gun was dangerous. He told the Inuit not the handle the rifles.

Incidentally, the herd of caribou were crossing from Banks Island to Victoria Island near the settlement where the Inuit were camped. Billy Banksland's partner ran forward to intercept the herd. He then abruptly aimed and fired the rifle and struck down one caribou. At that instance, the Inuit immediately rushed to the caribou that was shot down. In no time at all, the fresh killed carcass was devoured by the Inuit. 

The white man started in disbelief at the way the carcass disappeared so swiftly. The reason the Inuit devoured the caribou so quickly was because it was a change in diet. Their main staple food all winter was seal meat. 

 

 Of the sources available (including the formal report of the commander, Lieutenant Patrick Henry Ray), the best description of the people is the account by the anthropologist John Murdoch: “Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition,” published in the Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution(Washington, D.C., 1892). 

In addition to agreeing generally with Simpson's dietetic observations of the 1850's, Murdoch amplifies in the 1880's:

“The food of these people consists almost entirely of animal substances ... We saw and heard nothing ... of eating the half-digested contents of the stomach of the reindeer ... As far as our observations go these people eat little, if any more fat than civilized man; and, as a rule, not by itself ... It is usually supposed, and generally stated in the popular accounts of the Eskimos, that it is a physical necessity for them to eat enormous quantities of blubber in order to obtain a sufficient amount of carbon to enable them to maintain their animal heat in the cold climate which they inhabit. A careful comparison, however, of the reports of actual observers shows that an excessive eating of fat is not the rule ...

“We saw these people eat no vegetable substances, though they informed us that the buds of the willow were sometimes eaten [especially in time of famine] ... Food is generally cooked ... Meat of all kinds is generally boiled ... and the broth thus made is drunk ... Fish are also boiled but are often eaten raw ... Meat is sometimes eaten raw frozen ... When living in winter houses they ... have no regular time for meals, but eat whenever hungry and have leisure. The women seem to keep a supply of cooked food on hand for anyone to eat ... They are large eaters, some of them, especially the women, eating all the time ...” Elsewhere Murdoch relates that during winter the Barrow women stirred around very little, did little heavy work, and yet “inclined more to being sparse than corpulent.”