"All this luxury was explained by the presence of seal in quantity, whereas round King, seal is, to say the least, not plentiful. 

Back of each lamp, on a sort of platform of snow, lay the usual larder of the Eskimo rich in provisions, into which every visitor was free to put his knife and draw forth the chunk of seal or caribou or musk-ox that he preferred. 

....

Thanks to the abundance of seal, these people exhibited to me a powerful and dignified community, a life that might have gone on in an ancient civilization with its matrons, its patriarchs, its forum in which the will of a people expressed itself in common discussion and decision. Each detail of life was here an episode: the waking in the morning and first trimming of the lamps; the feeding of children and men and dogs; the hubbub of departure for the sealing; the chatter of the matrons, and their housekeeping; the return when evening fell amid the barking of the dogs, the swearing of the men, the hauling in of the seals; and finally tea, the women sewing or serving while the men stood waiting for their steaming mugs to cool, snorting, joking, cutting off large chunks of meat, and feeling themselves indeed that which their name implied, Inuit, "Men, preemintently." What I was seeing here, few men had seen, and it was now to be seen almost nowhere else-a social existence as in olden days, a degree of prosperity and well-being contrasting markedly with the pseudo-civilized life of the western Eskimo and the pitiful, stunted, whining life of the King William clan with its wretched poverty, its tents made of coal-sacks, its snuffling, lacklustre, and characterless men clad in rags; that life like a dulled and smutted painting with only here and there a gleam to speak of what it had once been. 

Page 198-199 Kabloona