Eskimo

An Eskimo mother doesn't wean her baby until her next pregnancy sets in, however long that might be. If she does not become pregnant again, she often nurses her lastborn for many years. It is considered a sign of a woman's youth and agility that she still has a child to nurse and milk to give, and only when she had finished her usefulness to her children is she really old. I thus saw several times, both among the Hudson Bay and the Polar Eskimos, and even in southern Greenland, mothers giving the breast to fourteen-year-old boys who were already sporting in kayaks and taking part in the hunt.

"It was now Fry's opinion that I had had typhoid fever. When my friends thought of what they had been letting me eat, they were shocked and alarmed. During the first period of high fever I had been without appetite, but as soon as the fever dropped to 100 degrees, I had begun to eat steaks and fried potatoes or whatever else the police were having for their meals. An hour before my sudden relapse, I had eaten a large meal of macaroni and cheese. There were some who believed that this heavy food was responsible. The relapse, they felt, served me right. What eles could have been expected of a sick man who ate macaroni and cheese!"

page 208

"My convalescence was not going well. When it was decided that I must have had typhoid, I was put on the orthodox typhoid diet. Nothing but tinned and Argentitian powdered milk was available. My belief was that if I was allowed to eat the hearty foods for which I hungered I would probably have a better chance of getting well, and I used to reason elaborately and, it seemed to me, convincingly that I should be allowed a chance at a square meal. Arguments that seemed lucid to me were, unfortunately, considered the cunning of delirium."

page 209

"My condition kept growing worse. Finally, everyone agreed that I was going to die. At that point Police Inspector Phillips took the position that, if I was going to die, I might as well die as I wanted: in an effort to get to Fort Yukon. This did not meet the views of some of the others. There was at Herschel Island a very respectable graveyard where whalers and other white men had been buried with supposedly civilized pomp and circumstance. I felt sure that, if I died, there would be a thoroughly orthodox funeral. However, I preferred to die elsewhere and, if possible, later."

"It was in the first week of April, 1918, that I left Herschel Island in a sled equipped with springs from an old cot. Constable Brockie, Henry Fry, my Indian teen-ager, and two Eskimos accompanied me.

Fry, now that we were away from the settlement, was less inclined to insist on the orthodox liquid diet for a typhoid convalescent. I was allowed to eat one of my favorite foods, frozen raw fish. This seemed to do me good, and my second day out from Herschel saw me free of fever. It seemed unnecessary for Fry to continue with us. He said that, since I apparently got along better the more my conduct differed from what his medical books said it ought to be, I might as well take the entire responsibility for doing as I liked. Having come to this conclusion, he returned to his mission at Herschel Island. 

From then on, my breakfasts and suppers consisted of caribou and fish, sometimes frozen and raw, sometimes cooked. I felt better each day and regained weight until finally, when we arrived at the mouth of the Old Crow River, at the trading post of Schultz and Johnson, I was no longer in real need of the expert care that I could get from Mrs. Schultz, who before her marriage had been a trained nurse at Fort Yukon. While I did not need the care, I shall never forget the kindness of Mrs. Schultz and her husband." 

Page 210

On April 27th, when we arrived at St. Stephen's Hospital, Fort Yukon, I was so far recovered that I walked without assistance from the gate to the house. A month before, when I had been about to leave Herschel, Inspector Philips had had to guide my hand as I made the penciled cross by which I agreed that if I died on the journey the responsibility would be my own. Thus, my polar expedition came to an end." page 211

What I especially remember is that when I saw the bishop at Toronto fourteen years later, in 1920, he told me he had long been in the habit of saying that he blamed diet for cancer because he knew of civilized Indians who had been victims but of none among the uncivilized. As I think back, it seems to me he spoke of this as if it were hearsay knowledge; and indeed it may well have been from books. For at least two of the classics of northern exploration, both of which are nearly sure to have been in the Hudson's Bay Company's famous Simpson Library, speak of cancer as found among Indians married to or working for Europeans.

Sometimes the Inuit hunters on St. Lawrence Island would be on an ice floe that breaks off the island and drifts through the ocean. This is a story about how they survived.

If the current carries them out pretty far, it will carry them around to the north side of the island. But if they drifted close in, the current would carry them south and away from the island. This is how they spent the winter. When the wind would die down, the current would take them swiftly north. They could see the Gambell mountain grow bigger, but when the north wind came up, they would see the mountain shrink again. 

By the time the days began to get longer [in early March], they lost hope of getting back to the island. Mount Ayvikan [on the southwest part of the island] is the last mountain which can be seen. By this time, they had lost sight of that too. Now they could see nothing but the sea around them. They lived on a large ice floe. I think they made a shelter somewhere on it. When the wind died down, ice would form around the floe. The men would hunt for seals on this new-formed ice. In the beginning they had only one problem: no water. 

The men caught a walrus or a bearded seal. They made containers from the processed intestines and filled them with snow so that their body heat could melt it. They then looped the intestines like strands of beads around their bodies between their inner and outer parkas. Our forefathers knew what they were doing. Their body heat melted the snow. This is how the men solved their water problem.

Elsie Kava - page 97 - Volume 2 - Date is a rough guess.

Every part of the reindeer can be eaten. The jowls, the ears, the velvet on the antlers, and the knuckles are barbecued and eaten. 

The stomach is first removed. Then, the fat on the outside of the stomach, called pugughyi, is peeled off very carefully without puncturing the stomach. Next, some of the contents of the stomach are squeezed out, while some is left in the stomach to ferment and be eaten later. That part of the stomach, called alamka, is washed thoroughly and eaten raw. The alamka, which has the texture like the nap of a towel, is rinsed thoroughly along with the stomach and eaten. 

Somewhere in the reindeer is a part called the kevighqat This is turned inside out and filled with fat from another reindeer. The container it makes is called a keviq. The large intestine also is turned inside out so that the fat [on it] can be stored inside. Our family did not eat the kidneys nor the livers, but some people did. 

The fat on the intestines is carefully peeled off all the way around and removed. Then the glands [on the intestines] are removed. There is a lot of this fat and when it is removed it takes on a tubular shape. Everything in the body of a reindeer is eaten. 

Fall reindeer hides, which have thick fur, are used for bedding. In the spring, when the reindeer are shedding, the fur becomes scruffy. The fur gets very thin and the hair is short. This was saved for parka trim. Sometime in the month of July the fawn hides were ideal for clothing. The length of the hair had gotten just right and was of good quality. Even the hair on the adult reindeer got short. 

Fawning began in April and only men took part in it. They worked in shifts of a week at a time. 

We used to be there at Ivgaq when the reindeer would come to the camp on their own to give birth to their fawns. We would lie down and watch them giving birth. As soon as the fawns dried off, they began to walk and run with the mother. If there was a snowstorm while tending to the fawning, we used tents. Reindeer herders used tents at fawning time. There were lots of reindeer in those days.