there is caribou meat in the camp most of the Eskimos will use the seal meat for dog feed. The Coast Pâdlimiut do not even use the blubber, as I have said. The meat of aquatic mammals is never eaten in a state of putrefaction as among other Eskimos, and as the Caribou Eskimos themselves often eat caribou meat. Neither seaweed nor mussels are gathered, no more than anybody eats the mussels found in the stomach of the walrus, although they form a refreshing, sourish dish which, for instance, the Polar Eskimos relish greatly.
The evidence of history apparently disputes the small rôle that is here ascribed to the hunting of aquatic mammals; for we know that when Knight's shipwrecked expedition wintered on Marble Island in 1720, Eskimos who lived at the same place sold whale blubber to the crew,[1] and later in the eighteenth century the H. B. C. traded from Churchill with the Eskimos on the southwest coast of Hudson Bay and bought up baleen as well as whale oil, walrus ivory and seal skins.[2] This may mean that the Eskimos were intermediaries between the Company and the more northerly coast tribes, especially the Aivilingmiut. But on the other hand it is also recorded that many whales were caught in the region round Whale Cove,[3] within what is now the territory of the Hauneqtôrmiut, and Hearne mentions harpoon floats of sealskin for whaling.[4] It is incontestible that the Caribou Eskimos neither know nor have the faintest tradition of having hunted whales, and this latter means much among a people who so faithfully preserve their memories as the Eskimos do. The facts stated regarding a former extensive sea mammal hunting in these regions are rather fragments of evidence among many of a tribal displacement to which we shall revert later.
Every grown man has a right and a duty to the community to hunt, and, from a social point of view, there is no restriction in this blending of right and duty. At times, however, considerations of religion intervene. These may both affect the whole camp — the highest social unit — and the single individual. The former is the case for instance after a propitiating of the spirits, when no one, at any rate among the coast group, may go hunting.[5] The latter applies for instance every time a death puts a check upon the activities of the relatives.
As the most primitive economic phase Karl Bücher has set up
- ↑ Hearne 1795; xxx.
- ↑ Dobbs 1744; 8. Ellis 1750; 244, 254 seq. Umfreville 1791; 73.
- ↑ Dobbs 1744; 82.
- ↑ Hearne 1795; 391.
- ↑ Among the inland dwellers proper it has been my experience that some have gone fishing the day after such a ceremony. On the whole the Inland Eskimos are more free in the observation of their taboos than the coast population.
