Introduction.
"Caribou Eskimos" is the name which the Fifth Thule Expedition has attached to a group of Eskimo tribes in the southern part of the extensive Barren Grounds west of Hudson Bay. It may be small and unimportant — a handful of people in the middle of the arctic waste — but it has acquired a natural right to be regarded as a complete unity, in that it possesses a culture that is essentially different to all other forms of culture among the otherwise homogeneous Eskimo stock.
In reality, this group comprises the only Eskimos who could with any justification be included in what Wissler calls "the caribou area” in the culture of North America; for in grouping all Eskimos under this head, this eminent ethnographer underrates the fundamental importance of the hunting of aquatic mammals to these other tribes. On the other hand, the importance of caribou hunting as far as the Caribou Eskimos are concerned cannot be rated high enough. To them the caribou occupies at least the same position as the seal and the walrus to their kinsmen, or as the bison of the past to the Plains Indians. The caribou is the pivot round which life turns. When it fails, the mechanism of culture comes to a stop and hunger and cold are the consequences for those tribes which, relying upon it, have created an almost incredibly one-sided culture. And yet it must not be inferred that the word "one-sided" is used deprecatingly. It should be emphasised that up to the present time this culture is the only one that has made these regions habitable, regions where even the Indian caribou hunters are as helpless as children when the winter cold approaches.
