A Man – Aged Twelve
On the trips to the coast, I was beginning to take an interest in exploring the countryside, looking for sites where people camped many years ago. Walking along the shore again at Kittigazuit, I saw arrowheads made of bone, some as long as ten inches. There were smaller ones, too, with barbed ends. And there were harpoon heads and bone knives and bone sinkers for nets.
Especially interesting was a hill I found – about two hundred feet high. When I walked closer I could see it was a hill of whale bones – piled one on top of the other. They looked as if they had been dumped there thousands of years before. Nearby were many old burial grounds. In some of them, you could still see the kayaks, harpoons, knives, and sleds with bone runners that had belonged to the people buried there. They were covered with logs, weather-worn and decayed. There were also many ground squirrels, what we call siksik. I trapped some and my dad cooked the meat. They tasted mossy.
There were night-time stories from dad, about old people long ago. He told us how they used to bury their medicine men. They would build a platform, a big one, and wrap the dead medicine man in caribou skin and place him on the platform so his spirit would be free to help his people. Hunters would make offerings and pray to the medicine man for good hunting…
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Silent Too Long
I remember once, some whales were trapped in the Husky Lakes. We wanted to kill them instead of watching them starve. We knew they would die for sure. But the white man’s law had come and it wouldn’t allow us to do what our senses told us to do. We could have made use of the whales for food, but we could only stand there and watch helplessly for many days until they starved to death. It was a slow, useless death.
At Paulatuk the seal hunting was good. We got a lot of meat and a fair price for the skins. Then, suddenly, the top price for a sealskin dropped to eight dollars. The white man had learned of the value of sealskin and had come in to hunt them. Following that there were the newspaper stories about the clubbing of defenceless baby seals. As a result we heard that a ban on seal hunting was coming. The Eskimo had never clubbed seals, but the ban applied to us as well as the white man. That year we nearly starved, living on a little tom cod fish and not much else. We could not raise enough money to buy ammunition for hunting caribou. We barely made it through the winter.
It is a story of misunderstanding repeated many times from the first time the white man set foot in the North.
A group of early explorers who crossed the Arctic returned home claiming that the Eskimo regarded the white man as an inferior. To support this they quoted the Eskimo word “inuvialuit” – the name we use for our people, meaning “the real man”. It does not mean that we think we are superior. It is simply used as an expression to describe the whole Eskimo family as one… man, woman, and child.
The culture gap, which divides our community from the people in the South, has constantly been underestimated.
