* * *
Where are your white people?
So the trap is set. Northern development is good because, among other advantages, it gives native people a greater range of choice: they will, with educational and industrial advance at the frontier, be able to choose between a life on the land and wage employment. But, we are also told, a life on the land is no longer possible-the population is too large and the renewable resources are insufficient. So federal policy must be directed at creating jobs. Therefore economic development is urgently needed-in order to solve, of course, the Eskimo's problems. . . .
"The younger generation has been educated in the schools and know little or nothing about the skills of hunting and trapping. They are being educated towards a wage employment economy and away from a hunting economy. However, when they go back to their settlements there is little or no wage employment and they don't know how to go out on the land. Something is lost between the older and younger generation. Parents and children no longer understand each other and it is difficult if not impossible to communicate. The older generation used to be respected. Today children tend to take their parents' guidance with a grain of salt."
"On a visit to a summer tent home, I arrived after the mother's daily trip to the store-a daily trip in so far as daily trips can last after pay day. She had purchased the following food items: one can beets, one can asparagus, one small jar pickles, one can apricots, one can tuna fish, one dozen or more tins soft drinks, numerous packages of gum and candy, plus a twenty pound bag of flour and three pounds of shortening. The tins were opened and passed out to individuals in the tent. The person who happened to fall prey to the tin of cold mushy asparagus--took one, tasted it, immediately discarded the entire tin with its contents outside the tent door and moved over to help younger brother devour the delicious sweet pickles. These foods washed down with a tin of Mason's root beer, followed by a package of gum, would be novel for any picnic. However, I thought, something surely must be done here-something long-range, something of a permanent nature-a diet like this will kill them. This type of buying, eating and wasting lasts until paycheque is gone-five to ten days after pay day. Then if hunting is not good or they have not been inspired to hunt, they go back to bannock and tea . . ."
"They have done very little, if anything, to encourage the Natives to develop a habit of saving for hard times. On the contrary, they have encouraged them to go into debt in the off-season for the purpose of compelling them to bring their fur catch to them rather than to a competitor. They have encouraged him to buy non-essentials with whatever money he has left over after paying his previous year's debt. They have neglected to take an interest in seeing that he utilizes his spare time to good advantage and, in general, have been quite satisfied to see him live a hand to mouth existence as long as he serves their purpose-that is-brings in the fur. It is true that there is the odd exception to this and there are a few Native trappers who have a few thousand dollars credit today. Yet, on the other hand, there is a Native who has sold as much as $65,000.00 of white foxes in one season who has today less than $100.00 in the bank. This same Native has a movie camera sold him by a trusted merchant."
"In the Northwest Territories as a whole, there has been an alarming increase in the suicide rate among teenagers and young adults. In 1983 for example, there were 21 reported suicides, for a rate of 43.1 per 100,000, which is significantly above the national average. Although they constitute only 35 percent of the territorial population (including Nunavut, which is now a separate independent region), Inuit account for slightly over half the suicides (11 male and 2 female). Examination of the age distribution of these suicides reveals that young people account for the vast majority, with 8 in the fifteen-to-twenty-four age range and 4 in the twenty-five-to-thirty-four age range.
When I stepped into one of the older ones [homes], both my sense of smell and sight were assaulted . . . the place reeked. At the opposite end of the small, cluttered room two sets of iron bunk beds, with crumpled, ragged and filthy blankets hit my eyes. Two small children, one with a torn dirty undershirt and wet, smelling diapers, the other in equally grubby cotton clothing, sat on the kitchen table, with their smiling faces dribbling with the chocolate bars they were munching. The mother of the house was kneeling on the heaving floor which was littered with dirty dishes, pop cans and small parts of a motor toboggan that had obviously been brought into the house to be fixed. She was skinning a rabbit and upon my entrance she got up, wiped her hands on her cotton dress, beamed broadly at me and offered me tea."
[NOTE: Housing in the Arctic has improved a bit since Cameron's home visit.]
"In addition to danger of offending particular species, Inuit [were] concerned with more general danger of offending [the] goddess in charge of all sea animals,"
"Sedna proud girl who refuses all suitors; finally goes off with seabird who promises the good life. She finds this not so (tent of fish-skins instead of sealskins, food of old fish instead of mammals, etc.). Other seabirds (non-kin) mistreat her, she is hungry and cold, calls to father to rescue her. Father takes her away after killing her bird-husband, but other birds find out, follow boat, create giant storm. Father throws Sedna overboard to save own life, cuts fingers off (1st joints = whales; 2nd joints = ringed seals; 3rd = bearded seals; stump = walrus)
"Sedna (aka Tak?nakapsluk) goes to dwell in sea, becomes ruler of sea mammals. She can withhold animals (via storms, etc.) or make them abundant. If taboos are broken by Inuit, her long hair becomes clogged with filth, she grows angry and withholds game. If appeased (by good behavior, or by shaman's journey), prey are plentiful."
"The province claims ownership of the water while the federal government claims jurisdiction over the fisheries. It has been our experience that in practice, while both governments will jealously guard these rights against . . . Indian residents, they are quite prepared to give them away to large corporations to the great risk of other users and for uncertain or ill-defined economic benefits . . . "
"when a mine dries up, so does the town."
"The aptly named Hub of the North [the Hay River] provides roadways, railways and waterways to the companies looking to harvest the riches beneath the roughly 100 miles of rugged tundra between the 60th parallel and the Arctic Circle",
"the trademark of the Northwest Territory" [that is, the 'Inushuks' or 'rock figures'] . . "It's what Eskimos used to put on the land because it was just flat tundra; that's what they would use as a kind of navigational point."
"[T]he Dene Indians, . . . in the 1940s, were employed to carry radioactive uranium ore from the mines near Deline (the called Port Radium). Their cancer rates skyrocketed due to lack of safety procedures that were available to their white colleagues."
[Barsh (1994) describes Canada's reliance on extractive industries and exports of raw materials (to the U.S.) with its need for] "cheap resources . . . " [in] "a sparsely populated frontier . . . " [and its subsequent abuse of native rights, as it developed policies that kept aboriginals inferior in terms of labor and land use rights; aboriginal Canadians fall in the] "medium development range" [together with] "people in such countries as Cuba, Paraguay, and Iraq."
Hobart (1984) indicates that ill health is not usually associated with development in general. However, short-term employment, such as in mining, brings a temporary boom followed by some problems during the fall; as a result of the boom, people change their subsistence activities as they are able to buy new snowmobiles, boats, hunting and fishing gear. The effects of the new technical gear and the associated technologies, the ebb and flow of the hunting/fishing implements purchased with cash from short term industry on the long-term ecology, are not addressed by Hobart. Hobart observes that other influences that come with arctic development include the media, and changing dietary habits; however, traditional local foods, rich in the fats needed in the cold winter, may be essential to life in the arctic according to other authors, and various native advocates, and some native peoples have returned to the land after finding failing health and poor conditions in the settlements. Hobart states that limited numbers of Northern Native people have also been affected by "environmental impacts" such as "hearing impairment, industrial accidents, and illness or poisoning due to toxic chemicals . . . in urban industrialized society"
A century ago, explorers observed an Arctic haze, but did not know what caused it. In the 1970's, scientists examined the chemistry of the Arctic haze and determined that it has a human origin. Using the proportions of lead isotopes in the haze as a chemical fingerprint, the scientists concluded that most of the pollution came from Russia and Eastern Europe (Phillips 1995).
In a process called global distillation, pollutants volatize into the air in warmer areas and condense out of the air in colder areas, so these pollutants tend to be transferred from the South to the North. Pollutants such as PCBs are easily transferred this way. Also, pollutants that might decompose into less harmful chemicals do so slower in colder regions, so they tend to accumulate in the Arctic (Pearce 1997).
Although most people view the Arctic as pristine lands unaffected by human activities, pollution in the Arctic is a big problem. Scientists agree that the level of contamination in Arctic food webs is "alarming". Some trace metals have reached concentrations in mammal tissues that exceed levels the Environmental Protection Agency predicts will cause organ malfunction (Davis 1996). Pollution sources include the transport of organohalogens by global distillation; oil and gas drilling and coal and metal-ore mining throughout the Arctic; and dumping of radioactive wastes in the Arctic Ocean by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Arctic is especially vulnerable to pollutants because of their slow degradation in the cold Arctic environment (Jaffe et. al. 1994)."
Steve Lindberg and Steve Brooks ask: Is mercury a significant contaminant in the Arctic?
(Is the Arctic a missing sink for mercury?: New measurements of mercury speciation and depletion events at Point Barrow)
My thoughts went constantly
To the great land my thoughts went constantly.
The game, bull caribou those,
Thinking of them I thought constantly.
My thoughts went constantly,
to the big ice my thoughts went constantly.
The game, bull caribou those,
Thinking of them my thoughts went constantly.
My thoughts went constantly,
To the dance-house my thoughts went constantly.
The dance-songs and the drum,
Thinking of them my thoughts went constantly.
What I can remember, I will say;
What I do not remember, I will not say.
I cannot read and write.
Before the white man came, we were bush people.
When they came, where we lived,
they said, "this is my land."
And we have no more.
We can't read and write.
We can only remember it.
* * *
The Inuvialuit are related to the Inuit people of Nunavut and Greenland and to the Yup'ik of Alaska and Siberia. They live above the tree line, in the arctic tundra. Before they lived in European-style settlements, they occasionally ventured into the forest below the tree line, to forage. Their primary means of sustenance was fishing. They also hunted and foraged for berries and herbs.
The Inuvialuit live along the Northern coast of the Northwest Territories, and on Victoria Island, to the North. Life on the land, particularly in the arctic, was in the past--and to a large extent still is--governed by the seasonal cycles.
The Inuvialuit lived in permanent houses of sod and rock. The houses were covered with an insulating layer of moss. Because wood was plentiful in the Northwest Territories, and available to the Inuvialuit, the frames for these houses were constructed of wood (that is, the sod blocks were supported by wooden planks), while frames for Inuit houses--to the east, in what is now Nunavut--were constructed of whalebone.
The back room in the houses had a large platform for sleeping. The front room served for cooking, eating, and socializing. This room was heated with a lamp carved of soapstone that used fish or seal oil. This lamp served as well as a cooking stove and a light. The Inuvialuit entered their home through an underground tunnel that prevented the cold air from entering and the hot air from escaping. A window pane was constructed of ice or animal intestine.
In the spring, before the ice melted, the Inuvialuit hunted for seals through the sea ice. They lived on the ice in temporary ice houses, called "igloos." Because these would melt if overheated, these were heated to only 32 degrees fahrenheit.
In the summer, the Inuvialuit followed the rivers and sometimes the sea coast, as they fished. They camped in tents at various sites. They dried fish on racks and smoked them in ovens. Some were preserved in oil and grasses in underground food caches, just as Kawagley (1995) has described in his study of his native Yup'ik tribe of Alaska. The Inuvialuit also gathered berries and herbs.
During the winter, the Inuvialuit spent much of their time indoors, singing, dancing, sewing, or carving. Whales were less available in the central arctic where the Inuvialuit lived than they were elsewhere--as it was far from both the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Inuvialuit however did obtain the ivory-like bones of small whales, and use these for carving various designs.
Like their Inuvialuit neighbors to the north, the Dene's life was governed by the seasons. The flow of the rivers was particularly critical to the Dene.
In the summer the Dene, like the Inuvialuit neighbors, followed the rivers and even the sea coast, in search of fish. Because a supply of food was critical to survival in the arctic winter, sometimes the northern Dene tribes (such as the Doghrib; see below) and the Inuvialuit raided each other's underground caches of fish.
In the early fall, the Dene gathered rice along the riverbanks.
Unlike the Inuvialuit, the Dene never lived on Victoria Island, but they did live on the Northern coast of the NWT!
Dene tribes include the G'wich'en, Doghrib, Deh Cho, and Slavey (North and South) Nations. The Doghrib and Inuvialuit were generally antagonistic toward each other, and Doghrib raids on the Inuvialuit and on closely related tribes in Alaska are described in elders' narratives. In recent times the two groups have negotiated some.
To learn about Doghrib migration routes along the Idaa Trail (from the Great Slave to the Great Bear Lake) see (interactive journey made available through the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Center)
The Metis are the descendants of French-speaking fur traders and Cree women. Originally from the Great Lakes (Ontario) area, they moved west and helped set up the fur trade in the Northwest Territories. When they came to the Northwest Territories, after a dispute over a war, they intermarried with the Dene peoples. The language these people spoke was Michif, a mixture of Cree, Dene, and French. Such mixtures are knowns as "Creoles" or "Patois." The Metis introduced into the Northwest Territories traps, trap line management, and other new hunting technologies, as well as new markets, according to the Sahtu Dene & Metis First Nation.
Scotch-Irish Metis settled later, still farther North.
Because Russian traders and trappers also settled in the Northwest, some Indians also intermarried with Russians.
Then, in the late 1940's and early 1950's, additional Metis from the Prairies, who spoke a mixture of Cree and French, and who were for the most part already related to Metis in the area, settled with Hay River area Metis fishermen--in the south.
Unlike their full-blood Dene and Inuvialuit neighbors, the Metis did not hunt in the bush with their families--until Canadian land policy forced this on them.
The discovery of oil at Norman Wells in 1920 served as the catalyst for Canada's renewed interest in dispossessing Dene and Metis of the Mackenzie River Basin (The Northwestern part of the Northwest Territories' mainland) of their rights to lands and resources. An excellent discussion of the land use policy changes is available online; see "Geography, Aboriginal Land Claims, and Self-government in Canada" (Fall, 1995), International Journal of Canadian Studies 12: Aboriginal Peoples and Canada, www.csj.ualberta.ca/iec-csi/index.php/download_file/view/60/! (This ia an adobe .pdf document.)
* * *
The Inuvialuit are related to the Inuit of Nunavut and Greenland, and to the Y'upik of Alaska. There are related peoples in Northern Siberia as well.
The Dene speak a language that belongs to the "Na Dene" family; it's related to Navajo and Apache, spoken far to the South.
When I was enrolled in a linguistics course, I had access to a computer at night to do my research on. My research at the time had little to do with the Inuit but I happened to be interested in the Inuit people and language (except that it's cold much of the time that far north), and started trying to find out what I could about the Inuit language.
Many of the people who are neighbors to the Inuit speak various Samoyed languages (and live where the Samoyed dogs come from). I could not get data on the Samoyed languages, but got a bit of data on a related language, Hungarian, and noted slight similarities in the verb endings in Hungarian and Inuit! Otherwise, there did not seem to be much vocabulary in Inuit related to Hungarian--but of course, I did not have much data!
The Inuit and Inuvialuit and others who speak related languages stress how different they are genetically from their "Indian" neighbors (they are; there's been a lot of warfare between the neighboring groups but apparently not much intermarriage and adoption).
The verb endings in Inuit are a bit reminiscent of verb endings in some languages in the Uralic language family (which includes Finnish, Hungarian, and various languages spoken in the Arctic, such as those spoken by the Sami, primarily in Northern Scandinavia, and those spoken by the Samoyed, primarily in Siberia!)
Many groups, when they adopt a new language, retain many of their native language's word endings and other markers (as far as I can tell, this happens in some varieties of English spoken by Hispanic children and also this happens in some Pidgins and Creoles), and so, perhaps, when the dog-sled tradition got to the Arctic in 0 to 1000 AD, the people who came brought their dogs from Siberia, spoke a Samoyed or related language, but adopted another Arctic language and added some of their word endings to it. (If this is the case, wouldn't there be some words in Inuit for sleds and dogs that are related to words in Samoyed???)
Probably the Dene and other people were living in the Arctic already at the time. However, the Inuit language does not seem to be closely related to the Dene language the way the Navajo and Apache languages are, so there was probably another language group in the Arctic that became the basis for Inuit.
Inuit Verb Endings
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_grammar)
|
|
Singular |
Dual |
Plural |
|
1rst Person |
tunga |
tuguk |
tugut |
|
2nd Person |
tutit |
tusik |
tusi |
|
3rst Person |
tuq |
tuuk |
tut |
(Alternately these can be junga, juguk, jugut, jutit, jusik, jusi, juq, juuk, jut; whether the verb suffix begins with 't' or 'j' depends on the sound that comes before!)
Hungarian Verb Endings
(from http://www.personal.psu.edu/adr10/hu4.html)
|
|
Singular |
Plural |
|
1rst Person |
dom |
juk |
|
2nd Person |
dod |
jak |
|
3rd Person |
ja |
jak |
(NOTE that the letters d/t/j alternate in the Hungarian endings; "d" and "t" alternate in many languages [indeed, both are pronounced in the same place in the mouth]! The letters t/j alternate in Inuit.
NOTE also that nasal sounds, such as the "n" in the Inuit 'tunga' and the "m" in the Hungarian 'dom' are found in the 1rst person forms of verbs in many languages--for example the "m" in the English verb 'am!'
To me the Inuit dual [formed with 'j'--juguk, jusik, juuk] looks a bit like the Hungarian plural but maybe the 'k' ending is just coincidence; it would be better, of course, if I had data from the Siberian [Samoyed] languages . . . )
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(Background on this page from hellas multimedia clipart. Page last updated February, 2011.)