In Order to Live Untroubled: Inuit of the Central Arctic, 1550 to 1940 PDF
Preview In Order to Live Untroubled: Inuit of the Central Arctic, 1550 to 1940
In Order to Live Untroubled This page intentionally left blank IN ORDER TO LIVE UNTROUBLED INUIT OF THE CENTRAL ARCTIC, 1550-1940 RENEE FOSSETT THE UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA PRESS © Copyright Renee Fossett 2001 The University of Manitoba Press Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2 www.umanitoba.ca/uofmpress Printed in Canada. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900,Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6. Cover Design: Steven Rosenberg Text Design: Karen Armstrong and Sharon Caseburg Maps:Weldon Hiebert Cover photograph: Inuit at LittleW hale River, Quebec, c.1865 (NationalA rchives of Canada). Canadian Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Fossett, Renee Evelyn. In order to live untroubled Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88755-171-8 (bound)—ISBN 0-88755-647-7 (pbk.) 1. Inuit—Nunavut—History. 2. Inuit—Nunavut—Social conditions. I. Title. E99.E7F61172001 971.9'5 C2001-910330-1 The publisher would like to thank the Archives and Special Collections, the University of Manitoba Libraries, for permission to reproduce illustrations from the published accounts of George Back, Henry Ellis, Charles Francis Hall, William Gilder, George Lyon, Edward Parry, and John Ross. The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP); the Canada Council for the Arts; the Manitoba Arts Council; and the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism. This book has been published with the assistance of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. To William and Andrew and In Loving Memory of Ussak who told me it was cold in the snowhouse This page intentionally left blank Contents Maps and Illustrations vi Preface ix Acknowledgements xxi Introduction: Asumptions about the Other 3 1. Empty Dishes and Days of Feasting: Human Habitation of Arctic North America to 150 9 2. Strangers Are Necessarily Hostile: War and the Protection of Resources, 150-1670 3 3. Fear when Winter Comes: Migration and the Search for Resources, 1670-170 57 4.The Lands around My Dwelling: Strategies for Social Environments, 170-1790 85 5.The Degree of Cold: Subsistence and Survival, 1790-1830 115 6. Memories of Hunger:W indfalls, Surplus, and Scarcity, 1830-1860 139 7. Skin for Soles, Moss forWicks:The Search for Predictability, 1860-1940 167 8.T he Experience of Dead Generations: Social Organization, Worldview, and Survival 195 Apendixes 23 Endnotes 235 Bibliography 283 Index 329 Maps and Illustrations Map Page xxiv,The Central Arctic Maps Following Page 55 Baffin Island and Foxe Basin Boothia, King William Island,a nd Great Fish River West Hudson Bay Ungava Peninsula and Labrador North Atlantic Hudson Strait and Frobisher Bay Illustrations Following Page 83 Dorset and Thule artifacts Floe-edge sealing at Melville Peninsula, 1824 Breathing-hole sealing at Melville Peninsula, 1824 Dorset house remains Iglulingmiut women's winter clothing, 1822 Iglulingmiut winter village atW inter Island, 1822 Iglulingmiut summer village at Igloolik, 1822 People of the Savage Islands in kayaks, 1800 Umiak, c. 1904 Baffin Islander tools, 1746 Elderly woman emissary Kakikigiu and her two husbands, 1835 niustrations Following Page 137 Inuit sleds, 1860s Ugjulingmiut meet George Back at Great Fish River, 1834 Netsilingmiut and Arvilingjuarmiut meet John Ross, Lord Mayor's Bay, 1830 Fall village, King William Island, 1879 Tookooliktoo and Ipervik, 1864 Hudson's Bay Company trade goods Aivilik Inuit in snowhouse, Fullerton Harbour, 1905 Shaman Preface: Evidence and Methods In the 300 years between the mid-thirteenth and the late sixteenth centu- ries, encounters between the indigenous peoples of the North American arctic and explorers and fishermen from Europe were rare, brief, and often at a distance. Until 1576, few observers recorded what they saw. Between 1576 and 1620, a series of expeditions in search of an ocean passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific produced more than a dozen accounts of meet- ings with arctic dwellers, some of them in great detail.B ecause both parties expected hostility from the other, the meetings were at arm's length, and accounts of them were superficial and often speculative.A fter 1717, when the Hudson's Bay Company established its post at the mouth of the Churchill River, British fur traders began to keep more detailed records of meetings with Inuit. A few traders, such asJ ames Isham and Andrew Graham, pro- duced densely descriptive ethnographies of the Keewatin coast people.The British Admiralty mounted a new and intensive search in 1817 for a far northern sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and more accounts of arctic peoples were added to the descriptive literature. However, no systematic attempts to understand the social and political institutions or the history of the indigenous peoples took place until the 1880s, when both Germany and Denmark sent teams of investigators to study arctic societies as well as arctic climate, geography, and wildlife.F ranz Boas, a recent doctoral graduate specializing in physics, mathematics, and geography, spent June 1883 to August 1884 as surveyor and cartographer with the German expedition to south Baffin Island. In the same years the ethnologist Gustav Holm, with the Danish Polar Expedition, conducted a comprehensive fieldwork study of the people of Ammassalik on Green- land's east coast.
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