Extinction of the Eskimo?
By MICHAEL GRAHAM
THE question in my title arises from piecing together information in some books on the " travel " shelves, including a new one by Farley Mowat. Another new book may prove to be relevant, Joan Newhouse's about the Lapps, because those people have progressed so as to live pastorally off an Arctic animal, the reindeer, whereas the Eskimos are still hunters. Both are gentle peoples. Both, by the way, spoil their children.
The question of the survival of the Eskimo has some urgency in relation to the defence of the Western world. If he dies out, our northern marches become virtually unwatched. The Eastern world, by contrast, has not lost its Tchuktchis, Tunguses and many similar tribes. There is reason to believe that these have lately been organised to give the assis- ance necessary to white men in the open country of the Arctic, white soldiers. Also, in the future, women may still want furs.
The tendency towards extinction had been made plain in the earlier books, and Mowat's gives a clear account of how it works. The most obvious harm has been done by fur companies, whalers or sealers, or fishing companies. Mowat tragically shows us how a tribe of probably 2,000 Eskimos, at the turn of the century, shrank to a mere dozen in 1950, and now none. The general history is that the modem agency separates some Eskimo tribe—or a Red Indian tribe—from its staple animal, in association with which all the tribe's skill and joy and conduct have been built up. The staples of the Arctic were caribou (reindeer), seal, white whale, musk ox and walrus. White men's companies have been interested in these, and have usually reduced the population of the animal below the level that would yield subsistence to a hunter, even one armed with a new rifle. But sometimes the lethal cause was simply reliance on a new trade, of flour and ammunition in exchange for fox-pelts, which then failed, and with it the supply of the new food and of ammunition to take the old. Perhaps the worst example was of a " meat-post " buying only the tongues of caribou, in order to stimulate the sales of ammunition.
In this history the Church has not been merely an onlooker. There is evidence that, when alone and with no traders near, missionaries can be as helpful as they certainly deserve to be. But over most of the field they are accused of harm. To take but one example; the nomads' orgiastic assembly once a year must have had great reproductive significance to the small units, otherwise likely to be in-bred and to have a proportion of barren matings, scattered over the wide spaces for the rest of the year. Setting aside, though not as irrelevant, its con- tribution to the joy of life, the meeting must have tended to maintain both numbers and stamina. If any missionary still has similar problems to face, he might do well to ponder on Mowat's account of a dying missionary wIto, in his youth, had converted a tribe of some 3,000 Red Indians, hardy, fear- less and skilful, and after fifty years died among fewer than 200, and they degenerates. Nor can one greatly blame any nineteenth-century man for being smug and unobservant. But their slanders, as they turn out to be, still stand in our way. They need not, if the books are right in what they say. Thus infanticide revolts the Eskimo as much as it does us. It is confined to times of star- vation, and is recognised as tragedy by men and women who are known to be fond of their children to a fault. The honoured suicide of beloved but immobile old people is, under nomadic conditions, the only way out; and is truly mourned. Eskimos, like Lapps, are normally dirty, and eat great quantities of meat at a sitting. According to the physician Gilberg, they should, as they often do, eat it raw, as the sole source of vitamins. Personal dirtiness goes with nomadism; there are settled Eskimos who are spotlessly clean in their persons and houses, and, by the way, their women are chaste.
So much for the slanders : now for the astonishing omissions. As a matter of course the weak or shiftless are looked after in Eskimo society; and, what is characteristic of the whole attitude to possessions, no unspoilt Eskimo would fail to give " his cloak also." De Poncins, greatly surprised, called them, " if I may say so, Christian." Gilberg gave them the highest praise; and Mowat says the same. These observers' samples were thousands of miles apart, and each writes as if his were the original discovery. Indeed, missionaries were required, not to teach. the Eskimo but to learn from him, as Kropotkin learned from his Tunguses. Kropotkin's understanding must be very useful to his less worthy successors, organising such tribes for their own ends.
Official Denmark seems well-satisfied with the results of the conversion of Greenland, and Danish Greenland surely offers a model for half-breed settlements under other flags. But neither Kent nor Gilberg would recommend it as a pattern for " saving the Eskimo." The Greenlanders are charming people, smiling as the Eskimo does, but shabby compared with Gilberg's undiluted neighbours in far-northern Thule, where few Danes had penetrated. The shabbiness is not only a matter of clothes. Kent, who was fond of them, found them " bewildered," because, he thought, they were asked to behave in a way not really " commensurate " with life in the Arctic; but there is still much to learn from Greenland.
Maybe all this is a tale that is told—Russian-trained Tchuktchis notwithstanding—a story for the library shelves. But some score of thousands of Eskimos and northern Red Indians remain, a precarious few hundreds of whom may still be unspoilt. It would seem to be in our interest to rescue them if we can; we could at least leave their staple animals alone. But Mowat has still more constructive suggestions, not necessarily the best. The authors named should certainly be accorded a full hearing; they are among the small handful of people in all the world who have penetrated so deeply.
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