Franz Boas’s The Central Eskimo is an ethnographic monograph on the Inuit peoples of Arctic North America, published by the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology. It combines Boas’s own fieldwork around Cumberland Sound and Davis Strait with reports from earlier explorers and whalers, and it moves systematically through geography, tribal distribution, hunting technology, domestic life, religion, and oral literature. The book is a work of descriptive anthropology, written in the late nineteenth century from the standpoint of a participant-observer who measured, mapped, collected, and recorded as he traveled.
“The only thing one can do is to wait until their wrath has abated and to clear the traces.”
Boas opens by stating his method plainly: the account rests chiefly on his own observations and collections, supplemented where his material fell short by the collections of C. F. Hall, W. Mintzer, and L. Kumlien. He explains his orthography, which follows Kleinschmidt’s system rather than inventing a new alphabet, and he lists the travelers whose works he quotes. From there the book establishes the physical setting—the granite hills, the Silurian strata, the ice cap that sends glaciers into Pangnirtung and Davis Strait—and argues that the land ice governs everything: it provides winter communication and controls the distribution of seals, and therefore regulates where people can live.
From Baffin Land to the Back River Estuary
The Making of a Smithsonian Report
Franz Boas opens by explaining how the volume came together. Most of what follows rests on his own observations and collections from a journey to Cumberland Sound and Davis Strait, filled out with reports from other travellers; his geographical findings were published separately, some traditions the Bureau judged unsuitable went to a Berlin society’s proceedings, and the linguistic material was reserved for another publication. Since he could not carry most of his own collection home, he leaned on the holdings of C. F. Hall, W. Mintzer and L. Kumlien, thanked Otis T. Mason for access to the National Museum, and noted that his own collection sat in Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde. A list of authorities follows, running from Frobisher and the Ross and Parry voyages through Rae, M’Clintock, Hall, Rink, Klutschak, Gilder, Bessels, Kumlien and Petitot. For spelling he adopted Kleinschmidt’s orthography rather than invent a new alphabet, marking accents and vowel lengths where useful and keeping original spellings in quotations whose meaning remained clear.
The Arctic Stage and the Rule of Ice
The Central Eskimo occupy nearly the whole Arctic coast of America, with the groups described here living in the northeast and the eastern islands as far as Smith Sound, the northernmost land man has reached. Their southern and western limits lie near Fort Churchill, the middle Back River and the coast west of Adelaide Peninsula, where they border Indian tribes on generally hostile terms. Boas sketches the geography that shapes their lives: Hudson Bay dividing Labrador from the Arctic rivers, Rae Isthmus joining Melville Peninsula to the continent, Baffin Land between Fury and Hecla Strait and Hudson Strait, and a landscape of granite hills and Silurian strata, including the ice-capped highland he named Penny Highland, whose glaciers reach the sea. Land ice, he stresses, is the governing fact—it provides winter roads and controls where seals go, and so controls where people can live.
The Seasonal Round
The year turns on the animals. When winter ends, families leave snow houses for small tents until enough sealskins are secured; spring brings abundant seals, salmon run down the rivers and settlements rise at fjord heads; in July the snow melts and the people go inland after reindeer for skins and fawn meat; walrus and harp seals return with the breaking ice, and birds swarm. Before the sea freezes they come back from the deer hunt to autumn food caches, making only short excursions through the storm season, and winter confines them to huts, dependent on the seal, with blubber replacing shrubs as fuel.
Classifying the Tribes
Boas takes up Rink’s fivefold division of the Inuit—Greenlanders, the central tribes of Smith Sound, Baffin Land, western Hudson Bay, Back River and Boothia, the Labradorians, the Mackenzie and the Alaska groups—but doubts that the central and Labrador peoples differ enough to warrant separate classes, since the natives on both shores of Hudson Strait appear closely related. He postpones a verdict until Lucien M. Turner’s Fort Chimo observations are published.
Baffin Land: The Northern Shore of Hudson Strait
The tribal survey begins with Baffin Land. The Sikosuilarmiut, “inhabitants of the shore without an ice floe,” live at Nurata and Sikosuilaq and summer in the Sarbaq and Sarbausirn fjords, hunting deer on plains that reach toward Fox Basin; only once, in 1883, did Eskimo from Lake Nettilling meet people supposed to come from Hudson Strait. The Akuliarmiut hold the northern shore of the strait, wintering west of Qeqertuqdjuaq (Parry’s North Bluff) and travelling by White Bear Sound or Lesseps Bay to Lake Amaqdjuaq, with another winter residence at Quaiirnang in North Bay. East of them, near Lake Qaumauang, live the Qaumauangmiut; Boas notes that accurate charts matter, because the Eskimo read a well-drawn chart readily. Traffic between Sikosuilaq and Akuliaq is moderate, perhaps stirred by an American whaling station at Akuliaq, and whalers count roughly fifty people at Sikosuilaq, two hundred at Akuliaq and fifty farther east—some three hundred on the strait’s north shore. The Qaumauangmiut probably stand close to the Nugumiut of Frobisher Bay.
The Nugumiut of Frobisher Bay
Hall’s two winters of 1860–62 supply the Nugumiut material, though he left no coherent account of their life. Four places are occupied almost every winter: Tornait (Jones Cape), Operdniving and Tuarpukdjuaq in Countess of Warwick Sound, Nugumiut in Field Bay, and Ukadliq in Grinnell Bay. Because these bays open on Davis Strait, the ice forms late and harpoon sealing on the floe is the only work; near Ukadliq the tide holes east and west of Allen Island teem with seals, and the village shifts near Roger’s Island for the winter. In autumn they linger in Field Bay while the women work up deerskins, since religion forbids starting the walrus hunt before the summer skins are dressed; then they cross Bayard Taylor Pass to Frobisher Bay, settling in mid-December or early January at Operdniving or Tuarpukdjuaq, sometimes at Aqbirsiarbing (Cape True), and avoiding the dangerous tide holes of Lupton Channel by way of a pass from Chappell Inlet. About mid-March some travel up the bay; in mid-April 1862 Hall found a settlement on Gabriel Island, and toward month’s end parties went northwest after basking seals, hoping to reach the bay’s head in July. Hall also recorded summer camps at Ukadliq, Field Bay, and on Frobisher Bay at Agdlinartung, Opera Glass Point, Waddell Bay and Nuvuktualung on Beecher Peninsula.
Routes That Bind the Tribes Together
Lake Amaqdjuaq is a crucial hunting ground for the people of Tiniqdjuarbiusirn (Frobisher Bay); the route from the bay’s head runs about fifty miles, probably up the Sylvia Grinnell River to Lake Amartung, whose brook flows west into Amaqdjuaq, while the women take a different line, arriving after six days’ tramp at Aqbeniling near Metja, where summer huts go up and birds and deer are killed in plenty. The lake’s accessibility lets Akuliarmiut and Nugumiut meet and opens intercourse: Hudson Strait people leave Tuniqten in spring, reach the head of Frobisher Bay in autumn and come by sledge to the Nugumiut settlements once the ice sets. When Hall wintered in Field Bay a travelling party of Sikosuilarmiut arrived, having covered the distance from King Cape in a single year.
At the Breathing Hole
The hunt begins in silence and ritual. A hunter marks the exact centre of a seal’s breathing hole in the snow, then seals the opening with small blocks of snow, taking obsessive care: even a hair from his clothing must not fall in, since its smell is believed to frighten the animal. Because the game is invisible beneath the snow, only a stroke driven precisely into the marked centre will strike it. He cuts away the thick covering and heaps loose snow around the harpoon end planted on that point; when he pulls the weapon free, the hole left behind becomes his target. If he expects a quick return he spreads a young seal’s skin to stand on for warmth, fastens the line to the shaft, coils it in his left hand, grips the harpoon in both, and waits for hours until he hears blowing. Then he rises and drives downward, paying out line while holding the end loop. The seal is usually struck near the head; a slipping hitch releases the line, and if the line runs through the fitting the harpoon itself is dragged into the water and hampers the animal. The hunter cuts the snow with his knife, hauls the line, dispatches the seal at the surface, and draws it onto the ice.
For long waits he builds a semicircular wall of snow blocks against the wind, with a central seat, a skin underfoot, and his legs tied with a thong closed by a two-holed buckle that a strong effort opens quickly while keeping him still. The snow knife sits at his right, the harpoon on two pegs at his left, the coil in his lap; his left arm is drawn from its sleeve, the sleeves held by a piece of deer’s horn branched like a hook. Hearing breathing, he reinserts his arm, takes the coil, picks up the harpoon, rises, and strikes. Ross and Rae both hold that sealing at the hole is harder by daylight than in darkness; the author doubts any difference when the snow lies deep, since the Davis Strait Eskimo never complain of daylight. A thin knobbed rod of whalebone, the qipekutang, stuck through the snow into the water, warns of the seal’s approach by its movements; a string attachment is possible but natives avoid it, as it often scares the seals.
Once the carcass is drawn out, wounds are closed with ivory plugs carried in a wooden or leathern case, pushed under the skin and tied; a rarer form has the skin drawn over the plug and tied over a screw thread. A thong is passed through a hole cut beneath the lower jaw and secured with a toggle whose drilled hole widens at the lower end to seat a knot, its points pressed into the flesh; the Eskimo carve these in seal shapes, and one specimen serves as both toggle and handle. A whirl sometimes keeps the line from tangling—Kumlien’s Cumberland Sound specimen held a ball in a hollow body that could not be pulled through the openings. The captured seal is dragged to the sledge, covered with bearskin, lashed, and freezes quickly, and the hunter sits on it. If a seal blows soon after his arrival a second may be taken, but generally the day is far spent by the first kill. Water holes are visited in winter, especially by hunters with firearms, who lie on the tide’s lower side, shoot the blowing seal, and secure it with the harpoon as it drifts to the ice edge; these holes can only be worked at spring tides, since a treacherous floe partly covers the opening between tides.
The Young-Seal Season and the Creeping Hunt
In March, when seals bring forth their young, the pups are eagerly pursued. Pregnant females excavate five to ten feet under the snow with the diving hole at one end, preferring snowbanks, rough ice, or cracks in grounded ice. Hunters set out on light sledges with a few dogs that take the scent and stop at the hole; the hunter breaks the roof, cutting off retreat if he can. The mother generally escapes, but the awkward pup is taken, or, if very young, cannot enter the water at all; it is drawn out with a hook and killed by stepping on its breast. Sometimes the natives cruelly lure the dam by tying a thong to the pup’s hind flipper and throwing it into the hole; it dives crying and is pushed back when it rises to breathe, and the mother returns to draw it away, whereupon she is harpooned. Foxes also drag young seals from the excavations, leaving only the skin for the Eskimo to find.
As the sun warms, seals break down the snow roofs and bask beside their holes, and the young stay with their dams until late June. This yields a new and easier method: the hunter approaches from windward to within seventy or eighty yards, lies down on a piece of skin under his left arm—protecting him from melting snow, speeding him up, deadening noise—and creeps forward on his left arm and side, pushing with his right foot. While the seal looks around he lies flat and still, or imitates its movements with head, hands, and feet; some utter blowing-seal sounds, or use a small sledge with a white screen. Sealskin clothing makes man and seal alike.
Weapons, Quivers, and the Deer Stalk
Slate arrowheads were formerly general; now heads are almost everywhere iron or tin, riveted or tied to the point, though flint heads turn up in ancient graves and stone heads are still used on Southampton Island. The quiver is sealskin with the hair removed, a larger division for the bow and a smaller one for four or six arrows, heads toward the lower end, with a small pouch between for tools and spare heads; travelling Eskimo carry it by an ivory handle, and in use it hangs over the left shoulder, one handle fashioned in imitation of an ermine.
Deer that cannot be driven into water are stalked or shot from a stand. On open plains two men hunt together, the second hiding behind the first, bows or guns carried on the shoulders to resemble antlers, imitating grunting and approaching slowly; when the deer look about, they sit down, the second lying almost flat. Ross reports the Boothia inhabitants imitating deer, the foremost bearing a deer’s head. Hunters hide behind stones in the herd’s path and wait; after the first shot the deer stand a few seconds in surprise, so a clever hunter may kill two or three. On level ground they raise stone heaps or curved walls and allure the animals by grunting, always approaching from the lee side because of the deer’s fine scent. Parry, confirmed by Hall, describes two men walking directly away from the deer, which follows; one hides behind a large stone with his bow while the other leads the deer within range. In winter deer are caught in snow holes covered with slabs, sometimes baited with urine or salt-water ice; falling through, they are speared.
Sedna and the Mastery of the Sea Animals
The mother and protectress of the sea animals keeps them confined beneath the world, and when scarcity comes it is the angakok who must visit her and release them. Cutting away her hand or her charm frees the creatures in stages: the nails give up the bears, the first joint the netsiq, the second the ugjuq, the whole knuckles the walrus herds, and the lower metacarpal bones the whales. Her fine house resembles a European looking-glass and holds plenty of food, with a large tailless dog, black about the hindquarters, guarding the entrance passage. Aiviliajoq herself is tall and one-eyed, black hair covering the other eye, a single huge pigtail twice the length of an arm hanging to her knee, her hood always up. Her father is boy-sized and quiet, one-armed, wearing a large bearskin mitten; he owns a fine house ringed by howling walrus and bears, eats nothing and needs nothing, unlike his voracious daughter, and as patron of the land animals he withholds them. His name, Anautalik, means “the man with something to cut.” Sedna’s other name is Uinigumisuitung, “she who would not have a husband,” and her father is Savirqong, “the man with the knife,” often called Anguta.
Boas identifies Nuliajoq with Sedna, but Lyon’s version mixes the Sedna myth with the angakok’s visit to Arnaquagsaq, the old woman who dwells in the ocean, sits before a lamp with an oil vessel, sends out or withholds the animals, and has the head parasites relieved by the visiting angakok, who passes on the way the Arsissut, a slippery turning wheel, a boiling kettle full of seals, terrible animal guards, and a knife-edge bridge. Rink’s Greenland tale has Arnaquagsaq’s grandfather cut off her fingers, which became the sea animals. Sedna’s story is likewise confused with the origin of Europeans and the Adlet: she orders her dog to gnaw off her father’s feet, and the dog is called Nuliajoq’s husband by some, father of the Erqigdlit and the Qadlunait. A walrus-and-reindeer origin tale credits a woman, probably Sedna, with creating them from fat during a famine; the deer’s teeth were knocked out and its tail kicked off, and her hatred of deer explains the taboos against mixing sea and land foods. The Akudnirmiut variant has boots become deer and breeches become walrus, an old man transferring horns to the deer and tusks to the walrus.
The Worlds of the Dead
Sedna rules Adlivun, called Idliragijenget when invoked; her house has no deerskins, her immobile one-eyed father Anguta lies on the ledge, and her dog lies at the threshold. The dead seized by Anguta stay a year, pinched. Qudlivun, the heaven above, abounds with deer, and the paired names Adlivun and Qudlivun imply graded worlds. Hall reports the Qudliparmiut as bright and happy and the Adliparmiut as dark, cold, and stormy; the good, kind, and happy, or those violently killed or suicidal, go up, while the bad and murderers go down. Boas rejects Kumlien as untrustworthy, having transferred Greenland tales to Cumberland Sound. Lyon describes four descending stages, the lowest Adli the best, the first three with a sky so low one cannot stand erect, wandering distressed souls suffering “fidgets,” and the lowest Adli enjoying perpetual summer. All who die by accident or violence, and women dying in childbirth, go to the upper world; murderers and offenders never leave Sedna’s house, while others pass on to Adliparmiut. Cranz’s Greenland accounts conflict with one another, one placing the good land below under tornarsuq, another in heaven by way of the rainbow. Rink prefers the under world; the upper world is cold, its souls playing ball with a walrus head and causing the aurora. Davis Strait souls linger three days before going to Sedna, and during their Adlivun stay the soul is a tupilaq, malevolent and shabbily clothed, killing by touch and causing sickness; once adliparmio it rests. The Greenland tupilaq, a man-made destroying being of mixed animal parts, is not found among the Central Eskimo.
Tornait and the Work of the Angakut
Everything has its inua, which may become a man’s tornaq. Three protector spirits exist—men, stones, and bears—and the bears are the most powerful. Stone tornait live in hollow bowlders, one of them a one-eyed woman; rolling stones address the native and wabble along leglessly. The bear tornaq is hairless except at the ear and tail tips and the mouth; the solitary seeker summons bears and must fall face-forward, since backward means death, and a bear asks to be his tornaq, catching a seal on the way home. No images are made; amulets are worn on the back of the inner jacket—an owl feather, a bear tooth, iron.
The season is busy for the wizards, who sing and pray in every hut, conjuring spirits. The angakoq sits in gloom, throws off his outer coat, draws his hood over his head, mutters unnatural sounds, and in trance promises help against the tupilaq and tells the frightened Inuit how to escape ghosts. Driving away Sedna is reserved for the most powerful: a rope is coiled on the floor leaving a small opening like a seal’s breathing hole, two angakut stand by with spear and harpoon line, and another lures her with a magic song. She emerges through the rocks, is harpooned, and sinks away drawing the harpoon after her; the two men hold fast until she tears free and returns to Adlivun, leaving only the blood-sprinkled harpoon, proudly shown to the Inuit.
The Great Festival and the Qailertetang
After Sedna and the other evil spirits are driven off, a great festival follows. Because the wounded Sedna is enraged and may seize anyone found outside his hut, all wear protecting amulets on their hoods, made from parts of the first garment worn after birth. Men assemble early, running screaming and jumping around the houses following the sun’s course, while a few dressed in women’s jackets run opposite—those born in abnormal presentations. They visit every hut, and the woman of the house throws out a dish of meat, ivory trinkets, and sealskin articles for the yelling crowd. The crowd divides into ptarmigans, born in winter, and ducks, children of summer, who tug a sealskin rope; if the ptarmigans give way, summer has won and fine weather may be expected.
The women then bring a kettle of water and each person takes a drinking cup.
The organizing idea beneath the book’s mass of detail is that Inuit life is a precise adjustment to a difficult environment, and that nearly every custom can be read as a response to the seasonal movements of animals. Boas returns again and again to the seal as the hinge of existence: winter confines people to huts and dependence on the breathing hole, blubber replaces shrubs as fuel, and the failure of the whale fishery—abandoned or yielded to European and American whalers—shrinks the food supply that once let families winter in the fjords. The same logic explains the migrations he documents. When the Ugjulirmiut obtained metals and wood from the Franklin wrecks, the Netchillirmiut began visiting King William Land and moved westward, intermingling with their neighbors until the two tribes could scarcely be separated. Boas draws the conclusion carefully, noting the disharmony among his sources and refusing to claim more than the evidence supports.
Against any notion of the Inuit as a people without order, the book assembles a portrait of considerable intellectual life. The people distinguish constellations, reckon a thirteen-month calendar and correct it by dropping a month when the new moon and winter solstice coincide, and draw charts so accurate that Boas can compare them with his own and find every point recognizable. Their poetry is strict in form, divided into alternating verses, regulated by syllable quantity rather than accent, and set to melodies that are binary, triple, or mixed. Almost every man has his own song. The tales—Kiviung’s escapes, the blind boy who becomes a whale hunter and turns his mother into a narwhal, the visitor who lets the witch’s poisoned soup fall through him—are recited as recitatives, some in rhythmic prose, some with songs embedded, and Boas treats their narration as an art requiring skill.
Religion receives the same close attention. Sedna, the mother of the sea animals, holds them below until an angakok harpoons her and sends her back to Adlivun; her father Anguta, one-armed and boy-sized, withholds the land animals. The dead go up to Qudlivun or down to Sedna’s house according to how they lived and died, and the sources conflict on the details—Boas weighs Lyon, Cranz, Rink, and Hall against one another and rejects Kumlien’s account as untrustworthy, since Kumlien transferred Greenland tales to Cumberland Sound. The great autumn festival, with its ptarmigan-and-duck tug of war, its naming of birthplaces over a water cup, and the masked qailertetang who pair men with women and are then ritually “killed” and revived to answer questions about the future, is described in full, and Boas gently corrects Kumlien’s misunderstanding of what the ceremony means.
What gives the book its lasting weight is the seriousness with which it treats its subjects as makers of tools, maps, poems, and arguments. Boas records the snow knife and the tutareang buckle, the toggle carved in the shape of a seal, the whalebone snare and the ice-house fox trap, and he defends the much-criticized dog harness on the grounds that other methods would break the sledge on rough ice. The result is a portrait of a culture rendered through its own techniques and categories rather than through European judgments—an approach that would shape the anthropology that followed.
