Franz Boas’s The Central Eskimo is an ethnographic monograph on the Inuit peoples of northeastern North America and the eastern Arctic islands, published as part of the Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Smithsonian Institution for 1884–1885. It combines Boas’s own observations from his journey to Cumberland Sound and Davis Strait with material drawn from earlier explorers and collectors—Hall, Parry, Lyon, Ross, Rae, Kumlien, Klutschak, Rink, and others—and covers geography, tribal distribution, seasonal movement, hunting and fishing, manufactures, dwellings, clothing, social and religious life, and oral traditions. The book’s arrangement follows the order of the report itself: an introduction and list of authorities, a section on orthography, a geography of northeastern America, a survey of tribal distribution, then chapters on hunting and fishing, manufactures, transportation, habitations and dress, social and religious life, tales and traditions, and science and the arts, closing with a glossary, an appendix of later reports, and an index.
“Directly over the entrance a window is cut through the wall, either square or more frequently forming an arch, which is generally covered with the intestines of ground seals, neatly sewed together, the seams standing vertically (Fig. 493).”
How the Report Moves from Coast to Coast
Editorial Apparatus and the Author’s Own Account of His Sources
The volume opens not with Eskimo life but with the machinery of publication: a Project Gutenberg notice granting free use of the text, the title page identifying the work as part of the Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology for 1884–1885, printed at Washington in 1888, and production credits naming the proofreaders, the Internet Archive, the Bibliothèque nationale de France for images, and a team that transcribed the music. The transcriber’s notes explain the special characters — the guttural χ, marked long vowels, the œ ligature — and warn that a Latin-1 version exists for machines that cannot display them. Parenthetical question marks, we are told, belong to the original; missing punctuation in captions and the glossary has been silently supplied. The orthography follows Kleinschmidt, with q replacing his ĸ, long vowels rarely marked outside the glossary, nasalized finals common, and medial q usually written χ, as in “Eχaluin.”
Boas then introduces his own enterprise. The account rests chiefly on observations and collections made during a journey to Cumberland Sound and Davis Strait, filled out with extracts from other travelers. The geographical results appeared separately in Baffin-Land; traditions the Bureau judged unsuitable were printed in Berlin; linguistic material was reserved for later publication. Unfortunate circumstances prevented him from bringing home most of his collections, so he drew on those of Hall, Mintzer, and Kumlien, and through Otis T. Mason on National Museum specimens, whose catalogue numbers he attaches to the figured objects; his own collection sits in Berlin. A list of authorities follows — Frobisher, the Rosses, the Parrys, Lyon, Rae, M’Clintock, Hall, Rink, Klutschak, Gilder, Egede, Petitot and others — together with his own earlier papers, whose ethnological remarks are embodied here, respelled after a conference with Dr. Rink.
The Country and Its People
A glossary of Eskimo geographic terms is promised on page 662. The Eskimo, Boas begins, inhabit almost the whole coast of Arctic America, and a large part of that coast belongs to the Central Eskimo, one of the great divisions of the people, living in the northeastern part of the continent and on the eastern islands of the Arctic-American Archipelago. In Smith Sound they reach the most northern countries visited by man, and their remains lie even at its northern outlet.
Seasonal Rounds in the Frobisher Bay Country
In late March some Eskimo travel up Frobisher Bay. In mid-April 1862 Hall found a settlement on Gabriel Island, from which the floe edge was visited and young seals caught in the channels between islands; toward month’s end parties went northwest after basking seals, meaning to reach the bay’s head in July. Hall found summer habitations at several points — Field Bay, Opera Glass Point, Waddell Bay, the southern tip of Beecher Peninsula. Lake Amaqdjuaq is an important hunting ground for the Tiniqdjuarbiusirn, reached from Hudson Strait and from Frobisher Bay by a route of about fifty miles, probably by the Sylvia Grinnell River and Lake Amartung. Women take a different road, arriving after six days near Metja, where summer huts are built and birds and deer killed in abundance. The lake’s accessibility lets the Akuliarmiut and Nugumiut meet and opens intercourse between them. Hudson Strait people leave Tuniqten in spring, reach the bay’s head in fall, and come by sledge to the Nugumiut once the ice forms; a party of Sikosuilarmiut reached Field Bay from King Cape in a single year. A boat route connects Qaumauang with the Nugumiut along Hudson Strait through the dangerous passage between Resolution Island and the mainland. Cumberland Sound people generally follow the coast between Ukadliq and Naujateling through the sounds formed by the long narrow islands.
The Oqomiut and Their Four Subtribes
The Davis Strait Eskimo call the Cumberland Sound and Saumia tribes Oqomiut. The land from Prince Regent Inlet to the Nugumiut plateau divides into Aggo, Akudnirn, and Oqo — weather side, center, lee side — giving Aggomiut, Akudnirmiut, Oqomiut. Cumberland Sound and the Davis Strait coast from Cape Mercy to Exeter Sound belong to Oqo. The Padli people occupy an intermediate position and communicate easily with both, so the boundary is arbitrary; by customs and position they may be joined to the Akudnirmiut. The names denote directions and intervals rather than strictly limited regions: Oqo is the southeast, the lee side; Aggo the shore of Prince Regent Inlet, the northwest, weather side. In Cumberland Sound the Iglulik natives count as Aggomiut; in Pond Bay they are a separate tribe.
Formerly the Oqomiut had four subtribes — Talirpingmiut of the west shore, Qinguamiut of the head, Kingnaitmiut of the east shore, Saumingmiut of the southeastern slope of the Saumia highland — named from their districts. Looking from head to entrance, the southwestern coast is Talirpia, “its right one,” the northeastern Saumia, “its left one,” and between Saumia and Qingua lies the higher land of Kingnait. The division is hardly justifiable now, though the four names are often mentioned on the Davis Strait shore; old settlements remain inhabited, but separate tribal identity has vanished through diminished numbers and the whalers’ influence. Boas doubts any great difference ever existed: these were family groups confined to districts and bound by a common life, communities that could develop more easily with large numbers.
Counting a Diminished People
When whalers first wintered in Cumberland Sound the population may have been about 1,500. In 1840, when Penny discovered the sound, he met forty Eskimo at Anarnitung, most inhabitants being away at the fjord heads fishing salmon, whaling, or hunting deer inland; the whole probably numbered 200. A few years later the Kingnaitmiut of Qeqerten manned eighteen whaleboats; reckoning five oarsmen and a harpooner to each, with a wife and two children apiece, gives about 400. Nettilling Fjord may have held as many, and 100 were said to live in Imigen. Penny found about thirty Saumingmiut at Ugjuktung who had come from Davis Strait. Boas estimates the whole tribe at 150. On the southwestern coast between Nuvujen and Naujateling, three settlements were reported to number about 600. All these figures are unreliable — hearsay and conjecture, with many natives away in summer.
The Hunt at the Breathing Hole
Sealing dominates the winter economy, and the harpoon earns its preference because it holds what it strikes. After the throw the hunter leaps forward at once, cutting off the wounded seal’s retreat to its hole; a skilled man may take ten to fifteen in a day. Rae watched Repulse Bay women finish seals with a small wooden club to the nose. Two men usually work together, one creeping toward the animals while the other keeps the dogs quiet, since a lone hunter’s team will follow or howl and ruin the approach. Once a seal is killed the dogs bolt to it and it is lashed to the sledge; hunters sometimes leave dead animals at their holes and gather them on the way home. Sleeping seals can be walked up to without ceremony. Ross describes the Netchillirmiut method, in which eight men advance until the seal lifts its head, those in front shout, and three others run in with the leader driving a spear. Later in the season whole settlements take possession of every hole, men with harpoons and women and children with sticks driving the seals back down.
The Kayak and Its Gear
The kayak runs from Greenland to Alaska, though Bessels reports that the Ita retain the word without the craft. Boas found none between Cape Mercy and Cape Raper on his first visit to Davis Strait, but two were built in the summer of 1884. The Nugumiut, Oqomiut, and Akudnirmiut boats are bulky, twenty-five to twenty-seven feet long and eighty to a hundred pounds; Iglulik craft weigh fifty to sixty pounds by Lyon’s account, Repulse Bay perhaps lighter, and Hall puts some at no more than twenty-five. The frame carries its own vocabulary of gunwale, beams, ribs, keel, and stern projection, and is covered with three or four skins of the rough seal. The gear includes the scraper, the paddle, the large harpoon with its float, pipe, and drag, the lance, and the bird spear with its throwing board.
Summer hunting follows the drifting ice: hunters paddle to a small cake, lift the kayak onto it, and steal up on basking seals or walrus. Lyon’s walrus method is quoted, with lines fastened through holes in a movable hummock and paddled toward the herd, the animals struck and held before being speared from the canoes. When the ice is gone, seals are shot or harpooned; in late summer, when molting seals sink, the harpoon and float become essential. Walrus are struck at a distance and exhausted by float and drag. In Frobisher Bay and Cumberland Sound, seals are ambushed in shoals and inlets, and in fall the edge of the land ice is worked with the unang. Gilder and Hall describe the friction of the line, the spear held fast in the ice, and the dangers of entanglement and drowning. Whaling used kayaks with a large float or skin boats carrying a heavy harpoon, drag, five floats, and a lance; narwhal and white whale are hunted like walrus, the white whales frightened by stones into shallow bays.
Deer, Musk Ox, and Bear
Deer are hunted in summer for the skins that make the best clothing. They are driven into lakes at peninsulas or along lines of cairns built to look like hunters, then pursued by kayak and killed with the lance. Klutschak describes driving reindeer onto treacherous ice near Simpson Strait. Bows are of wood or antler, and Parry’s fir bow with sinew strings is quoted; arrows differ in hafting between western and central tribes, with heads of slate, flint, iron, and tin. Quivers are sealskin, divided into compartments. Stalkers hide two men behind each other, imitating grunting and antlers, and Ross notes Boothia hunters carrying a deer’s head; Parry and Hall describe luring deer past a hidden bowman. Winter traps are snow pits baited with urine or salt-water ice. Musk ox are brought to a defensive circle by dogs and lanced while the dogs hold the animal at bay. Polar bears are run down by sledge, with the traces of reliable dogs cut, brought to bay, and speared; the best season is March and April, and she-bears den in snow banks at Cape Raper and Cape Kater. Firearms have made both hunts easier. Wolves are trapped in deep snow pits with bait, or killed by a blood-smeared knife sunk in the snow, which cuts their tongues.
Fishing and the Salmon Spear
The salmon is the most important fish, taken abundantly in summer. When the lakes break up the fish descend to the sea along the narrow lead between land floe and open water, sometimes filling it. They are speared with the kakivang, a handle widening toward the end, with a central bone or iron prong and two diverging side prongs of antler or musk ox horn, each fitted with a nail on the inner side and stiffened by thongs. When salmon are plentiful no bait is needed. Once the ice is gone they are caught in shallow rivers falling from lakes to the sea, the natives standing on the bank or stepping into the water. A small ivory fish tied by holes in its back to a plaited sinew line serves as bait, and bear’s teeth are also used on a separate line moved up and down. The fisherman holds a quqartaun in his left hand, a thong with a thick knot fastened to its hole; a caught salmon is taken from the spear, the ivory point pushed into the gills and out at the mouth so the fish hangs until dead, then pushed onto the thong. Stone weirs a foot and a half to two feet high are built across creeks below high-water mark, so that salmon crossing at high water are cut off from the sea at half tide and speared. In autumn the fish are caught ascending rivers, and some linger in small ponds that dry up; ponds freezing to the bottom yield frozen fish taken by cutting holes in the spring ice. In early spring salmon are hooked through the lake ice, formerly with hooks of deer antler. Lines are plaited sinew, held in the hand or tied to a short rod. Boas never saw nets, but Klutschak found them among the Utkusiksalik and Petitot among the natives of the Anderson River; Labrador Eskimo also use them.
Skins, Knives, and the Ulo
Most implements come from the animals pursued—skins for clothing, building, and boat covers, and bone, walrus tusk, and narwhal horn, since wood is extremely scarce. In skinning, a longitudinal cut is made across the belly with a butcher’s knife, an instrument most natives have procured and which even in olden times had found its way from Hudson Bay territory. Their own large knives have a metal edge set into an ivory blade. The skin with its blubber is cut from the flesh with the same knife or more easily with the pana, about a foot and a half long; Parry did not explain the small prongs near its blade, and a specimen from the eastern coast of Hudson Bay, collected by Dr.
The Fate of Souls and the Geography of the Dead
The tribes hold that anyone who dies by accident or violence, and women who die in childbirth, pass to the upper world; Boas never heard a native dissent from this. Whether a series of upper worlds mirrors the nether worlds of the Iglulirmiut he cannot confirm, though the names Qudlivun and Qudliparmiut make it likely. Greenland tradition pictures the upper world as a country of hills and valleys beneath the solid blue sky. Sedna of the Oqomiut dwells in Adlivun, where souls must remain a year after death; all who die of disease, or who have offended Sedna by breaking her orders, are taken to her, and her abode is greatly feared. Murderers and breakers of human law never leave her house; the rest pass on to the Adliparmiut, who live in comparative ease, hunting whales and walrus but plagued by ice and snow, far less blessed than the Qudliparmiut.
Older writers on Greenland mythology disagree among themselves. Cranz reports one tradition placing the good land below, ruled by tornarsuq, the supreme tornaq, a place of continuous summer, fresh water, and game, open only to good hunters and workers, men of great exploits, many seals, much suffering, or death by violence or childbirth; souls must slide five days or more down a steep rock made slippery with sprinkled blood, while the lazy and unfit go to the upper world to suffer scarcity, the wicked and witches tormented by ravens. Another tradition puts the good land in heaven, reached along the rainbow to the moon, beside a lake teeming with fowl and fish. Rink says souls go above or below, the lower world decidedly preferable as warm and rich in food, its happy dead called arsissut, those who live in abundance; those above suffer cold and famine and are called arssartut, or ball players, playing with a walrus head, which produces the aurora borealis.
The Iglulirmiut believe the soul leaves the body at once and descends to Adli, but the Davis Strait tribes say it lingers three days about the corpse, unable to leave, then descends to Sedna’s house. During that stay it is a tupilaq, pictured as a man in wide, loose, shabby clothing, a malevolent spirit often roaming the villages. It may not enter houses; if the angakoq perceives and announces it, no one dares go out. Its touch kills instantly, and the sight of it brings sickness and mischief. Once the soul becomes an adliparmio it is at rest and no longer feared. The Greenlanders give the name tupilaq to a being men make to destroy enemies, assembled from parts of different animals and able to act in any of their shapes; Boas found no trace of this among the Central Eskimo.
The Tornait and the Angakut
Next to Sedna, the tornait—the invisible rulers of every object—are the most remarkable beings. Everything has its inua, or owner, which may become the genius of a man and grant him the qualities of an angakoq. Boas is not sure every inua can become a man’s tornaq, though among the Greenlanders it could. He learned of only three kinds of protecting spirits: those shaped as men, as stones, and as bears. They let the angakut deal with spirits hostile to mankind; kind to their own angakoq, they would injure strangers who saw them. The bear seems the strongest. Stone tornait live in the great bowlders scattered over the country, which the Eskimo believe hollow and fitted up as a fine house whose entrance only the angakoq whose genius dwells there can see. This tornaq is a woman with a single eye in the middle of her brow. Another lives in stones that roll down the hills in spring as the snow melts; meeting a native, such a stone addresses him—”I jumped down in long leaps from my place on the cliff”—and asks whether he will take it for his tornaq; if he agrees it follows him, wabbling along, having no legs.
The bear tornaq is a huge animal hairless except at the tips of the ears and tail and about the mouth. A man who wants one must travel alone to the edge of the land floe and summon the bears. A large herd comes and frightens him almost to death; he falls at once, and should he fall backward he dies on the spot. If he falls on his face, one bear steps forward and asks whether he wishes it for his tornaq; he recovers, takes the bear for his spirit, and is accompanied home, passing a seal hole on the way.
Birth, Infancy, and the Rules of the Mother
Greetings differ by region: “Assojutidlin?” answered “Tabaujuradlu” on Davis and Hudson Strait, “Taima!” and “Mane taima!” elsewhere, “Ilaga!” among the Ukusiksalirmiut. Boas found the regulations on birth, sickness, and death hard to learn, the sources disagreeing. Before birth a small hut or snow house is built for the mother, and the sick are isolated the same way, since anything touching the dead must be destroyed. Kumlien’s claim that only a young girl appointed by the head angakoq attends the mother is an error; friends may visit but must leave at parturition. She cuts the navel string herself, with deer sinew on Davis Strait, with a stone spear head at Iglulik. The child is cleaned with a birdskin and dressed in a birdskin gown; Lyon says the Iglulirmiut swathe it in dried intestines. Boas found no trace of Kumlien’s ceremony of the aged female angakoq marching in circles on the ice and leading the mother bare-legged through snowdrifts. Lyon describes an angakoq friend washing the infant with urine while the gossips wish it an active man or mother of many children—the qoqsiuariva, never omitted; Boas heard only of the urine washing. A few days after birth the first dress is exchanged for a hare’s-head hood, a fawn-skin jacket, and two fawn-skin boots, the left wreathed with seaweed; the first clothing is fastened to a pole on the roof. At two months a third suit is given, the second exposed on the hut top, the first taken down; both are kept a year, then exposed on a pole and sunk into the sea, a portion of the birdskin dress kept as a powerful amulet worn every fall at the Sedna feast on the hood’s point. Those born in abnormal presentations wear women’s dresses at that feast and move against the sun. Captain Spicer of Groton affirms that the first-clothing bird is fixed by strict law, each month its own bird; Boas knows waterfowl in summer and ptarmigan in winter, so men are called ducks and ptarmigans at the autumn feast. A strip of sealskin is worn around the belly while the navel string remains.
What the Tornait and the Angakut Mean
The religious material gives the book its deepest hold on a reader. Everything in the Eskimo world has its inua, an owner or indwelling spirit, and some of these spirits become the personal tornaq of an angakoq—a protector appearing as a man, a stone, or a bear. Boas records the stone spirits that live in the great scattered bowlders, hollow houses whose entrances only the angakoq can see, and the rolling stones that address a lone traveler as they tumble down in the spring melt, asking to be taken as his spirit and wabbling along beside him because they have no legs. The bear tornaq demands a harder bargain: a man must go alone to the floe edge and summon the bears, and if he falls backward when the herd charges he dies on the spot. Over all of these stands Sedna, mistress of the underworld of Adlivun, feared and never named lightly, who receives the souls of those who die of disease and holds murderers and lawbreakers forever. The soul lingers three days beside the body before descending to her, and during that time it is a tupilaq, a shabby malevolent wanderer whose touch kills and whose sight brings sickness. Boas is careful to distinguish this from the Greenlandic tupilaq, a creature manufactured by men to destroy enemies—a conception he found no trace of among the Central Eskimo.
Feasts, Names, and the Rules Around Death
Boas’s account of custom is at its most absorbing where belief turns into obligation. Birth brings a thicket of regulations: the mother isolated in a small hut, the navel string cut with deer sinew or a stone spearhead, the first gown of birdskin preserved for a year and then sunk into the sea, a scrap of it kept as an amulet to be worn at the Sedna feast. A woman who has lost an infant carries its boots on every journey and buries them at each stopping place; she may not eat raw flesh for a year and cooks in a pot no one else may use. Naming follows the dead—children take the names of those who have died since the last birth, so a person may accumulate several—and the sick may have their names changed by the angakut to ward off disease, or be consecrated to Sedna as a dog and wear a harness for life. Death itself contaminates: if someone dies inside a hut, everything in it must be destroyed. The Sedna festival gathers the whole settlement, and Boas notes, with the plainness that marks his reporting, that in 1885–86 two old women in Cumberland Sound were killed—one buried alive under stones despite her resistance, the other left on an island to die of cold because she asked it, so that her son need not cast away a second set of clothing.
Why the Book Still Matters
The Central Eskimo belongs to the founding moment of American anthropology, and its methods are as revealing as its findings. Boas works from his own collections and those of whalers and explorers, attaches museum numbers to figured specimens, and says plainly when his population figures are hearsay and conjecture. He corrects Kumlien on birth customs, doubts Hall on a route to Pond Bay, and questions whether Fury and Hecla Strait is regularly passable. The appendix of 1887 whaling reports—new stations, the first outbreak of dog disease on the Davis Strait coast, angakut who run themselves through with harpoons and rise unhurt—shows a culture already being reshaped by the ships that came for whales. The tales collected at the end, with their angakoq brothers sailing through a rising land and whipping a wall of seaweed into the sea, preserve a storytelling voice that the ethnographic chapters surround but never quite contain.
