People of the Deer (21 page)

Infanticide is another favorite bogey of the missionaries and a standby of sensationalist writers. The tragedy is that it most certainly does occur, and will continue to occur while there is need for it. That is the point—there is an inescapable need for it at times, and nothing we can say will change the need; nothing we can preach to the Innuit will alleviate that tragic necessity.

The need for infanticide produces the most terrible situation an Eskimo can be forced to cope with, for all Eskimos—and the Ihalmiut in particular—are passionately fond of their children. Their young ones receive more deep-rooted affection, and are shown more tolerance and kindness than many of the children of our homes ever know. To have children and to raise them to maturity is a passion even stronger in the Ihalmiut than in us, because the People are much closer to the primeval drive toward reproduction of the species than we are. But despite the love they bear for their offspring, and despite this consuming desire to see children grow into men of their blood, there are times when a more desperate emotion overwhelms the parents.

To understand what infanticide really means in the Barrens, you must first understand that in those hard lands all human life is valued according to a fixed-priority system that may seem callous to us who can afford to oppose sentimentality to reality. The unwritten order of survival places the man, the hunter, at the head of the list as the most indispensable member of the family group. He is the provider and should he die it does not greatly matter whether or not the rest of his family lives through the immediate crisis, since they cannot live for long afterwards without a hunter's help.

Next to the man stands his wife. If there is more than one wife, the youngest stands next to the man. From her womb the continuity of new life will be maintained. Yet even she is not irreplaceable, for there is a surplus of women in this land where many men lose their lives simply in the course of their everyday efforts. Old wives quickly lose their priority, for their wombs become sterile and they can give little more to their race.

The children must stand below both the man and his wife. This is a cruel thing indeed, but the cruelty is not the work of the parents. It weighs more heavily upon them than it does on the children. But new birth can replace sons and daughters and so their loss is tragic only in terms of emotions; for while wombs remain fertile and loins remain potent, children may be born again.

The old people stand at the lowest point of the scale. The men whose arms are no longer strong and the women whose wombs are no longer fecund—these live on the thin edge of time, with death always before them. When the choice of living and dying comes upon a camp of the People, when starvation announces the coming of death, then the aged ones must be prepared to go first, to seek death voluntarily so that the rest of the family may cling a little longer to life. The old ones seldom die a natural death and often they die by their own hands. Suicide is not lawful in our eyes but as it comes to the People it is a great, and a very heroic, sacrifice—for it is the old who fear death most and who find it the hardest to die.

Put coldly like this, the value placed on the lives of men, women and children seems like a harsh, unnatural thing, but there is nothing else to be done. Who can care for helpless old people when their sons and daughters are gone? Who but the wolves? Who can care for children who have not yet been weaned, when the mother is gone? Only the wind and the snow. What can the wife feed her family when there is no man to bring in the meat of the deer? Only tears and the hard taste of dying.

The logic of the order of death in the Barrens is more inexorable than death itself, and as inescapable. Yet there are few of the People who, when the time of decision is on them, do not try desperately to escape the horror of seeing a loved one go into the night of the winter. Love overcomes logic. Many families have perished because love was too strong to let logic save the lives of all but a few.

Yes, infanticide happens. I have seen Ootek with his fourth child, Kalak, and I knew his other three children did not live their first year to its end. I have seen the overmastering devotion Ootek feels for Kalak, and I have seen the frantic desperation which fills him when danger threatens the child. But I should not like to know or feel what Ootek felt as he watched his first children die, unable to help them in the face of the grim trickery death played upon him.

Let the moralists peddle their wares to those who would think of the Innuit as barbaric and bestial people who destroy their own children. Let them preach the white man's love which must be brought into the dark, savage hearts of the Innuit. But let them keep their sanctimonious mouthings from the ears of Ootek and those of his race, who alone know what it is to assist death in his work.

There is a place in the great plains called the Lake of the Dead Child, and on a promontory of this lake stands a small cairn of stones. Through the interstices of the rocks you can see the tiny bones of a child, and on the grave are the decayed remnants of many things, robes of the best deerhide, gifts of meat, toys carved from scraps of wood, and kamik-boots sewed for a child's foot with infinite care. There are all things needful for the living—or for the dead.

The story of that grave concerns a family of three who lived alone by the lake during a winter long past. On a certain year the father was stricken down with a strange illness so that he was unable to complete his fall hunt and did not make a large enough kill to last through the winter. It is told how the blizzards came early and hunger followed. It is told how the dogs were eaten and how, at last, the woman understood that only if she made her way for ten days' travel on foot over the winter Barrens, to the camps of her kinsfolk, could her family survive.

The Ihalmiut do not say what the woman's thoughts were as she saw the decision she must make. She knew she must go alone, and could not carry a child with her. She knew too that she could not leave the child behind, for her husband was too ill to attend to it and there was no food he could give it, for the child had not yet been weaned. Nothing is said about the thoughts of the woman, but it is told how she left that camp after coming to her decision. The few scraps of food which remained she placed by her husband on the sleeping ledge, and the child she placed under the snow.

It took the woman nearly two weeks to reach the igloos of her people, and for five of those days she walked in a blizzard. She walked almost a hundred miles without food, but she arrived safely at her kinsmen's igloos. In a few days the dog team of her brother took her back to the shores of the Lake of the Dead Child. The sick man was rescued and lived. In the years that followed, this couple had many children and some of these still live in the land. But each year, while they lived, the woman and her husband returned to the shores of the distant lake, in the first days of spring, and placed fresh clothing, food and toys on the grave of their first-born.

Truly, infanticide does exist in the land of the People.

There is also the crime of sexual promiscuity, which is almost as abhorrent to the men who carry the Word into far places as is the crime of murder. But I know from my experiences with the Eskimos that promiscuity in the world of the Innuit does not compare with its sordid prevalence in our lands. True, erotic play among children is common, but never hidden or driven out of sight to become something dirty and obscene. Apart from this, wife-sharing, as it is called, is really the only manifestation of sexual promiscuity in the Barrens. Women for hire, clandestine sexual experiences, the thinly cloaked extra-marital relations of those who have been joined by the Church, all these belong to our race and not to the Ihalmiut. Wife-trading, in the Ihalmiut way of life, is a voluntary device which helps alleviate the hardships of the land. To begin with, only song-cousins or other close friends would normally consider the exchange of their wives. Contrary to popular opinion about Eskimos, a stranger is not expected to leap into bed with the wife of his host. That is a stupid lie with no basis in fact... Well, perhaps it has a basis in fact, for many of the white men who have come to the land have demanded just such an arrangement, and, because the Innuit will go to great lengths to meet the wishes of a guest, it has occurred.

When a man must make a prolonged trip on a muskox hunt, or on a visit to a distant relative, or for purposes of trading at some distant post, he often leaves his wife at home because of the dangers of travel. If there are children it would be foolish to risk either the wife or the children where there is no need. So it happens that when the man arrives at his destination his song-cousin may, with the wife's full consent, volunteer to share his wife with the visitor during the time of his stay.

This is contrary to the law of the white man, but to my unsubtle mind it seems a perfectly sane arrangement, particularly since there is no problem of illegitimate children in the Barrens, nor any jealousy of paternity. To the Ihalmiut the children themselves are what matter, and a child from any source whatever is as welcome as any other child in the camps. Paternity is unimportant. A man who questioned the paternity of his child would be thought mad. It would be the opinion of those in the camps that he ought to be grateful for the presence of any child. A child sired by a visitor is as much the son of the man of the family as the children he sires for himself.

Now this may be uncivilized behavior. But is it as barbaric as our repudiation of bastard children, who must bear the stigma of their parents' “sin” throughout their lives?

As for theft and dishonesty, before the coming of white men the Ihalmiut were unaware of the meanings of these words. Obviously, theft can hardly occur in a land where the rules of ownership are those I have already described.

Unfortunately, cannibalism, like infanticide, does sometimes take place. But if it can be called a crime to eat the flesh of the dead in order that death may not claim those who still live, then our race and every race has been guilty of that crime. Many expeditions of white men into the arctic have come to know the same appalling needs which come to the Innuit, and not a few of these expeditions have saved lives at the expense of the dead. Yet though we condemn other peoples as cannibals, we pity these men of our own race, and we think of their acts as the ultimate bravery of which man is capable, for to force one's self to eat of the dead demands a courage few of us have.

I have spoken to an old woman who now lives near the coast and who in her youth survived a terrible winter by eating the flesh of her parents after they had died of starvation. The marks of that experience still lie on her though the event is now three decades in the past. She is an object of sympathy to her people and is cared for and helped by all manner of men who have heard her grim tale. As for the woman, she never recovered from the mental ordeal she had faced. Though she lived on in the body, in her heart death has lived for full thirty years.

Cannibalism does happen, though rarely. The wonder is that it does not happen more frequently and that murder and cannibalism do not happen together. There is no doubt at all but that the eating of the flesh of the dead is as abhorrent a thought to the Ihalmiut as it is to us. The difference is that the macabre decision must sometimes be met by the Ihalmiut, while we are spared.

Now I have mentioned many of the “crimes” of which the Innuit, as a race, are accused by those who seek an excuse for interfering with the ways of the People. The Ihalmiut, who must share this condemnation, are only men, after all, and not infallible. Therefore there are deviations from law, and there are crimes in the land; for no race of men can be free of these things. But there are also certain forces which the People control and which in turn direct the actions of men, and these forces keep the law-breaking within narrow bounds. To understand these forces is to realize why the Ihalmiut have no need of our laws to maintain the security of their way of life.

There is absolutely no internal organization to hold authority over the People. No one man, or body of men, holds power in any other sense than the magical. There is no council of elders, no policeman. There are no assemblies of government and, in the strictest sense, the Ihalmiut may be said to live in an anarchistic state, for they do not even have an inflexible code of laws.

Yet the People exist in amity together, and the secret of this is the secret of co-operative endeavor, limited only by the powers of human will and endurance. It is not blind obedience or obedience dictated by fear. Rather it is intelligent obedience to a simple code that makes sense to those who must live by its rules.

Now and again a man may willfully step over the borders of the unwritten law. Perhaps he may refuse to share his deer kill with a less fortunate neighbor. Let us look at the result.

Does the starving man revenge himself by killing the one who refused him, and then take what he needs from the man he has killed? Not at all. He goes elsewhere for help, and never by word or deed does he show any overt resentment or anger toward the man who turned a deaf ear to his plea.

This is so because there are certain things the Barrens do not allow to co-exist with men, and foremost among these is anger. Anger in the heart of a man of the Ihalmiut is as potentially dangerous as homicidal madness, for anger can make him overleap the law and endanger not only himself but the rest of his community. It can lead him to ignore the perils which beset him, and so bring him to destruction. Anger is a luxury in which the People dare not indulge, and, apart from these physical reasons for its absence, the Ihalmiut have always looked upon anger as a sign of savagery, of immaturity, or of inhuman nature.