The Copper Eskimos: Encyclopedia Arctica 8: Anthropology and Archeology

In historical times the Copper Eskimos occupied the mainland coast of Arctic Canada between approximately longitudes 102° w. and 118° W., as well as the southern and western coasts of the adjacent Victoria Island and the southern end of Banks Island. Like the Indians immediately south of them, they re– ceived the appelation "Copper" because in many of their tools and weapons they substituted the natural copper they picked up on the surface of the ground for the stone that other Eskimos were using prior to the introduction of iron by Europeans. Another name, "Blond" Eskimos, given to them occasionally in former years, is now generally discarded. It arose from the belief of Vilhjalmur Stefansson that a certain percentage of them had lighter eyes and hair, and features more European-like, than the Eskimos he had encountered in the Mac– kenzie River Delta and in Alaska, traits which suggested to him the possi– bility of early Scandinavian (Viking) admisture. This theory, however, has not as yet been substantiated, and Stefansson himself in his writings has pre– ferred the more usual term "Copper Eskimos."

Samuel Hearne was the first European to come in contact with this arctic group. In 1771 he journeyed with a party of Chipewyan Indians from Churchill

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to the mouth of the Coppermine River, where his companions ruthlessly mas– sacred a small band of Copper Eskimos near a place now known as Bloody Fall. The next white man to fall in with them was Captain (afterwards Sir John) Franklin when he surveyed the southern shore of Coronation Gulf in 1821. After Franklin's day they were visited by several explorers, and even by two or three traders, but no one attempted to make a detailed study of their customs until Stefansson traveled through the western portion of their territory in 1910 and 1911. Part of a Canadian expedition which he led to the Arctic again in 1913 then wintered for two years in Dolphin and Union Strait, and in Volumes XII to XVI of the reports of that expedition its ethnologist, Jenness, greatly ampli– fied Stefansson's earlier description. Finally, Knud Rasmussen, leader of the Danish Fifth Thule Expedition to the west coast of Hudson Bay in 1921-24, lingered among the eastern Copper Eskimos during his long sled journey [: ] across arctic America to Alaska, and he, too, has given us a most illuminat– ing account of their religion and folklore.

The Copper Eskimos were not a very numerous group. Jenness estimated their number at between 700 and 800, scattered in groups of from 20 to 100 in dif– ferent districts. The census of 1941, just 25 years later, made it 682. Whether it ever exceeded this figure, which gives a ratio of about 1 person to every 4 miles of coast line, is unknown. Certain bands had traditions of depopula– tion, and remains of Copper Eskimo habitations have been found beyond the limits of their a wanderings in recent times; but these clues are too faint to warrant any conclusion.

To Stefansson and Jenness coming from the west, and, though to a lesser extent, to Rasmussen coming from Greenland and Hudson Bay, there were many peculiarities of life among the Copper Eskimos, in addition to their use of

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copper, that set them off from Eskimos elsewhere. Thus they lacked the large open traveling boat or umiak , and they never used the smaller one-man kayak for hunting seals. Harpoon heads, fishhooks, knives, and other tools and weapons had unfamiliar shapes, pottery was unknown, and the soapstone cooking pots and lamps were unlike those made in other regions. The clothing, which, as usual, was tailored principally from caribou fur, followed a local style nearer, perhaps, to Hudson Bay styles than to Alaskan; and the only winter dwellings were the quickly perishable snowhouses. The latter were often grouped together in unusual patterns, never had cooking porches, and were never lined with skins as in parts of Hudson Bay.

Environment could conceivably explains a few of these peculiariaties. The waters around Coronation Gulf are too sheltered to harbor the whales, wal– ruses, and belugas that are fairly abundant from the Mackenzie Delta westward, and again in Hudson Bay; hence, one would not [: ] expect the Copper Eskimos to possess the special appliances, or to practice the special rites, associated with the hunting [: ] of those sea mammals in other regions. Again, they could hardly build permanent houses of whale bones and sod, such as were common in the Hudson Bay region, since there were virtually no whales; nor could they build log cabins like those prevalent in the Mackenzie Delta and Alaska, because there are no trees along the arctic coast and only a negligible quantity of driftwood ever reached their shores. Environment, however, does not explain why they never hunted seals from kayaks during the summer months, nor why they failed to build houses of stone. There are some ruined stone houses in their territory, it is true, but archaeology has shown that these were left by an earlier people.

The most noticeable of their peculiarities, their replacing of stone by copper, was conditioned, of course, by the occurrence of float copper near the banks of the Coppermine River. It is interesting to observe that the Copper Eskimos of the 20th century never used stone for knife blades, or for spear and arrow points, nor did they recollect they forefathers had ever done so; yet Hearne noticed that half the arrow points of the Bloody Fall natives were of stone. It would seem, therefore, that the metal grew in popularity during the last two centuries. [: ] The copper Eskimos can hardly have discovered for themselves that it could serve as a malleable stone, for their predecessors in southwest Victoria Island, a Thule-culture Eskimo group who apparently arrived there from the west, had used copper in one or two implements; and near Iglulik, in the north of Hudson Bay, Rowley discovered some fragments of copper in remains of the Dorset Eskimo culture that must date back eight or more centuries. Even these earlier Eskimos were probably not its discoverers, for the Indians of the Mackenzie River Basin have been familiar with copper for several centuries, and those around Lake Michigan were mining it during the first millenium A.D.

It was the environment that limited the food resources of the region. Seals were not particularly plentiful, caribou and fish were seasonal and also not over-abundant, musk oxen scarce, and edible roots and berries almost non– existent. Life was an unbroken round of sealing on the frozen sea ice during the winter and spring months, fishing in late spring and again in the fall, and caribou hunting during the brief summer. In some districts every fifth winter or so was a time of scarcity, every fifteen th winter of famine.

The limited food supply made the communities or bands small and unstable. Twenty or thirty families might build their snow huts side by side during the winter, but they dispersed during the spring and early summer to roam the land

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as single units, or in tiny groups of two or three families together, and the composition of the next winter's community in that locality was generally rather different. Many communities in the western Arctic, and also in the eastern, were both larger and more enduring than any which existed among the Copper Eskimos, simply because the food resources were more abundant.

The lack of any organization in these communities was characteristically Eskimo. There were no chiefs, no persons in authority. Individuals owned the things they could make for themselves, e.g., knives, cooking vessels, etc.; but the land was common property, and the food it yielded was shared by all alike. There were no ceremonies at funerals, and none at marriage. The latter took place at an early age, but the union was quite unstable until a child was born, when it generally lasted for life. Polygamy was uncommon, partly because males preponderated over females in the population, partly because it was not easty for a hunter to support more than one wife; and polyandry was discouraged because it invariably led to quarrels and murder, thereby instigating new blood feuds. A subdued tone of uneasiness pervaded every community because of these constantly recurring blood feuds, which, here as elsewhere, constituted the foulest blot on Eskimo social life. In conjunction with the practice of infanticide, especially of girl babies, and the hazards of life generally, it effectively counterbalanced a fairly high birth rate, the fecundity of the Copper Eskimos being no less, apparently, than that of other races.

We remarked earlier that the Copper Eskimos lacked the beliefs and prac– tices associated with whaling that were current among the natives in both the eastern and western Arctic. Like all Eskimos, nevertheless, they denizened the universe with a multitude of spirits that were presumed to control the phenomena of nature and the abundance of game. Rasmussen thought that a few philosophers among them had attained to the conception of a supreme deity; but this is by no

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means certain, since they may have derived the idea from missionaries and their converts who were active in the area for several years before Rasmussen's visit. They did, however, recognize a sky god, though they thought him too remote to interfere very actively in human affairs; and they possessed the Sedna myth of the eastern Arctic, the belief in a female deity at the bottom of the sea who regulated the supply of seals. Perhaps the most solemn ceremony in their [: ] lives was their formal intoning of prayers to this deity during periods of winter famine. Any native, man or woman, might obtain a personal spirit helper and set up in practice as a shaman, but his influence and prestige depended entirely on his charater and his powers of leadership. Numerous taboos were prevalent, as one would expect in a primitive people. Some were permanent and handed down from generation to generation, others temporary, imposed by the shamans for a period only; but the personal taboos that were so marked a feature of life in the Mackenzie Delta and in northern Alaska were conspicuously absent. Closely associated with the taboos was a ritual dis– tinction, made also by the Hudson Bay natives though not by the western ones, between products that were derived from the sea and those that came from the land.

The Alaskan natives often consumed one or two whole evenings in narrating a single folk tale; but the Copper S ^ E ^ skimos, who were less addicted to this form of entertainment, commonly clipped their tales, giving only the high lights and leaving most of the details to the imaginations of their listeners. In this respect, as well as in the contents of their tales, they resembled more closely the natives of Hudson Bay. Their dancing, too, the music of their songs, and the large tambourines that accomp ^ a ^ nied their singing and dancing, were eastern in style rather than western; and they indulged in the song contests that evoked such bitter rivalry in Greenland, but were unknown in the western

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Arctic. Art, if we exclude the ornamentation of fur clothing, was little developed as compared with other regions; but this may not have been due to lack of talent, for one could find a few simple figures of fish and birds that were quite neatly carved in bone.

The dialect spoken by the Copper Eskimos was, on the whole, intermediate between those of north Alaska and of Hudson Bay. It had the eastern tendency to nasalization, and to the substitution of the softer voiced consonants for the harder voiceless ones; but it lacked some of the eastern sound changes — e.g., rn in place of nr ; and it retained the western too conjugation endings in many verbs.

From the description given above it is evident that the Copper Eskimos were somewhat nearer akin to the natives of the eastern Arctic than to those of the western. Their own traditions were silent about their origin. They knew that they were not the first inhabitants of the area around Coronation Gulf, for here and there were traces of an earlier people, a people who had lived in stone houses, or in houses made of wood and sods, of which the ruins were visible in several places. Unlike the Copper Eskimos, these people occasionally hunted the whale in open skin boats, made many cooking vessels of ^ pottery ^ [: ] in place of stone, and used so little copper in their tools and weapons that they could almost be said to have been ignorant of that metal. Jenness has shown that they were probably estern Eskimos, and has suggested that they may have retreated to the west again when the narriw waters of Coro– nation Gulf proved unsuitable for whales. He thinks the Copper Eskimos who displaced [: ] or succeeded them came from the south, where they constituted the

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outermost wing of a horde of inland Eskimos who, 500 to 600 years ago, streamed out of the barren lands east of Great Bear and Great Slave Lakes and took possession of the littoral of Hudson Bay, a few of them even reaching Greenland. This theory of their origin is now widely accepted, because it accounts more readily than any other for their lack of umiaks, their ignorance of the hunt– ing of seals from kayaks, and their rather close resemblance to the present– day Eskimos of Hudson Bay.

In the days of Stefansson and Jenness the Copper Eskimos still wore the same style of clothing as their forefathers, and used the same tools and weapons. The quarter ce ^ n ^ tury that has elapsed since that time has brought many changes. Bows and arrows have disappeared, for every man now owns a high-powered [: ] rifle. Iron and steel are so plentiful that copper has gone entirely out of use. The snow but still holds its own, but there are many frame houses also, while the cloth tent has largely displaced for summer use the former tent of seal or caribou skin. The old caribou-fur clothing is still much preferred for winter wear, but it has taken on a western [: ] cut that is much less pic– turesque than the original, and in summer practically all the natives now wear garments of wool and cotton. Kayaks, always scarce, have vanished completely, but there are numerous canoes and even a few motorboats. Nearly all Copper Eskimo families now possess sewing machines, and many have radios and gramo– phones also.

Nor is it only the material culture that has changed. The whole manner of life has been revolutionized since 1916, when the Hudson's Bay Company estab– lished the first permanent trading post in their midst and diverted their energies to the trapping of foxes and other fur-bearing animals. For trapping

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is profitable only on land, and then only during the winter months when the furs of animals are in their prime. The Eskimos had therefore to modify the yearly cycle of their lives. Whereas in earlier times they used to spend the months from April to November on the land, hunting caribou and fishing for trout and salmon, then in winter erect their snow huts on the sea ice and hunt seals, today they shorten their stay on the sea ice in order to trap foxes along the shore, and some of them have given up sealing altogether, except during the summer season of open water [: ] when they can shoot the animals from canoes. Furthermore, since foxes cannot replace seals for meat and oil, the Copper Eskimos, like their kinsmen elsewhere, are now consuming consider– able quantities of imported foods, particularly flour, sugar, and tea; and for cooking their meals they frequently use primus lamps that burn coal oil instead of the old saucer-shaped lamps that burned seal blubber. Since the construction of a small airplane landing field at the mouth of the Coppermine River, more than one sophisticated native has gazed on his ancestral hunting grounds from the level of the clouds.

Hand in hand with these economic changes have gone a few changes in the social life. Intervention by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has effectively discouraged murder (including infanticide) and the practice of the blood feud, thus increasing the security of life. The Copper Eskimos no longer fear to travel far afield, to visit distant places like the Mackenzie River Delta, or to associate with the once dreaded Indians of Great Bear Lake. The family — the man, his wife, and their children — has remained the fundamental unit of society, for such a unit does not readily change; but the old grouping into bands, each bearing a definite name and restricting itself to a definite district,

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has gone out of existence now that every man feels free to hunt and set up his fox traps wherever he wishes, provided he does not encroach too closely on his neighbor's trap line. The compact winter villages of the bands, with their contiguous snow huts from which the hunters and their dogs marched out each morning to hunt seals, have been largely replaced by the single dwellings of trappers — some of them log cab ^ i ^ ns — spaced at intervals along the coast. The Copper Eskimo is becoming more individualistic now that he is confronted with new ideas of property that are not easily reconciled with his former communistic practices. Even the simple amenities of life have changed. Western Eskimos and half-breeds have brought in new pastimes and new dance forms, and the church services of the missionaries have replaced — publicly at least — the seances of the shamans. Many of the old religious beliefs and taboos still survive no doubt, but they have been largely submerged be– neath the newly accepted Christianity.

In one respe ^ c ^ t, contact with the outside world has brought unqualified calamity. Prior to the 20th century the Copper Eskimos appear to havebeen free from all but two diseases, simple colds that attacked them when they moved from their drafty summer tents into the rather stuffy snow huts, and some internal malady that has [: ] never been diagnosed, but may have been appendicitis. In 1926 influenza was introduced amongst them and carried off, according to one estimate, nearly 20% of the population. About the same time white traders were responsible for the appearance of a few cases of syphilis and gonorrhoea; fortunately[], they did not persist. Tuberculosis, however, did take root, and in 1930-31 attained such virulence that of the 100 or so natives who were then wintering around the mouth of the Coppermine River no less than 20 died within 8 months.

Tragic has been the history of the family with which Jenness wandered around southwestern Victoria Island in the summer of 1915. His adopted mother Icehouse was a victim of the influenza epidemic of 1926. Ikpuck, his father, was suffering from tuberculosis in 1930, but was able to remain active up to his disappearance during a hunting trip two years later. Of Icehouse's two children the elder, a male, was reported to be in good health as late as 1940; but the younger, Jennie, wasted away with tuberculosis in 1931, at the age of about 27, after two of her three children had perished from the same disease and her husband had contracted it also. Jennie knew that her days were numbered, and only three months before herd death she radioed a message to her "brother" Jenness from the wireless station that had just been erected at Coppermine. Translated the message read" It would make me very happy if you would visit us next summer when the warm weather arrives. I will make you a fur coat if you come. But I may not live until then. I do not know."

Diamond Jenness