by Farley Mowat
This tremendous intake of protein probably explains the Eskimo thirst for tea or, if no tea is available, for water. The toxic wastes from such quantities of meat would strain the best of human kidneys, and only by drinking several gallons of fluid every day can the Ihalmiut manage to adjust to their amazing diet. Their bodies seem to have undergone some physical modifications as well, for when you see an Ihalmiut naked—as a visitor sees them every night—you notice that their body thickness, back to front, looks as great as their body width, both measurements taken at the waist. This typical shape presumably results from the enlarged liver needed both to store glycogen against lean periods and to deal with the completely protein diet. It most certainly is not a sedentary “pot.”
The words “food” and “deer” are practically synonymous throughout the Barrenlands, but though there is a certain monotony in the choice of food, there are many ways of preparing it. First there is the natural style, and I have eaten my meat this way and found no complaint with it, except perhaps that raw meat is singularly tasteless. If the Ihalmiut hunter shoots a deer for food when he is on a trip far from the camps, he seldom bothers to go to the trouble of building a fire. Usually his first act is to cut off the lower legs of the deer, strip away the meat, and crack the bones for marrow. Marrow is fat, and an eternal craving for fat is part of the price of living on an all-meat diet.
With the marrow disposed of, the hunter may slit the animal’s throat and catch a cup of blood, for while the People do not know the use of salt, they do seem to crave it and to satisfy their craving with blood, where the saline concentration is very high.
Now having satisfied some of his specific cravings, the hungry hunter slices through the flank of the beast and carefully picks off the bits of suet clinging to the entrails. If he is still hungry—and he usually is—the hunter may also cut off part of the brisket if the animal is fat. Before leaving the carcass he takes out the tongue and sometimes the kidneys, and these he carries with him until he can find time and fuel to light a fire.
All the parts that I have so far mentioned can be eaten cooked, of course, and when it is possible they will be cooked, for the Ihalmiut do not eat raw meat from choice. When only an open fire is available, cooking methods are delightfully simple. The roast is simply shoved into the coals and left there until it is well charred on the outside. Pulled out and scraped, the inner core is found to be well cooked to a depth of an inch or so, and this part is eaten, then the roast is again pushed into the fire and the process repeated until the bone itself is reached and the hot marrow is ready for extraction.
When meat is cooked at camp it is usually boiled, if fuel permits, for the soup is greatly loved by everyone. Originally, and not so many years ago, the Ihalmiut used great square-cut stone pots made of a kind of soapstone. These were filled with water and chunks of meat, then hot pebbles were added to the water to bring it to a boil. It was a slow chore, and parboiling was usually chore enough, but now iron pots have been obtained in trade from the coastal Eskimos, and boiling meat is easier than it once was.
Amongst the special boiled delicacies I must mention fawn’s head. Any deer head is good when boiled, but the heads of fawns are best of all. They are sometimes skinned before cooking, more often not, but the meat from them is the most delicious from the animal and the fat behind the eye is the best part of the head. Incidentally, when occasional fish are speared in summer, the boiled heads are again considered to be the choicest part.
Nearly all of the caribou is eaten, one way or another. But as you may have noticed, the steaks and roasts that we prefer don’t often appear on the Ihalmiut menu. Usually the dogs get the rumps and thighs, for these parts of the caribou seem to be lacking in the specific nutriments that a meat-eating man requires. The Ihalmiut believe that only by eating all parts of the deer can they achieve a satisfactory diet. So the heart, kidneys, intestines, liver and other organs are greatly esteemed and often eaten.
There is a third way of using deer meat, and this is by preparing nipku, or dried meat. The Ihalmiut make this dish because it is a variation of an otherwise monotonous diet and because it can be easily stored to tide them over times when the deer are not about. Nipku is made by slicing muscle tissue paper-thin, then spreading it to dry on willow bushes near the camps. It looks, and tastes, like cardboard sparsely sprinkled with icing sugar, and it is as tough as blazes, but an excellent trail food since it equals five times its weight in fresh meat. I liked nipku, finding it as good as most Ihalmiut dishes, though I must admit to a certain indignation when Ohoto gave me a bag of it that was already in the possession of a lively collection of fly maggots.
Undoubtedly the most important item of Ihalmiut food is fat. Amongst the coastal Eskimos the supply of fat is limited only by the number of sea mammals that are killed, and blubber, that grossly overworked arctic word, is obtained in immense quantities from seals, walrus, narwhals and other aquatic mammals who build thick blankets of fat as an insulation against the cold of the arctic seas. The coastal people have so much fat and oil available that they can meet all their dietary needs and have enough left over to heat and light their igloos, and to cook upon. Well, they are lucky. The inland people of the plains must depend for fats on what they can obtain from the deer, and the caribou is no substitute for a seal as a source of oil.
In the fall of the year, just before the rutting season for the bucks and just after for the does, the deer are in their best physical condition and this is the only time of the entire year that fat can be obtained from them in any quantity. Buck deer, killed in the autumn, may carry thirty pounds of pure white suet under their hides, and though this sounds like a lot, when it is rendered down it gives a much smaller quantity. It takes a great many fat buck deer to equal one seal in the production of oils.
During the fall hunt the Ihalmiut must collect sufficient fat to meet the year’s needs, but there is never enough to provide fuel, food, and heat together. As a result the winter igloos generally remain entirely unheated, and almost without artificial light during the interminable winter darkness. Yet the People manage to survive temperatures of fifty degrees below zero in their winter homes because fat is being burned—within their bodies. Each man is his own furnace, and as long as there are enough blocks of deer fat to last until spring, the People manage to stay alive under conditions which seem completely inimical to the maintenance of human life. Enough fat is the answer, and the sole answer, to winter survival in the Barrens.
The importance of fat as a fuel is, however, only part of the story. Even in summer, when the problem is to stay cool, fat remains absolutely essential to the well-being of the People. I had its importance demonstrated to me during one long canoe trip Franz and I took. We were short of supplies—in fact we were completely out of them except for a pound of tea, half a pound of lard and some ammunition. So we lived by the rifle, and we lived on deer.
It was late summer then and the deer were extraordinarily thin as a result of long months of persecution by the flies, and so our diet consisted almost entirely of lean meat. For the first few days I made out very well on three meals of lean meat a day, but before the end of the week I was smitten with an illness which for want of a better name I called mal de caribou. It was an unpleasant illness to have during a canoe voyage. The river was fast and filled with rapids, but nevertheless I had to go ashore at frequent intervals, whether we were in “white water” or not. And I had to expose myself so often to the insatiable flies that it became painful for me to sit down.
But persistent diarrhea was only a part of the effect of mal de caribou. I was filled with a sick lassitude, an increasing loss of will to work that made me quite useless in the canoe. I began to get really worried. Memories of dysentery in Sicily came uneasily to mind and the thought that the nearest medical aid was three hundred miles away did not bring me much comfort.
Then Franz turned physician. One evening he took our half-pou
nd of precious lard, melted it in a frying pan, and, when it was lukewarm and not yet congealed, he ordered me to drink it.
Strangely, I was greedy for it, though the thought of tepid lard nauseates me now. I drank a lot of it, then went to bed; and by morning I was completely recovered. This sounds like a shock cure, but in fact I was suffering from a deficiency of fat and did not realize it.
Exactly what the physiological effect of fat, apart from its straight nutrition value, is on the metabolism of a meat-eater is something I do not know. But I do know that man cannot function on lean meat alone. Perhaps there is an enzyme in fat which acts on lean meat in the digestive tract; perhaps certain essential vitamins are present in the fat. Whatever the factor may be, it is clear that fat provides not only the large amount of calories essential to winter survival in the arctic, but also some essential substance without which a meat diet is impossible.
Of course the Ihalmiut have always been aware of this, and it is their custom, winter or summer, to eat not less than a mouthful of fat for every three of lean meat. This is the ideal proportion, but it is not always possible to maintain it, and when fat becomes scarce the Ihalmiut appear most susceptible to disease and show other symptoms of a greatly lowered resistance.
So the point I wish to make is that fat is not just a cold weather fuel to the Eskimos, but is a vitally essential part of their everyday diet. And this is a point which seems to have escaped the notice of those administrators who are entrusted with the well-being of the Northern natives. At any rate, the current trend in the arctic is to bring about the transition from native foods, and by that I mean animal or protein or fat foods, to the prepared foods of the white man which are largely composed of starch. I will have something to say about the appalling results of this policy later in this chapter.
Probably the thought has occurred to you that the Barrens ought to be able to provide some variety from the eternal diet of deer meat. Perhaps the total reliance of the Ihalmiut on the deer may seem foolish, particularly when death by starvation can result from this limited dependence.
Well, the Barrens are not given over to the deer alone. In the winter, great numbers of arctic hares move down from the northern fringes of the Barrens, and they make delicious and tender food. Then there are the ptarmigan, whose numbers are so great in spring and fall that the flocks may cover the hills like snow. The rivers and lakes are literally filled with whitefish, trout, grayling and suckers, and these can be netted in quantity during the summer. Oddly enough the Ihalmiut have no nets, and have never used them, though they spear the occasional fish with the ingenious spear that is common to most Eskimo cultures.
With their usual acumen the authorities have seized upon this evidence of the remissness of the primitive mind. Obviously, they think, the ignorant natives must be unaware of the untouched reservoirs of food in the lakes and rivers, if they are so backward that they have not even learned to make and to use nets. So the authorities would supply nets, and thereby solve the starvation problem in the Barrens.
This plan was brilliantly reasoned out. On my return to the Barrens in 1948, I was given a large supply of nets to distribute to the Ihalmiut and I was told to instruct the People in their use so that they would never again be faced with a starvation winter.
I took the nets, for it is of no use to argue with men of government, and in due course I gave them to the People and showed them how to use them. The Ihalmiut thanked me, for they are a courteous lot, and they humored me further by borrowing my canoe and learning to set the nets. Certainly I fulfilled my orders and I have no doubt this was a source of satisfaction to the authorities in Ottawa.
However, there were some minor points which had been overlooked by the enthusiastic agents. In the first place the Ihalmiut have kayaks, but no other kind of boat such as the open umiak of the coast Eskimos, and it is exceedingly difficult—if not impossible—to set or service a net from a kayak. In the second place it is during the winter and early spring that starvation comes to the People, and the problems of setting nets under ten or twelve feet of fresh-water ice would baffle even the ingenious Ihalmiut.
Yet these physical problems are relatively unimportant. There was a reason why the Ihalmiut had never learned to make and to use nets; for they were perfectly well aware of the fish that could be had for the taking. But they also knew that the results of fishing on a large scale are simply not the kind of results that can support human life in the Barrens. It all comes back again to the problem of fat. No inland fish, and this applies equally to hares and ptarmigan, can supply even a fraction of the fat requirements of the People. Fish are fine in summer as a dietary supplement when there is plenty of food in any case. In winter, a prolonged diet of fish would be as disastrous as poison to the People, and starvation in the form of fatal deficiencies would smite those whose bellies are distended with fish as violently as it smites those whose bellies are empty. Later I will tell you of a race of Northern natives who were weaned over from deer meat to fish. It is evident that the tragedy which resulted did not make its mark upon the official minds of men in high quarters.
The deer must feed the People, and the deer alone can give the People life. In the years to come the Ihalmiut will eat deer meat as they have done for countless centuries and as their bodies demand that they continue to do. If, and when, the time comes that there are no more deer, then the last Ihalmiut will die in their igloos and the problems that they pose to us as their guardians will not be problems any longer. The fish nets will fray and whiten on the rocks by the shores of the Little Lakes, but there will be none to use them. They will remain for a while as symbols of the type of aid that we gave to the People in their extremity.
Now I am going to speak for a while of famine. I want to tell you something of the real but hidden cause of the destruction which has come upon all the Northern natives, Eskimos and Indians, wherever white men have come amongst them. It is not a pretty tale.
Perhaps you have heard of the decimation of the forest Indians, brought about by disease, by lack of adaptability, by inherent laziness and indolence or by other causes. You may have heard of these things but you have never heard the truth, for all of these apparent causes are but manifestations of the real destroyer, which is—starvation.
If you ask about the thousands of Indians and Eskimos who die each year of tuberculosis, if you ask about the measles and smallpox epidemics which in the last two decades have destroyed over one-tenth of the Northern natives, and if you ask whether these people too die of starvation, I will answer that they did.
Let me explain. To begin with, one of the most popular apologies for our failure to preserve the Northern races from destruction has been the theory of “acquired immunities.” It is something the natives haven’t got—and cannot get—if we believe the propagandists. And yet no medical authority has ever been foolish enough to say that certain races can develop specific immunities to disease while others cannot. The theory that Eskimos and Indians are, and always will be, lacking in the immunities we possess has been used to explain our inability to check the ravages of tuberculosis and the other diseases that yearly take a tremendous toll of the Northern natives. But this idea is as untenable as the theory that Aryans are superior to Semitic peoples. Immunities to disease are acquired. And the ability to acquire them belongs to all men. But if it were simply a question of immunities, then the Indians of the Mackenzie River region would long since have acquired all they needed, for disease has been a mighty killer in that land for a century and a half. And yet the children’s children of survivors of ancient epidemics still die by the hundred when a plague comes down the river and into the huddled settlements. It looks then as if the “immunities” apologists may be correct—but it only looks that way.
I loathe statistics, but I must quote these to prove my point. The reported death rate from tuberculosis in the Canadian Northwest Territories between 1937 and 1941 was 761 per 100,
000 as compared with 50 per 100,000 in the rest of Canada. This figure includes only those native deaths examined by a medical officer. There is good reason to believe the true figure should be well over a thousand deaths, since a high proportion of the Northern peoples die, and are buried, without the knowledge of white men. Now tuberculosis has been present in this area for a hundred and fifty years and yet, oddly enough, the natives seem to have been quite unable to develop a resistance to it.
What has starvation to do with all this? I shall explain with men, instead of figures.
On Reindeer Lake in Northern Manitoba there is a settlement called Brochet. It is the center of the surviving members of the branch of the Chipewyan Indians who call themselves Idthen Eldeli—Eaters of Deer. In 1860, when Brochet was already a well-established trading post, there were about two thousand members of the Idthen band and theirs was a peculiar and demanding life. In the winter they lived in tents within the borders of the high arctic forests where the deer also wintered. In spring, when the deer moved out into the great plains, the Idthen people followed after. So the Idthen band annually traveled over a thousand miles through the Barrens, the home of the Ihalmiut.
In the eighteenth century the famous explorer Samuel Hearne journeyed overland across the Barrens from Churchill to Coppermine River with a band of these Indians and he speaks, as do many others, of the almost super-human endurance and physical capacity of the Idthen people.
In the winter of 1948, when I lived with the Idthen Eldeli at Brochet, they numbered a little over a hundred and fifty men, women and children who spent the winters on their scanty trap lines, starving through the cold months until they could fish for life along the opening rivers. They no longer followed the deer on the long trek into the Barrens. Instead they followed the deer on the long trek to extinction. They are a passive, beaten, hopeless people who wait miserably for death. They are unclean, weak-bodied, sick caricatures of men, who spend their days in an apathy broken only when utter necessity drives them to make an effort to live a little longer. Also—and despite almost a century of contact with white men—they have acquired no immunities.