by Farley Mowat
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.
Children alone are permitted brief outbursts of temper, for a child is not held responsible for its actions. But when a man gives way to anger it is something of the deepest shame to the beholders, for anger is the only really indecent thing in the land.
However, methods of punishment do exist. Should a man continuously disregard the Law of Life, then little by little he finds himself isolated and shut off from the community. There can be no more powerful punishment in the lonely wastes of the Barrens, and in fact it is a punishment which can easily be fatal in a world where man must work closely with man in order to live. A small dose of ostracism usually brings the culprit to an acute awareness of his defects and he ceases to transgress the law. Thus while there is no overt act of justice or of social revenge, nevertheless the object is achieved and the wrong-doer almost invariably returns into the community once again, with no permanent stigma attached to his name. The law does not call for an eye for an eye. If possible the breaker of law is brought back to become an asset to the camps. His defection is tacitly forgotten, and to all intents and purposes it never happened at all.
Such is the punishment for most major offenses. Minor offenses are dealt with by employing the powerful weapons of ridicule, and the Ihalmiut are masters of that art. A man capable of doing his own hunting, but whose family must be fed by other hunters because he is lazy or simply indifferent, is made the subject of the drum-dance song and an object of biting laughter. Only a very callous man can face that sharp laugh for long. However, he knows that when he returns to his duties, the songs about him will disappear, and in time all memory of the incident will be washed from the minds of the People by common consent.
On the other hand, if a man is prevented from doing his work because he has been crippled, or because he is one of those natural incompetents who botches whatever he puts his hand to, then the Law makes an exception. In our society, such unfortunates may become embittered, or may even grow dangerous as a result of the treatment meted out to them. In the Ihalmiut camps, those who are physically or mentally unable to cope with the problems of living are treated with inexhaustible patience and understanding. Poor, dull-witted Onekwaw, for instance, never managed to succeed in a single deer hunt during all the time I knew him. He tried hard enough—but it was always someone else who had to keep Onekwaw’s family from starving. And yet, as far as I know, no one ever seriously rebuked Onekwaw for being a burden to his People. True, everyone made fun of his efforts to be a great hunter, but this was good-natured fun and Onekwaw joined in it himself. He even seemed to extract some sort of compensation from being able to provide a source of amusement for the other men. He was the butt of innumerable good-humored jests—but he was never exposed to the bitter ridicule which is the punishment of those who are capable of obeying the law, but who refuse.
The only physical punishment in the Barrens is death, but the death penalty is not the same as with us. It is not intended as an act of social revenge or even as a warning to other potential wrong-doers. It exists only as a means of releasing a man who cannot live in the land he has defied, or as a means of releasing the People from an added danger to their lives.
When a man becomes mad (and only a madman kills, according to the beliefs of the People) and murders or threatens to murder those who live about him, then, and then only, the sentence of death is invoked. There is no trial, no official passing of judgment. Perhaps three or four men, usually those most closely related to or most closely concerned with the murderer, meet and speak indirectly of the problem which faces the entire community. One of their number is usually designated as the executioner. But he is not an instrument of justice as we know it, for his task is not to punish, but to release the soul of the madman from a physical life which can only end in agony of the flesh if it is prolonged. The executioner does his duty quickly and humanely—for the idea of physical or mental torture is simply not known to the Ihalmiut. When the deed is done, the executioner obeys the spirit laws and begs forgiveness from the ghost of the dead man. If he is lucky and the white men do not hear of it, that is the end of the matter. But in not a few cases Eskimos who have had the terrible task of destroying brothers, fathers, or sons, so that the rest may survive, have been brought to the bar of white man’s justice and rewarded for the mental sufferings that they have endured by being hanged by the neck until they were dead.
12. Kakumee
Partly because the story of his life outlines in minuscule the tale of his People, and partly for other reasons, I give Kakumee,* the old shaman of the Barrens, a greater place in this book than I give to any other man. His story is one of disintegration and of degradation and this is also the tale of his People. His life is bitter and tragic, the more so because it is not his alone, but also the tragedy of his race.
* * *
* The name Kakumee is a pseudonym for a man whose real name was Pommela and who died in 1958, as described in the sequel to this book, The Desperate People.
It was a long time before I came to know much of his story, for the name of Kakumee is an anathema in the mouths of the Ihalmiut. When they can be brought to speak of him they speak shortly and with the bridle of fear on their tongues.
Even Ootek, who was my song-cousin, spoke of Kakumee only when I begged him to speak and he grew visibly uneasy whenever I mentioned the name of the old shaman. Ohoto too, that brash man who claimed to fear nothing, would not tell me much of Kakumee but would deftly switch the subject and talk instead of the deer or of the land.
Franz had known him well, yet even in the stories Franz told I detected an undercurrent of tension and of uneasiness. Eventually it dawned upon me that Franz, who believed he was gifted as white men are with superiority over the primitive natives—Franz too was afraid of Kakumee!
Because I could at first gather only vague clues to the reasons which led the Ihalmiut to fear the old man, my curiosity grew. In the early summer of 1948 I even began to prepare for a journey northward to the shores of Kakumee Kumanik, where the two tents of the shaman stood apart from the rest of the People. The preparations were needless, for this man who had brought a great fear into the land had heard much of Andy and me from some of the other Ihalmiut, and had developed plans to bring us into the orbit of his influence.
One summer day I looked casually from the window of Windy Cabin and saw a stranger approaching. He came up and stood by the door, not offering to enter unbidden, as the other Eskimos always did. So I went out to meet him.
He was not a tall man, yet he was even more massively built than old Hekwaw. His great legs were bowed slightly apart, supporting a square body almost as broad as it was high. But it was his face that caught and held my attention. I shall never forget the face of Kakumee.
When I think of him, I remember those magnificent yet hideous masks the Iroquois used to carve to portray the faces of their devils. Kakumee’s face was like a masterful devil-mask that had weathered and cracked through the centuries under the storms and the sun. It was ancient, not in terms of mere years, but ancient in time long since forgotten by men.
Two or three clumps of straggling hairs hung from his pointed goat-chin in the shadow of a bulbous lower lip. That great lip splayed downward to expose a broken, outpointing row of dark-colored teeth, each as massive as the tooth from the jaw of a fossil. A sparse fringe of hairlets was permanently cemented to his upper lip by an unchecked dribble of mucus. His eyes were tiny black marbles sunk deeply under the thrust of his brow and folded under taut curtains of skin, yet they glistened out from their crevices as the black eyes of great spiders shine from their shadowed caves under rocks. His forehead was itself a great rock, cut by ten thousand crevices left by the weather. Above his face was a wild mane of rough, graying hair knotted and twisted in confusion.
That was our first meeting, but many more followed as Kakumee sought by all the cunning he knew to turn Andy and me against the r
est of the People.
He was the first Eskimo I had met who deliberately lied, and for a while I almost believed the slanderous stories he told us about Ootek and the others, for I was not prepared to find an Ihalmio who did not speak the truth. Kakumee did more than try to alienate us from the others with lies—he threatened them directly, and us indirectly; and it was only because we refused to be intimidated, and so set ourselves up against him, that the other men dared to remain our friends. Kakumee wheedled me, bribed me, lied to me, threatened me, and revolted me. Yet despite it all I grew fascinated by the character of the man, and increasingly covetous of the incredible store of knowledge he possessed of days lost to all memory but his.
He was a master of indirection, and his subtlety was often too much for mine, but after a while I began to understand him a little. In time, too, I managed to get at some of the stories about him which were known to the rest of the People.
Kakumee was born on the River of Men not far above the Little Lakes where the People now live. His father was Ajut, a shaman whose fame had spread beyond the limits of the plains and who was known even to the distant folk dwelling by the sea. In these days of his childhood, Kakumee was one of more than a thousand Ihalmiut who lived along the banks of the river and on the lakes thereabout.
Ajut’s three wives had given him other sons and of these the eldest was Kakut, who lived to be a great man and the enemy of Kakumee. When Kakumee was born, about 1880, no white man had yet entered the land of the People. But in the spring of 1894 two canoes came down the river from the south bringing the first white stranger into the land. This man was Tyrrell, and though Kakumee was but a youth at the time, he can still recall every detail of that visit.