White Lies abOut inuit the This page intentionally left blank White Lies about the Inuit John L. Steckley broadview press © 2008 John L. Steckley All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the pub- lisher—or in the case of photocopying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario m5e 1e5—is an infringement of the copyright law. library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Steckley, John, 1949- White lies about the Inuit / John L. Steckley. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55111-875-8 1. Inuit—Canada—History—Errors, inventions, etc. 2. Common fallacies. I. Title. 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Printed in Canada Contents One ImagInIng the InuIt 7 Arctic Urban Legends 8 Learning about the Eskimo 10 See You in the Movies 13 “In This Movie, You Will Be an Eskimo” 14 White Lies Not Included 15 The Word Eskimo and Its Meanings 19 Does Eating Raw Mean Eating People Raw? 22 Who Are You Calling Inuit, White Man? 23 Part of a Larger Picture 24 TwO Four major WhIte FIgures 31 Franz Boas: A Paternalistic Father of Anthropology 32 Stefansson and Jenness: Two Polar Opposites 36 Farley Mowat: Subjective Non-fiction, Essential Truths, or Fxxx the Facts? 47 Conclusion 49 Three FIFty-tWo Words For snoW 51 A Source of Humour: Jokes about Inuit Snow Terms 52 It All Began with Boas 53 Enter Diamond Jenness 55 Benjamin Whorf 55 Downplaying the Number of Inuit Snow Terms: An Ignored Source 56 The Birth of 20 Snow Terms: A Sociological Tradition Since 1968 57 Numbers Ending with Two: 52, 42, 32, 22 59 Farley Mowat Takes the Number to an Artistic High: 100 59 How Do Inuktitut and English Differ in Terms for Snow? 60 English Is Good in the Snow, Too 63 So How Many “Words” Are There for Snow? 64 Seven Primary Terms for Snow 67 Negative Implications of the Inuit Snow Term Cliché 68 Summary 75 FOur the myth oF the Blond eskImo 77 The Blond Eskimo: A Popular Figure 78 The Copper Inuit 79 First Contact 79 Lost Races 80 Stefansson Discovers the Blond Eskimo and Finds Funding 82 The Greenland Norse and Their Fate 84 The Blond Eskimo Captures the Literary Imagination 89 Jenness Takes Up the Challenge 90 The Return of the Blond Eskimo 97 Negative Implications of the Blond Eskimo 101 Five elders on Ice 103 A Popular Story: Going with the Floes 104 Why Shouldn’t You Believe the Story of Culturally Determined Inuit Elder Suicide? 106 When Is Abandonment Really Abandonment? 108 The Deep Roots of This Myth: Beginnings as Euthanasia 110 Growing the Myth 112 Altruistic Suicide, Mores, and Cultural Relativism 113 Anthropologists Introduce Environmental Causality 119 Balikci Uses Psychology to Blame the Victim 121 Guemple Uses Anthropology to Blame the Victim 122 Colonial Contact: A Neglected Causality 123 Farley Mowat Popularizes Inuit Elder Abandonment and Suicide 125 Inuit Suicide Today 126 Six the lIes do not stand alone 131 Inuit Snow Terms, Hanunoo Rice Terms, and Nuer Cow Colour Combinations 132 The Blond Eskimo: Atlanteans, Welsh Princes, and the Irish 133 Sati 139 The Inuit as a Canadian Construct 141 Best in the Bush 142 Conclusion 144 Works Cited 147 Index 159 Chapter One Imagining the Inuit learnIng oBjectIves After reading this chapter, you will be able to » describe the ways in which the Inuit have been treated as collectors’ items or showpieces. » outline the history of the portrayal of Inuit in the movies. » critically discuss the four stereotypes of the Inuit described in this chapter. » critically evaluate interpretations of the meaning of the word Eskimo. » connect the story of John Rae and his findings about the fate of the Franklin expedition to the notion that the Inuit were cannibals. I dreamed I was an eskimo in my Maidenform bra. Guess whose figure is going around in Arctic circles? It’s mine and it’s marvelous—so sleek and smooth, so fabulously curved. Here on top of the world we know what makes the world go round ... it’s Maidenform. —1954 Maidenform Bra ad (quoted in D’Souza 2004) thIs Book has Been a personal journey for me. It has not been easy to knock the heroes of my youth and early academic career from their pedestals. But it needed to be done. In my early teens, Farley Mowat inspired me to become an author myself, and yet here I am writing a book that takes shots at him. In the academic sphere, anthropologist Franz Boas was one of my first heroes. In my later career, I have been forced to undertake a long hard reappraisal of his material. Until recently, I would not have called myself an Inuit specialist. Yet when I look at it, my life and academic career have often taken me back to the people. My first anthropological paper as an undergraduate reviewed Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer. It was filled with praise for my then hero. I still highly respect the fact that he brought the world’s attention, however briefly, to the Caribou Inuit, the people who traditionally hunted caribou west of Hudson Bay. An examination question in an introductory class on Aboriginal people intrigued me at the time, as it does now: “Why is it that 7 white lies about the inuit the Inuit are conceived of in ways different from those of Indians?” How many exam questions do you think you will remember 30 years from now? At Memorial University of Newfoundland, I worked as a research assistant for Jean Briggs from 1974–75, coding the field notes from her psychological and linguistic studies of a small Inuit population. She had then only recently published Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, an excellent eth- nography based on her time among the Uktu on a remote Arctic shore—a brilliant exception to the “White lies” rule discussed here. In it, she examined how the people she studied virtually never expressed anger. At the anthropol- ogy department at Memorial, the joke was that her sequel would be called Sometimes in Anger. In 1980, I volunteered in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to act as a guide for school tours in the Inuit section of the city’s museum. I still remember the challenging questions the students asked and how I scrambled in ignorance for answers. In 1985, I published a piece on the early eighteenth-century Labrador Inuit girl Acoutsina for Them Days, the often quirky but always interesting Labrador publication. Shortly afterwards, the Labrador school board asked to use my piece in their curriculum. At the time, I found this ironic. I had written frequently about the Huron—I was a Huron specialist after all—and no such request had ever come concerning those articles. This is still true. Inuit stories have been a feature of my anthropology classes at Humber College in Toronto over the last 20 years. So it is hard to admit that for years, I taught lies—White lies. I should have known better. I should have checked the facts. However, my stories came from textbooks and other so- called reliable sources, and the lies were so useful in teaching about a culture different from my own. Generally, though, my discussions of the Inuit have come to be useful in my teaching. Through the Inuit, I have learned well to beware what I read in textbooks, a lesson I pass on to my students. Such information concerning the Inuit provides a good cautionary tale for my students, teaching them how important it is to be critical of what they read. Arctic Urban Legends Truth is not a popularity contest. Repetition, like imitation, might flatter an earlier author, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to truth. Just because there is a huge literature about a subject, does not mean that many truths are told. Often what you get are the same falsehoods repeated over and over again. Over the last three centuries, White explorers and adventurers, police offi- cers, missionaries, traders, and especially anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars have spun many a twisted story about the Inuit. Some have become Arctic urban legends without a city. White-created myths about the 8 white lies about the inuit one ✦ imagining the inuit Inuit abound like five-year-olds’ theories about where babies come from. Ignorance abhors a vacuum. In her discussion of one of these myths—Inuktitut terms for snow—Laura Martin put forward the following ideas: Arctic peoples, among the most easily recognized ethnographic populations, remain a poorly understood group about whom other easy generalizations are routine: they eat only raw meat, they give their wives as gifts to strangers, they rub noses instead of kissing, they send their elderly out on ice floes to die. We are prepared to believe almost anything about such an unfamiliar and peculiar group. (Martin 1986: 420) The problem of distorted perceptions about the Inuit has long been recog- nized and written about. Unfortunately, the impact of these writings is rather like that of the corrections to front-page news stories that are buried some- where in the back pages. To my knowledge, an 1887 issue of The Ameri- can Naturalist contained the first published piece attempting to correct such errors. The author was naturalist John Murdoch, a member of the Point Barrow, Alaska, research expedition of 1881–83, headed by Captain Patrick Henry Ray. Murdoch’s scientifically trained mind could not abide the myths he was hearing. In concluding his insightful article, he wrote, not without a little humour: I trust that I have presented sufficient evidence to show that the popular picture of the dwarfish Eskimo, dozing in an underground den, keeping up his internal heat by enormous meals of raw blubber washed down with draughts of lamp oil [made from boiled blubber], is based on exaggeration, to say the least, rather than on actual facts. (Murdoch 1887: 16) The notions that Inuit are dwarf-sized and dig underground homes have thankfully disappeared. However, the idea that they only eat their meat and fish, not to mention blubber, raw persists. This has been encouraged, of course, by the outsider-imposed term Eskimo, which means “eaters of raw flesh.” When most of us hear an Inuit story, we lack any critical framework with which to judge it, much like with urban legends. I know I digested, as a southern Ontario child and young adult, pretty much every Arctic story I was fed, no matter what the narrative ingredients. The vast majority of North Americans have never been to the Arctic or even the Subarctic of the Inuit and have never even met an Inuk (singular of Inuit). They meet paper Inuit only, in elementary school two-dimensional picture-book images of igloos, parkas, dogsleds, and kayaks. How could they know better than they do? Tear down the igloo, strip off the parka, take away the harpoon, and Whites would not recognize an Inuk. In an anthropology class at Humber College in the late 1980s, I had an Inuk student. She was born in Pelly Bay 9