ODD CUSTOMS 65 



There are no chiefs among these people, no men in 

 authority; but there are medicine men who have some 

 influence. The angakok is generally not loved — he 

 knows too many unpleasant things that are going to 

 happen, so he says. The business of the angakok is 

 mainly singing incantations and going into trances, 

 for he has no medicines. If a person is sick, he may 

 prescribe abstinence from certain foods for a certain 

 number of moons; for instance, the patient must not 

 eat seal meat, or deer meat, but only the flesh of the 

 walrus. Monotonous incantations take the place of the 

 white man's drugs. The performance of a self-confident 

 angakok is quite impressive — if one has not witnessed 

 it too many times before. The chanting, or howling, 

 is accompanied by contortions of the body and by 

 sounds from a rude tambourine, made from the throat 

 membrane of a walrus stretched on a bow of ivory or 

 bone. The tapping of the rim with another piece of 

 ivory or bone marks the time. This is the Eskimo's 

 only attempt at music. Some women are supposed to 

 possess the power of the angakok — a combination 

 of the gifts of the fortune teller, the mental healer, and 

 the psalmodist, one might say. 



Once, years ago, my little brown people got tired of 

 an angakok, one Kyoahpahdo, who had predicted too 

 many deaths; and they lured him out on a hunting 

 expedition from which he never returned. But these 

 executions for the peace of the community are rare. 



Their burial customs are rather interesting. When 

 an Eskimo dies, there is no delay about removing the 

 body. Just as soon as possible it is wrapped, fully 

 clothed, in the skins which formed the bed, and some 



