440 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



severely ill. The local shaman, Tagluksrak, went into a trance and 

 discovered that Joe had made a pen drawing on paper of a woman's 

 face and had written the word "Nannegrak" across the forehead. 

 He had then stabbed the picture through with some sharp instru- 

 ment. Kutok thought he stabbed it through the forehead for the 

 chief pain Nannegrak suffered was there. Tagluksrak saw while 

 under the spirit influence Nannegrak's name written in black across 

 her forehead. The shaman announced that he could not prevent 

 her death for the magic was too powerful for him to combat, and 

 all he could do was to explain the cause. All our Eskimos agreed 

 that in the country west of Herschel Island this story was every- 

 where known and everywhere believed. My Eskimos had them- 

 selves told it to Duffy O'Connor, who had told them that the 

 method of causing illness by making an image and then pricking or 

 burning it was well known among white men to be efficacious and 

 had formerly been much practiced. This was the first time I had 

 heard the Eskimo explanation of Nannegrak's death. Leffingwell 

 had told me about it, but I do not remember how he diagnosed the 

 disease — probably as pneumonia. 



The idea of sympathetic magic may not be fundamentally un- 

 known to the Eskimos except through white men's superstitions, 

 but certainly this is the only story of the sort that I ever picked up. 

 In view of the fact that this superstition was common in Europe 

 until lately and the fact that sailors are generally superstitious, 

 it would be strange if in the long association of sailors and Eskimos 

 in the forecastles of whaling ships this belief had not been passed 

 along. 



In a country like North America, where every landmark of con- 

 sequence must have had its native name before we white foreigners 

 appeared on the scene, it would seem manifestly proper that moun- 

 tains, lakes and rivers should continue to be known by their im- 

 memorial designations. I should be a great advocate of this were 

 it not my experience that native names are so badly mispronounced 

 by the earliest whites who come into any given district that few 

 of them could be understood by the people whose language it is 

 attempted to follow. When a stranger comes to any people he is 

 sure to mis-hear their words, interpreting them into unwarranted 

 likeness to the language which he speaks. A person who is not a 

 trained phonetician does not hear the sound actually spoken but 

 hears instead the sound out of his own language which most nearly 

 approximates the strange sound. Often the approximation is so 

 far from the truth that the native name written by a phonetician 



