130 J. C. SCHULTZ ON THE 



for." They prefer an elevated and remote situation for the tomb, which they l)uild of 

 stones and line with moss and skins, and the nearest of kin brings out the dead swathed and 

 sewed up in his best pelts, bearing him on his back, or sometimes dragging him along the 

 ground. He then lays him in the grave, covering him with a skin or sods and placing over 

 these large heavy stones as a protection against foxes and lairds of prey. The kayack and 

 weapons ofthe dead are deposited near the grave, as are also knives and sewing implements of 

 women, that the survivors may contract no detilement from them, nor be lead by the con- 

 stant sight of them to indulge in too great grief, an excess of which is thought to be 

 injurious to the departed soul. Many also entertain the notion that the same weapons which 

 were used in this world will be necessary for the support of life in the other. 



In attempting to form my own opinion regarding this singular people, I have consulted 

 all the records of early and later intercourse with them within reach here, and in the fore- 

 going having endeavoured to give from these and from unwritten sources of information as 

 faithful an account of their habits, modes of life, religious belief, etc., as was possible con- 

 sidering their wide habitat and the contradictory statements often made in reference to 

 them, and some of these accounts of them I have copied from the records of observers who 

 seemed to me to have had a fair opportunity of being correct, and whose veracity I do not 

 doubt, and from all these sources of information I am inclined to class the Innuit nation 

 high among the aborigines of Canada, high even among the aborigines of America, except- 

 ing, of course, in constructive skill and some of the arts, the tribes of Aztec and Toltec stock. 

 And it seems to me that no aboriginal people have been, when first encountered in early or 

 more recent days, more misunderstood or traduced. They were believed for a time to be 

 sun-worshippers, because when first emerging from their tents in the morning they invari- 

 ably looked toward that luminary to see what mists were likely to obscure the haunts ofthe 

 seal and what clouds betokened a gathering storm or fair weather. They have been con- 

 sidered cowardly, though their life is one long war with the elements and where they con- 

 stantly exercise in the pursuit of food a courage greater, indeed, than he wlio attacks the 

 whale, walrus or polar bear with modern implements of destruction, and, when smarting 

 under the sense of injustice and cruelty, they have, in times long gone, swept the Norsemen 

 from the Greenlandic coasts, and in chance encounters with sub-arctic Indian tribes, they are 

 nearly alwaj's the victors. 



They have been set down as inveterate thieves, generally by those who underrated the 

 temptation to purloin a little of the white man's stupendous affluence of that metal, the 

 slightest bit of which in needle or knife-blade was a treasured possession to be handed down 

 from mother to daughter and from father to son, and most writers agree that honesty and 

 respect for their neighbour's goods characterizes their dealings with each other. In their 

 semi-communal life, however, no man must possess too much ; the man who has two kayacks 

 must allow any relative to use the spare one, and he who has three, must submit to the third 

 being taken by any one who needs it, and a misdirected exercise of this unwritten Eskimo 

 law may perhaps account for the ingenious abstraction of a tin plate or a coveted inul from 

 a kegful of such riches ; they are said to be callous or indifferent, but no savages exceed 

 them in fondness for their children and the care of the aged, although when famine is 

 abroad and only the well and strong can make their way to the distant sealing ground or the 

 stranded or rancid whale, the old must wait till help can come. Family relationships, more- 

 over, are strong and the aged whose young people have gone before, are only cared for in 



