E.— GEOGRAPHY. 93 



long Arctic winter or the pestilential irritation of the mosquito in 

 summer. 



The reindeer industry in Alaska is largely in the hands of Eskimo. 

 It was started to maintain them and 70 per cent, of the flocks now belong 

 to Eskimo. In Siberia, where the reindeer are for native use only, there 

 being no export of meat as from Alaska, all the herds are owned and 

 managed by natives. In Arctic Canada, when the industry grows, no 

 doubt Eskimo and Indians will be largely employed to tend the flocks, 

 but the slaughter of the beasts, the preparation of the meat and its 

 export, as well as the transport arrangements, will no doubt be in the 

 hands of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans. Eskimo and white will 

 meet even more than they do to-day. 



The experience of the past, in every quarter of the globe, of the fate 

 of hunting peoples in contact with more highly organised races gives room 

 for legitimate doubt as to the ultimate survival, still less the increase, of 

 the different peoples of the tundra. The clash of widely divergent cultures, 

 to say nothing of the introduction of new diseases, almost invariably has 

 meant the extinction of the more primitive people. 



The same will probably occur in the Arctic. The latest reports from 

 the North- West Territories of Canada do not hold out much hope for 

 Eskimo survival. The Eskimo are depending more and more on the 

 police and trading post for supplies and help. Only the remoter tribes 

 seem to preserve their strength and independence. The Hudson's Bay 

 Company and the Canadian Government, through the Mounted Police, 

 are doing all they can for the Eskimo in sheltering him from the evil 

 effects of civilisation. Yet the fact is admitted by the police themselves 

 that the sturdiest and most attractive Eskimo are those who are not in 

 contact with outposts of the white man's civilisation. 14 



Siberian natives in their greater isolation will no doubt last longer, but 

 they also show signs of failing. 



Up to the present the tide of human migration has flowed and ebbed 

 on Arctic shores and has been mainly a seasonal movement, marked even 

 in the permanent residents by a great degree of nomadism. But eventually 

 the tide of white settlement will definitely set northward, even to the 

 Arctic seas, and in its flood destroy the present inhabitants. 



It is no more presumptuous to forecast a scattered population of 

 reindeer and musk-ox farmers in the ' barren lands ' of Arctic Canada, 

 the tundras of Siberia, and even in Greenland and Spitsbergen too, a 

 hundred years hence than it was a hundred years ago to suggest sheep 

 farmers in the plains of Australia or wheat fields in the Peace Valley of 

 Canada. Every land beyond the frontiers of settlement has been a 

 ' never-never land ' to unadventurous and unimaginative folk living in 

 sheltered homes. But in most cases the prediction has been falsified. 



Prejudice and antipathy, which loom so strong at present, can be 

 ignored : when the Arctic calls for population and offers inducement in 

 the form of material gain, all difficulties of that kind will vanish, just as 

 the old-time horror of the tropics disappeared as knowledge grew and 

 prospects of gain loomed through the heat. The only question that 



14 See Report of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 1926, and K. Rasmussen, 

 Across Arctic America (1927). 



