Ethnological Sketch of the Angmagsalik Eskimo. 127 



People who are unable to sing are ashamed to touch a drum. 



When the drum-chants are thus sung for pleasure, they are 

 called mumerpok\ but when the same songs are recited without the 

 accompaniment of a drum, as e. g. in kaiaks or umiaks, they are 

 called sokulavok. When songs of this kind are sung by a number 

 of persons, they may sound very impressive and harmonious. 



Justice. — As has already been mentioned, a challenge to a 

 drum-dance {ivernek) is the way in which justice is administered 

 between disputants. Murder, theft, or destruction of anothers' pro- 

 perty may be the occasion. In most cases, however, and perhaps in 

 every instance, these challenges are occasioned in the last resort by^ 

 a woman, as the crimes just enumerated are usually committed as 

 a revenge for some wrong a man has suffered on a woman's account, 

 as, for instance, when someone has run away with his wife or 

 been too intimate with her. On the other hand, we have not had 

 occasion to observe, as we have heard from the West coast, that a 

 man may be challenged to a drum-match because of his failure as 

 a hunter, arising either from laziness, cowardice, or incompetence. 



The drum-matches are held both summer and winter. A match 

 of this kind is not settled in one evening, but is continued for a 

 number of years, the parties taking turns to visit one another. For 

 each new meeting the parties prepare and practise new songs. In 

 these songs the crimes are vastly exaggerated, and if they can find 

 no other material, they father new crimes on their opponent, or 

 reproach him for crimes he has merely intended but not committed.. 

 They also enumerate the faults of their opponent's family, and even 

 of their dead ancestors. In the hands of malicious people these at- 

 tacks may assume an exceedingly brutal form : thus a man from 

 Sermilik who had challenged the angakok Kunit at Norajik to a 

 drum-match, enumerated all the people his wife and mother-in- 

 law had eaten in the famine at Kernertorsuit (as to which more 

 anon), which made them so miserable that they burst into tears. 



The opponents stand facing one another. They sing one at a 

 time in the position we have already mentioned, the other party 

 standing quiet and apparently indifferent in front of him. The singer 

 mocks the other in a great number of ways, as a rule by snorting 

 and breathing right in his face and by striking him with the fore- 

 head (talartauputj, so that he tumbles backwards^). 



The other party receives this treatment with the greatest com- 

 posure, nay even with mocking laughter to show the audience his 



^) The word tulartauput is used on the West coast in the meaning of 'to butt', 

 of goats (Kleinschmidt's Dictionary p. 378). 



