34 Canadian Arctic Expedition, 191S-18 



Mr. Stefansson found thirteen families encamped on the ice north of Cape 

 Bexley in the spring of 1910, though a settlement of over forty houses but a 

 short time before had been deserted near Hope point. He states that Cape 

 Bexley is a trading rendezvous where people from the east come to visit the 

 Akulhakattangmiut, even from the east coast of Victoria island. This did not 

 happen during the time that the expedition remained in the neighbourhood/ 

 though natives from the east end of Coronation gulf visited the Dolphin and 

 Union strait Eskimos when they were camped in the neighbourhood of the 

 Liston and Sutton islands, both in 1915 and 1916. Normally this intercourse 

 took place just before spring, about the beginning of March, when the days 

 were long and travelling much less difficult. In the fall of 1915, however, a 

 large band of Eskimos from the Coppermine river region, attracted by the 

 prospects of trade with the expedition, came west into Dolphin and Union strait, 

 and camped first at Bernard harbour, then with the local natives at one of the 

 Liston and Sutton islands. 



Opposite the Akulhakattangmiut, on the other side of the strait, once lived 

 the Haneragmiut, the "people on the side of the land." Mr. Stefansson estimated 

 their number at about forty, and states that "a few of them each year hunt on 

 the mainland with the Akulhakattangmiut or farther east, but the larger number 

 go north into the Colville mountains to a fishing lake called Tahiryuak, where 

 they also get numerous caribou, and where .... they some years meet a few 

 representatives of the Kangianermiut." These latter people, he says in another 

 place, are the inhabitants of the mouth of the Rae river. There was a settlement 

 of about seventeen Haneragmiut people near Tulukak which he visited in the 

 spring of 1910. 



In the summer of 1915 the region of Hanerak was entirely uninhabited, 

 save for my own party, which extended its wanderings into this portion of the 

 country as well as over Puivlik to the eastward. The Eskimos said that the 

 Haneragmiut were extinct as a separate group; several had died one summer 

 near a small lake named Pisiksitorvik in the Colville hills, and the fest soon 

 beca;me dispersed among the surrounding groups, so that now the district is 

 often uninhabited. In 1916 only one family intended to hunt there; they were 

 encamped on the shore near Point Williams in the month of June, fishing in 

 the lakes and hunting in the hills immediately behind the point. One of our 

 western natives shot a bearded seal on the ice and offered them most of the 

 meat, but they had so much meat and blubber of their own that they refused 

 even to drag the animal to shore and cache it. There are at least two lakes named 

 Tahiryuak in this region, and still another northeast of Prince Albert sound, 

 but the best known of them all is the lake where my party of strait natives met 

 the Prince Albert sound Eskimos in the summer of 1915. This is probably the 

 one that Mr. Stefansson heard of, though the natives who normally meet there 

 are the Kanghiryuarmiut from the north and the Eskimos, particularly the 

 Puivlirmiut, from Dolphin and Union strait.^ 



The Noahognirmiut are the next group to the east on the mainland. In 

 the summer of 1914 there were nineteen people inhabiting this district, all of 

 whom called themselves Noahognirmiut, though two of them when cross- 

 questioned named other places as their original homes. During most of the 

 summer they wandered about in two separate bands, but two of the natives 

 kept changing about from one band to the other. In the autumn the two 

 bands came down to the coast at different times. The first to arrive, on 

 November 12th, consisted of two famihes only, six people in all who made 

 their camp at the mouth of a creek four miles east of Bernard harbour where 

 they had left their caches in the spring. Here they stayed for about three 

 weeks, then, early in December, they crossed the strait and joined the Puivlik 

 Eskimos at the mouth of the Kimiryuak river. The other band, thirteen in 



>Nor has it happened since then, the Rev. Mr. Girling informs me. 



mix. Stefansson has since explained to me that the word Kangianermiut in the passage quoted above 

 is obviously an error for Kunghiryuarmiut. 



