200 Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913-18 



Uloksak described a stance at Bathurst inlet in which he had taken part. 

 A woman, stripped to the waist, swallowed a snow knife till only the handle 

 projected from her mouth. Another shaman took hold of it and pulled it out 

 of her stomach. A third shaman, a native of Ekaluktok, then swallowed a 

 mitten and made it come out of Uloksak's stomach, whereupon Uloksak him- 

 self swallowed it and made it come out of the stomach of a man named Manne- 

 ratsiak. Manneratsiak immediately went outside, and when he entered the 

 dance-house again all the upper half of his body had changed to a musk-ox while 

 the lower parts remained human. In this state he walked about the dance- 

 house for a little while, then went outside again ' and returned in his proper form. 

 Meanwhile a woman named AUanak was looking after her hut some distance 

 from the scene of these marvels. The shamans threw a line out into the passage 

 of the dance-house, and began to haul it in again ; the spectators then saw that 

 the end was fastened around Allanak's neck. The woman herself knew nothing 

 about it until she was told some time afterwards. 



Kuniluk, a Puivlik shaman, professed to have changed to a white man 

 on, one occasion. He was crossing Dolphin and Union strait, he said, on his way 

 to our station, when a fog came up and he lost his way. He summoned one of 

 his familiars, which changed him temporarily into a white man and enabled him 

 to find his way again without any difficulty. 



Many a shaman lays claim to clairvoyance. In the spring of 1915 when 

 a number of Eskimos were encamped beside our station this same man Kuniluk 

 was accused by Uloksak of stealing two boxes of cartridges. After Kuniluk 

 had left the camp Uloksak entered the station and announced that he intended 

 to recover one of the boxes. He rolled up his sleeves like a conjuror, waved 

 his arms about in the air, rolled his eyes, and finally, diving down into a dark 

 corner of the room, brought forth a box. The trick was rather too transparent, 

 for plainly he had left the box there earlier in the day. Our cook immediately 

 accepted the challenge, and, knowing of another box that lay in a corner out of 

 sight, he went through a similar performance and 'discovered' it. Uloksak was 

 astounded, and could not make up his mind whether the cook's 'discovery' was 

 a genuine one or simply a fraud like his own. 



In December, 1915, a woman shaman prophesied that some people to the 

 eastward would fall over a cliff into a hole and perish. During the same per- 

 formance she announced that evil spirits were threatening the lives of certain 

 natives in the community. One of them was Avranna, so she forbade his wife 

 Milukkattak to sew on the following day. Milukkattak had promised to make 

 a sleeping bag for me, but in consequence of this prohibition she had to post- 

 pone it. 



Many of the shamans' "discoveries" are made in dreams. Two fox-traps 

 were once stolen from my sled; Higilak told me a few days later that in her sleep 

 she had seen a hand and fore-arm stealthily abstracting them, but could not 

 identify the person. On another occasion I lost a tin full of matches, and a 

 shaman discovered in a dream that a certain woman had stolen them. Ilatsiak 

 asserted that his familiar often visited him in his sleep and revealed what was 

 about to happen. Whenever he dreamed of small knives he knew that some 

 children were sick. Sometimes the knives lay broken on the ground and he 

 would rivet them together; then the children would grow well again. One 

 morning he heard that a little boy, the son of a Mackenzie river woman in our 

 service, had taken suddenly ill; immediately he announced that during his 

 sleep he had repaired a knife that lay broken on -the snow, so the boy would 

 recover. The very next morning he entered our house and reported that during 

 the night his spirit had told him that something had gone wrong on our schooner; 

 it was the thing, he said, that made the vessel move. We thought that he must 

 mean the propeller, for we had put a new one on during the winter and had to 

 keep the ice open around it. By a strange coincidence, however, we discovered 



