Shamanism 209 



an unpleasant charge of murder, which might have endangered my work, if 

 not my life, among these Eskimos. The following day I presented Uloksak 

 with a cast-off Burberry snow-shirt, a very valuable garment in his eyes. The 

 account that Sullivan gave of the stance to the other members of the expedition 

 was rather amusing; the only words he had understood, of course, were the 

 directions I gave him during the dancing. He was greatly alarmed at one period, 

 he said, for he thought that Uloksak was urging the natives to kill us; then when 

 Uloksak talked gibberish and I answered in an equally unknown tongue he 

 thought that I had been hypnotized. 



The greatest of all the shamans among the Copper Eskimos was Uatsiak. 

 In March., 1916, he guided a large band of Bathurst inlet natives to our station 

 at Bernard harbour and camped beside us for about three weeks. Seeing us 

 record one Or two songs on the phonograph he asked to be allowed to summon 

 his familiar spirit, Kingaudlik, and under its inspiration to speak into the 

 machine. He was rather short of stature, so we had to raise him on a box to 

 bring his face level with the horn ; perched on this box he protruded his face into 

 the bell of the horn and nervously kicked his legs out behind him, one after the 

 other, in the manner of a person skipping over a rope. The usual preliminaries 

 of a shamanistic performance were omitted; he merely paused a moment to 

 collect his wits (or to give his familiar time to enter him), then said what he had 

 to say and stood down. Some of the words are scarcely audible in the record 

 owing to his jumping. As usual too, it is difficult to attach any meaning to them, 

 but the literal interpretation of this first oracle was,"Where? Give me liver, liver; 

 it is excellent. I hear speech" — a remark that Ilatsiak's adopted son under- 

 stood to mean that his' father's familiar Kingaudlik was asking for some liver. 



This stance not being very satisfactory, Uatsiak was requested to give 

 another similar to those he habitually gave in the dance-house. When every- 

 thing was ready he came forward and asked for a cup of water. He gazed into 

 it very intently for a few seconds, then said that something was wrong on our 

 schooner; some one on board was going to be drowned. He then drank the 

 water, solemnly shook hands with all the white men present, stepped up to the 

 phonograph and, at the word takki, "Begin", delivered the oracle that is trans- 

 lated below. Mingled with his words are the remarks of his Eskimo kinsmen, 

 especially of his wife> whose voice, though she sat quite six feet away from the 

 machine, can be heard quite distinctly on the record; for the natives regarded 

 the stance as a perfectly genuine one, and tried to interpret Ilatsiak's utterances, 

 and enlarge on them, just as they would have done in the dance-house. Uatsiak 

 gave a gasp at the conclusion and breathed very hard for a moment or two as 

 his familiar left him, after which he sat down and enquired of the natives what 

 he had said. Later in the day he invoked another of his familiars, Annakok, 

 and we recorded yet another oracle. 



It was not considered advisable to allow Uatsiak to hear his own records, but 

 after he had returned east two natives from the same region who had heard the 

 oracles delivered helped me to reduce them to writing and to translate them into 

 English. In many places the words were quite unintelligible even to them, for, 

 as they took pains to remark, it was not the shaman himself who was speaking 

 ■but the spirit that possessed him, and spirit utterances are not easily understood 

 by the laity. Neither stance was in any way fictitious, either to Uatsiak him- 

 self or to his audience. Even the Eskimos who heard the records only discussed 

 them as real oracles, and had implicit faith in their verity. 



The first oracle was as follows: — 



". . . Did you do it? Did you do it? It is terrifying. Himiamin,i 

 did you do it? The fish's eyes, the fish, they say. Did you do it? The fish, 

 they say, ate the people. It is terrifying. The fish ate the people, it swallowed 



'Himiamin was said to be the name of a woman shaman in Bathurst inlet. 

 23335—14 



