228 Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913-18 



CHAPTER XVIII 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MORALITY 



There are two standpoints from which we may treat of the psychology of 

 any given people. In the first place we may select a dozen or twenty individuals, 

 rega:rd them as typical of the whole group, and subject them to elaborate experi- 

 ments that will test their emotional susceptibilities and intellectual powers. 

 We should then try to differentiate between their inherent and their acquired 

 qualities, that is to say, between the qualities that are inherited from one gener- 

 ation to another and those that are superimposed on these either by dehberate 

 training or by the influence of the environment. GeneraUzing from the data 

 thus obtained, we may arrive at certain conclusions regarding the psychology 

 of the people as a whole and the characteristics that mark them off from other 

 peoples. But a study of this nature, so full of traps and pitfalls even to the 

 trained psychologist, is quite beyond the reach of an ordinary layman. More- 

 over, as far as the Copper Eskimos are concerned, no one has ever undertaken 

 the necessary experiments. 



The second standpoint that we may take, if less scientific in the technical 

 sense of that term, is at least equally valuable. The method adopted is the 

 method of the legislator and the trader, the traveller and the missionary. Regard- 

 ing the people as a single group, studying their culture and watching their be- 

 haviour under the varying circumstances of life, we single out those traits which 

 seem to mark the majority of its individual members and make them character- 

 istic of the people as a whole, without troubling to enquire whether these traits 

 are innate or acquired, the outcome of hereditary factors or the result of education 

 and environment. An analysis of this kind, being more or less empirical, can 

 only be approximately accurate, and when applied to individual cases will be 

 found to fall very wide of the truth. Nevertheless it is largely on such an 

 analysis, conscious or unconscious, that foreigners must always base their 

 j udgments and their relations, whether it be, for example, a legislature framing laws 

 for its alien subjects or a Hudson's Bay Company factor trading with Indians or 

 Eskimos. Even though it lacks therefore the precision and exactitude of more 

 scientific enquiries, it has its practical value. It is the object of the present 

 chapter to supply such an analysis, and so to round off the conception I have 

 tried to convey of the Ufe and culture of the Copper Eskimos. 



Let us consider first how the limitations of their environment and their 

 ignorance of the great world outside of them react on the minds of these Eskimos. 

 Naturally, we find it reflected in the circumscribed range of their ideas, notice- 

 able more particularly in their topics of conversation. The men are thinking 

 and talking always of their hunting, their fishing, and their sealing. When the 

 hunter returns to camp, every little incident of the day, how he saw a caribou 

 from the top of a ridge, the character of the country, his careful stalking, how 

 he crawled on hands and knees, what the deer was doing, his shooting, the action 

 of the wounded animal, how he skinned it, the thickness of its back-fat and the 

 excellence of its fur, how he packed it home and the other tracks that he came 

 upon, all these are repeated over and over again, down to the minutest detail, 

 to everyone who enters the house. The other hunters describe their adventures, 

 and the women interrupt now and then with a question or an exclamation, or 

 retail the most recent item of gossip around the settlement. The same questions 

 are asked, the same requests made again and again, and so the conversation 

 continues. Even less than with us does it rise to the height of abstract reflection, 

 or to a contemplation of the nature and purpose of the things by which mankind 



