Psychology and Morality 



241- 



market for their skins, and even those natives who never fell in with the white 

 men began to give some attention to it. The Eskimos were particularly struck 

 by the fact that many articles of inestimable value to themselves, such as tin 

 cans, scrap iron and steel needles, were very little prized by the white men, who 

 set more store on fox-skins and other objects of little use to the natives them- 

 selves and therefore of small value in their eyes. The white men again were 

 inferior in hunting, except for the advantage their rifles gave them, and less 

 hardy and enduring. They were ignorant, too, of the art of harpooning seals 

 and of building snow huts, so that they could not move from their houses in 



Fig. 69. The influx from the west. Christian Jorgenson Klengenberg (a Dane), his wife (an 



Eskimo woman from Wainwright inlet, N. Alaska), and their family, all of 



whom migrated into Coronation gulf in 1916 



winter without their tents. Further they often bought meat from the natives, 

 or employed them to hunt for them, and the women to sew their clothes. The 

 journey of the two French missionaries to the mouth of the Coppermine river 

 in 1913 must have opened the eyes of the Eskimos to the diflaculties under 

 which the majority of white men labour when they try to cope with Arctic 

 conditions of life and travel. For many different reasons, therefore, the natives 

 conceived a certain amount of contempt for white men, a contempt that was 

 only quahfied by a desire to gain some of their most valued possessions, their 

 knives and axes and particularly their rifles and their ammunition. The receipt 

 of indiscriminate presents, however small their value to the donors, undermined 

 the dignity and independence of the natives, especially those of the Coppermine 

 river basin who came more directly under this influence. They quickly dropped 

 the custom of offering an equivalent for everything they received, and learned 

 to beg and clamour for everjrthing they saw without the slighest hesitation or 

 shame. There were still men of grave dignity and -self-respect amongst them, 



23335—16 



