Fig. 55. Marhre, one of the most prominent uaajeertoq players. 
(Painting by Mrs. E. Locher Thalbitzer, Ammassalik 1906.) 
V. MIMIC DRAMATIC DRUM SONGS 
Mimic GAMES. — Some mimic singing-games of the same kind 
as these were first described by G. Holm (see First Part, especially 
рр. 128—129). Their designation uaajeertog ‘a mimic player or gamester’ 
I have only heard at Ammassalik, but it seems to be a word of 
ancient origin. From West Greenland the name is not known and 
the games are not described, still the same have no doubt flourished 
there before the days of the mission as such games belong to the 
real Eskimo culture. 
It is probable that some of these games date far back and owe 
their origin to certain cultic ceremonies. As already remarked by 
Holm the masks were used at some similar games in Baffin Land 
and Alaska. In Franz Boas’s report from Baffin Land and in Parry’s 
old narrative of his journey to more westerly islands we find some 
contributions to the nature and history of these singing games to 
which I shall revert later. At Ammassalik I was told that there also 
masks have been used formerly in connection with some of the 
uaajeertog games (both wood- and skin-masks). In later time, how- 
ever, it had become more customary for the mimic players to 
make themselves up, e.g. by putting soot-spots on the naked body, 
by stuffing a plug into the mouth to distend it, by tieing a string 
under the tip of the nose to turn it up ete. 
Of much interest appears to me the information that the uaajertoq 
games at Ammassalik in olden times took place in special houses 
without windows, e.g. at Umeewik where there is said to have been 
“a large and high house” that was not used in winter, but only in 
Summer or harvest time by the young folk of the whaler families 
that gathered there. — Though the word for “qashe” is unknown at 
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