Iglulingmiut: Inuit Hunters In Transition — Part 1 Video Transcript

Text: WARNING The following documentary contains graphic animal butchering scenes.

[Music]

Text: Iglulingmiut: Inuit Hunters in Transition, A Film by Richard Emerick – 1953

A Production of the Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian Institution 91.9.2 and Hudson Museum, University of Maine

Supported by The University Museum of Philadelphia and the Danish National Museum

[Music fades]

Visual: Grainy, low-resolution video of icebergs and a snow-covered landscape.

Voiceover by Richard Emerick: In 1953 the University Museum in Philadelphia and the Danish National Museum sent two men to the territory of the Iglulingmiut Inuit in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. They went there to investigate some puzzling archaeological findings from that area and to document some of the walrus-, seal-, bear-, and whale-hunting activities of the people living there now.

Visual: Shots of Inuit people walking across a landscape, and a young Inuit woman sitting on the ground in front of a hide tent.

Voiceover: During the icebound season the only way to get to the area of Northern Fox Basin, north of Hudson’s Bay (in 1953 at least) was by ski plane.

Visual: A small yellow single-prop plane with skis sitting on a snowy landscape, a map of the Hudson’s Bay region of Canada, shots of the icy waters of the Arctic ocean.

Voiceover: The single-engine Beaver flew North from Churchill Manitoba along the eastern shore of Hudson’s Bay until reaching Melville Peninsula and Igloolik Island off its northern tip.

Visual: A series of videos and still images of igloos in various levels of disrepair. In some of the images tents have been erected inside the shell of a collapsed igloo.  In one video a woman in Inuit dress looks at the camera and dogs lay down outside a collapsed igloo.

Voiceover: It was in early March and the village of Igloolik was in the transition time between the long Arctic winter and the earliest signs of spring. Igloos made from snow blocks and used through the winter were beginning to soften and melt and were gradually being replaced by tents of seal skin and even some of canvas.

Visual: Videos of people in Inuit clothing in front of a hide tent, walking across a snowy landscape, carrying an infant in a traditional infant carrier draped over the back.

Voiceover: In the winter the people dress in two layers of clothing made from Caribou skins. The inner layer is worn with the hair toward the body; the outer layer has the hair toward the weather. In the spring only the undergarments are worn. Some will cover it with tent canvas and some of the women will wear trade cloth skirts over their skin trousers.

Visual: A panning shot of a snowy landscape with groups of dogs laying in various places. Children play on the still sled.

Voiceover: Dog teams are kept busy by taking the hunters out to the edge of the sea ice to hunt seals. When they get back to the village they just drop in their harnesses and rest. Boys will sometimes pretend to be driving them and practice using the long seal skin whips.

Visual: Image of white furs on a line with blue sky and snowy land behind.

Voiceover: Since the Hudson Bay Traders came to the Arctic back in the last century hunters also set trap lines to catch the Arctic fox. Its much-prized, snow white pelt is then traded to the Company in exchange for such things as tea and tobacco, flour, cloth, rifles, and bullets.

Visual: A woman squats on the ground and scrapes a hide. A dog licks the hide as she works.

Voiceover: Seal skins brought in by the hunters are also traded for goods. These need to be scraped and cleaned thoroughly before the trade is made. This woman is getting a little help from one of her son’s dogs.

Visual: A dogsled moves through a snowy landscape. It carries multiple people. Video then cuts to people in Inuit clothing carring packages toward the camera. Many of them are women with babies or young children on their backs.

Voiceover: During this interim period between winter and spring families come in with large sled loads from the several other small villages of Iglulingmiut in the region. They come in to bring their trade materials to the small tar paper-covered Hudson’s Bay Trading Post. Both men and women will trade against the credit their family has established with their skins and furs and ivory for a few household needs and then take them back to their homes.

Visual: A dogsled moves away from the camera. The video then cuts to a shot taken from the perspective of the sled – lines fan out to around a half-dozen dogs  walking next to each other and pulling the sled through the snow.

Voiceover: This early spring trading temporarily brings more people into the village and hunting is stepped up in order to feed them. Some hunters head out for the edge of the sea ice at the horizon to get some seals to feed both people and dogs. In seal-skin harnesses with Ivory toggles the dogs run in fan hitch rather than the one-line tandem hitch used farther to the south where there may be vegetation to get snagged on.

Visual: A hunter kneels in the snow and points a rifle off to the right of frame, out toward the ocean. Video then cuts to the hunter hurrying over the snow holding the rifle and again to the hunter inspecting the carcass of a seal laying on the snow.

Voiceover: Kulout, the village’s best hunter, uses a trade .22 rifle to shoot a small jar seal that surfaced in the open water, knowing that the prevailing wind will quickly blow it into the edge of the of the ice. The hunter, in his trade sunglasses, looks over the seal and notices that it has six digits on its front flippers. This is a very uncommon condition in seals.

Visual: The hunter uses a knife to open the belly of the seal. The video cuts briefly to a shot showing the entrails steaming, then to a close-up of the hunter pulling the intestines through his hands, emptying them. Then a group of hunters squat around the carcass and use knives to cut off hunks of meat that they hold in their mouths.

Voiceover: The carcass is then cut up for eating. The open body of the warm-blooded sea mammal steams in the cold air and the meat is warm. The entrails are rung carefully to clean them of digested food and fecal matter. They’ll be consumed later. The warm, fresh meat and blubber makes a good meal for the hunters. They take a bite of the raw meat and then slice it off close to their noses. They’re careful to share the meat and blubber and delicacies such as the liver and the heart.

Visual: The body of the seal is sewn back up along the cut that runs the length of its underside. Video fades to dogs sitting in the snow watching a man use a large knife to cut a carcass into small pieces.  Then we see a back of dogs eating with tails wagging.

Voiceover: What isn’t eaten is laced up in the skin to be used later to feed the dogs. When it’s their turn the dogs wait obediently, if not patiently, for the meat to be cut into portions so that one dog can’t run off with a very large hunk. When the signal is given the hungry dogs move in and eat their fill.

Visual: An Inuit individual walks through the snow toward a tent surrounded by bare, rocky ground. Then we see a young woman and group of children wearing lighter garments standing on rocky ground with snow in the background. A small child wearing mittens plays on the bare ground by a tent with adults looking on.

Voiceover: The increased length of daylight hours has taken its toll of the fairly shallow snow cover in the village. In the high Arctic – which is really a desert as far as far as annual precipitation is concerned – it doesn’t take long for the Winter’s accumulation to melt. As the gravel of the tundra gradually emerges, tents of skin, or sometimes of canvas, are put up on the dry places and people can enjoy open ground again.

Visual: A metal kettle hangs on a tripod over a fire in a half-circle-shaped soapstone lamp with fire burning along one edge.  The camera pans up and across a group of people by the lamp inside a well-lit light-colored tent. In the background can be seen various items including furs.  The video then cuts back to the lamp and then to a close-up of the fire burning along the edge and the chunk of blubber sitting in the body of the lamps’ dish.

Voiceover: Inside a new canvas tent they have made a family lives with a mixture of traditional and trade household materials – the seal oil lamp, tea, tobacco, and so forth, and, finally, even a hand-crank Singer sewing machine – the only one in the village. At the heart of the household, as it has always been, is the blubber oil lamp made of soap stone. Proximity to the heat of the flame renders oil from the chunks of blubber placed in the bowl of the lamp. The oil burns on wicks of moss placed along the straight edge of the lamp. This provides all the light and heat in the traditional igloo or tent.

Visual: A young woman with a black braid smiles at the camera while chewing on a piece of leather. She is outside and the snowy ground can be seen behind her.

Voiceover:  Spring and summer walking conditions require new and repaired boots. This woman is softening a piece of seal skin to make boots.

Visual: A panning shot from melting snow to water-logged ground sticking out of standing water.

Voiceover: The snow is almost gone now and melt water stands on the tundra everywhere. The permafrost just under the surface does not let it soak in.

The sun is now up for 24 hours at this latitude. The so-called “midnight sun” stays above the horizon.

Visual: The sun moving horizontally from left to right across the sky near the horizon over the ocean. The foreground is dark.

Voiceover:  Timelapse photography shows it approaching the horizon near midnight, traveling parallel with it, and then begin to climb again.

Visual: A somewhat distant shot of two women walking along the bare ground with the ocean in the background. One has a child in a carrier on her back. The video then cuts to birds flying over water toward rocks, then to a female duck on a nest in the rocky ground. She is chased off the nest and five eggs can be seen nestled in soft feathers where she had been laying.

Voiceover: Women can now walk over the open tundra to search for moss and birds’ eggs. Many species of waterfowl nest above the Arctic Circle each spring and flocks of them come flying in. Among them are eider ducks. This hen has made a nest in the tundra gravel and lined it with the soft warm down from her breast. When she’s urged off the nest one can see the large, pale green eggs which women and children collect in large quantities at this time of year. However, they’re careful not to take all the eggs from any one nest.

Visual: Various shots of small yellow flowers blowing in the wind on thin stalks. The ground below them is covered in dense, low plant cover. The final shot is a wider view that shows patches of differing vegetation.

Voiceover: The few flowers that bloom in the high Arctic begin to appear at this short season. The people have names for them all of course but they don’t figure importantly in their lives because they’re not edible. The Arctic poppy is the tallest growing thing in this part of the world and it may get as much as 10 inches tall! These poppies are growing along an ancient shoreline ridge on which a prehistoric village was once located. The house sites are still discernible on close inspection.

Visual: Various shots of the ocean with sea ice cut to a woman kneeling on the ground using a lunate metal knife to very carefully cut a sheet of hide.  A wider shot shows other women engaged in similar activities nearby.

Voiceover: The melting sea ice and the tides cause the seascape to change continuously in the spring. This is when the people move from the main village at Igloolik to the summer walrus camp on the tip of Melville Peninsula. Old skin tents need repairing and new ones need to be made. Women, using the traditional woman’s knife or ulu, cut up skins in preparation for this annual tent work.

Visual: A man stands on ice and dangles a line into a hole, holding it by a bone handle it is attached to.  In his other hand is a long harpoon with the point in the water ready to strike.  In the background sea ice flows by.

Voiceover: As the melting sea ice comes and goes along the shore men using lures on seal skin lines and small harpoons try to catch the Arctic char which hide under the ice. The fish is a welcome addition to the meat diet.

Visual: A man sites on the rocky ground in front of a tent with other tents in the background. He holds a piece of bone and works on it carefully with a file and then a small knife. He wears lighter hide clothing and fur boots.

Voiceover: While waiting for the walrus hunt to begin Kulout uses ivory from walrus tusk to make carved figures of animals and sometimes of people. He does it because he may be able to trade them to the Hudson’s Bay Company. But, mostly he does it because it pleases him to do it.

Visual: The video pans from a sail boat with a single triangular white sail sitting on smooth water to a second boat, sail lowered, sitting near ice. The video then cuts to the first boat under sail, then to shots of dogs laying on the ground or on remnants of ice on a rocky shoreline or playing in the water.

Voiceover: Over the years the Iglulingmiut were able to get in trade two wooden whaleboats to replace the large skin boats, called umiaks, which they traditionally used. They’ve learned to sail the whaleboats and use them for the summer walrus hunt out in Northern Fox Basin. The summer hunt is about to begin. The dogs for a while can relax and keep cool on stranded blocks of ice along the shore.

Visual: A brief shot of a seal sticking its head above the water cuts quickly to the seal being dragged from the water onto ice by a hunter.

Voiceover: On this hunt the first animal encountered on the way out to the walrus herd was was a large bearded seal. He’s shot, harpooned, and dragged up on a floating ice pan to be butchered.

Visual: The hunters use a large metal knife to cut a line around the girth of the seal carcass, exposing a think layer of blubber beneath.  A second hunter helps and they make cuts in rings around the middle of the seal, leaving strips of skin intact between.  The video then shows the rings of skin being cut free of the fat and meat of the seal and slid down past the back flippers and off the carcass intact.

Voiceover: The bearded seal has thicker hide than the smaller jar seal and its skin is used for tents and boot soles and harpoon lines. It’s been determined that this seal skin will be used for making line. Cuts are made around the carcass through the skin and the blubber. The rings are of varying widths because the width of the ring will determine the length of the line to be made from it. The rings are removed from the carcass. Later, each ring will be cut spirally about at 1/2 inch wide around and around and around the ring until it’s used up. This produces one long, continuous piece of line that’s extremely strong and slightly elastic.

Visual: The hunters have now moved on to butchering the now-skinless carcass.  They have opened the body and the organs are visible and being sorted through by the hunters.  Cut to the intestines being carefully laid out straight on the snow, then the hunters run the length of them through their hands to remove the contents.  The next shot shows the now-empty intestines being neatly bundled with a technique that resembles hand-crochet. A hunter then tosses a fragment of flesh into the bottom of the waiting boat.

Voiceover: The carcass must then be cut up so that it will stow in the boat. Nothing is wasted. The organs and the meat are carefully saved. The intestines are removed and rung out to remove fecal matter. Then, so that they will not get tangled in the feet of the hunters in the boat, they’re “crocheted,” if you will, into a compact bundle and, along with the rest of the meat, are loaded into the boat. Now, no matter how the rest of the hunt goes, there will be meat for the hunters.

Visual: A series of shots of group of walrus swimming through the open ocean, laying on floating ice, gathering in the water.  A later shot includes the walruses and floating ice in the background and a man and portion of the boat’s rigging in the foreground. 

Voiceover: There’s an area of floating ice pans about 50 miles out where it’s likely the walruses can be found feeding on mollusks and vegetation on the bottom. As expected, the huge animals were there. Some of them were on the ice basking in the sun and scratching or sleeping. Very soon the boat was surrounded with dozens of bobbing walruses that looked like a pachydermal ballet performance. The mature males –  weighed a ton or more – and the slightly smaller females both have tusks! The bulls’ tusks are thicker the tusks of the cows are more slender but often longer. Any one of them could easily have ripped the side of the boat off.

Visual: The man in the boat uses an oar to row closer the bobbing walruses and then pulls out a rifle.  We then see a series of close-up shots of walruses bobbing, thrashing, or floating in the water.

Voiceover: The hunters opened fire and shot some of the animals in the water, but it would then be necessary to harpoon them as well so that there would be a line on them. The object was to shoot them through the lungs if possible so that they would not be able to sound or dive for the bottom without drowning in their own blood.

Visual: A walrus laying on the ice, looking around.  The video jumps and the walrus suddenly stops moving.

Voiceover: Sometimes a lone walrus would be found on an ice pan and the hunters could shoot him there before he could get into the water. This avoided the necessity of harpooning and then hauling them up out of the water onto an ice pan to be butchered. This lone bull is approached slowly and dispatched with one skillfully placed shot.

Visual: A group of men working together to pull a walrus carcass onto ice using a rope and a hook placed through the muzzle of the walrus. The next scenes show various stages of the butchering process, beginning with making a long cut along the walrus’s underside and exposing the think layer of fat beneath the skin.

Voiceover: The animals shot and harpooned in the water have to be pulled up onto the floating ice so that their huge carcasses can be cut up into manageable sized pieces. The following scenes of the butchering process are a composite from a number of hunts that were undertaken that summer. They show, once again, that nothing is wasted.

Visual: Various shots of men using knives to remove organs and meat from a carcass. Many men are working together in each shot. Each piece is sorted out into different piles on the ice. The piles are then placed within sections of skin that are sewn into bags. We also see closeups of the hunters eating pieces of the carcass as they work. The final shot of the video shows a man using a large metal knife to cut a shallow strip of skin on a skin bag to form a handle.

Voiceover: People have sometimes wondered how these high Arctic people who eat meat almost exclusively can be properly nourished on such a diet. It must be remembered that an entire animal is probably a fairly well-rounded diet. These people are not selective carnivores as people to the south are. They eat every organ and gland and type of meat as well as the stomach contents and cartilage and the high-oil-content blubber. Virtually everything is eaten raw. This, of course, accounts for the high incidence of trichinosis among the Iglulingmiut in 1953, especially in the men who eat warm, raw meat fresh from the kill when they’re out hunting.

To facilitate the transportation of the meat by boat back to the camp it’s made up into bundles: slabs of hide are cut and lacing holes are made along the long edges. Meat, organs, blubber, and Meaty bones are placed on the slabs of skin and strips of hide are used to lace up the bundles, each of which is about the size of a large seal. Handles are even cut into the sides of the bundles to make carrying easier.