Copper Inuit Research Articles

Nadlok and Its Unusual Antler Dwellings

Nadlok, or crossing-place-of-deer in Bathurst Inuit dialect, is an island camp and herd interception site found in 1982 by Douglas Stern 100 km south of Bathurst Inlet, Northwest Territories. In the Little Ice Age (1450-1700 A.D.), a few families of coastal Copper Inuit appear to have abandoned a declining seal resource on the coast for predictable and available inland caribou hunting at Nadlok. A simple tent camp, as seen in the architecturally sterile bottom level dating 1400 A.D., evolved into 15 sturdy stone and antler dwellings occupied in winter. ... Scattered between the floors were late prehistoric Copper Inuit tools, art and trade goods. Men's and women's tools include an ornately engraved antler knife handle, ulus, harpoons, arrows, copper fishhooks with bone lures, needle cases, whittling knives, engraved pendants, fire-starting kits and awls. There were some 40 000 bones, mostly the remains of caribou, but also of birds, fish and muskox. ...

Richard Sterling Finnie, 1906-1987

Richard Sterling Finnie ... died at his home of February 2, 1987, at the age of 80. Highlights of Richard Finnie's early career, which led to his recognition as an authority on the geography and history of the Arctic and northern Canada, were five seaborne expeditions to the eastern Canadian Arctic, the first flight made over the North Magnetic Pole and around King William Island, a year living among the Copper Eskimos, the first direct flight from Norman Wells to Whitehorse and two years as northern adviser and documentary film maker with the civilian contractors and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the building of the Alaska Highway and its related Canol Project. ... Finnie produced The Alaska Highway, a film that has come to be regarded as a unique documentary of this historic project. Finnie retired as official historian and film producer for Bechtel Corporation in 1968, after 25 years covering in word and picture Bechtel's international construction projects. ... he produced more than 60 films in sound and color, often being his own cameraman as well as writer, director, soundman and narrator. ... After Finnie retired, he continued an active life, lecturing and publishing on the Northwest and Yukon territories. ... Finnie was a fellow of the Arctic Institute of North America, honorary member of the Yukon Order of Pioneers and emeritus fellow of the Explorer's Club of New York and co-founder of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter, of which he was chairman for a decade. He also was a life member of the California Academy of Sciences and an active member of the New Orleans Jazz Club of northern California. ...

Thule and Historic Copper Use in the Copper Inuit Area

The extensive use of native copper by historic Copper Inuit has been felt to be a fairly recent development, inspired in one way or another by indirect European contact. This conclusion seems to be based on the comparison of ethnographic historic collections and archaeological prehistoric ones. However, an examination of archaeological collections dating from the historic period suggests that copper and other metals are much less frequent in archaeological samples than in functioning, ethnographically-described assemblages. The difference appears to be due to curation, which in turn is a product of the high value and durability of metal. Archaeological collections from the prehistoric Thule culture in the area show a frequency of copper tools that is actually higher than the frequency of all metals at late nineteenth-century sites. This study illustrates some of the difficulties inherent in uncritical use of ethnographic data to solve archaeological problems.

The analysis of copper artifacts of the copper inuit

Abstract Metallography and neutron activation analysis have been used to investigate copper artifacts from 19th century archaeological sites associated with the “Copper Inuit” of the west-central Canadian Arctic. A knowledge of the source of the copper from which the artifacts were manufactured - native (local) copper or European (exotic) copper - is important, for example, to studies of the effects of European contact on utilization of native copper and on the general lifestyle of the Copper Inuit. Trace element analysis by neutron activation using the SLOWPOKE reactor has allowed local native copper, from the Coppermine River and Victoria Island, NW Territories, to be clearly distinguished from 19th century European smelted copper, which was found to contain higher concentrations of arsenic, antimony, nickel and selenium. Moreover, optical and scanning electron metallography revealed significant microstructural differences between native copper and the 19th century smelted copper. As a consequence it was possible to differentiate between native copper archaeological artifacts and those produced from smelted copper.

George Mellis Douglas (1875-1963)

George M. Douglas was one of the most efficient and well-informed explorers of the Mackenzie District, particularly the northerly reaches of Great Bear Lake and the Coppermine River as far as the arctic coast, during the early years of the twentieth century. A lean, muscular six-footer, he was a pioneer who opened up new vistas for mineral investigation and development. Yet he is chiefly known for his only book, Land Forlorn, which, published in 1914, is noteworthy for its accuracy, attention to detail, and superb photographs. It stands as one of the classics of northern literature. ... He went to sea as a marine engineer between 1897 and 1900 and then began a career in Mexico and Arizona as an engineer, later as a consulting engineer, until 1940. His work in the Southwest was interrupted by the first of his northern explorations. This was for a 1911-1912 expedition to Great Bear Lake, the Dismal Lakes, and the lower Coppermine River to search for copper deposits. ... The three-man party, headed by George Douglas, included his brother, Lionel, a master mariner, and Dr. August Sandburg, a geologist. ... The Douglas party tracked up the swift-flowing Great Bear River with a York boat to Great Bear Lake, towing a canoe. They sailed across the lake to the northeasterly corner at the mouth of the Dease River, where Lionel Douglas built a substantial cabin for the winter. Meanwhile, George Douglas and August Sandburg canoed up the Dease to the Dismal Lakes and thence to the Kendall River and the Coppermine. They explored the Coppermine Mountains during the first season before returning to the cabin. ... In the spring of 1912 the Douglas party returned to the Coppermine and found the extent of the mineralized area to be much greater than had been supposed, the width of the belt being about 25 kilometres. It was deemed significant enough to justify more extensive prospecting, but the effects of World War I and the copper industry discouraged it. The party ranged as far as Coronation Gulf, meeting some of the Copper Inuit but missing Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who had visited the Dismal Lakes only a few months prior to their arrival. (George Douglas and Stefansson eventually became life-long friends.) The entire expedition was noteworthy for its meticulous planning and successful execution, with no serious mishaps. In 1928 Douglas carried out a summer journey with two canoes along the southeastern shore of Great Slave Lake for the United Verde Copper Company. Four years later he investigated coal deposits on the western shore of Great Bear Lake, and in 1935 he conducted mineral exploration around Athabasca Lake and the country between it and Great Slave Lake, as well as on Great Bear Lake. He resumed his mineral exploration in 1938 along the Snare River and between Great Slave Lake and Talston Lake, including Nonacho Lake. He wrote well and kept journals of all his journeys, profusely illustrated with his photographs of consistently professional quality, yet he published only one book and a couple of articles for technical magazines. ...

The Earliest Sound Recordings among North American Inuit

On 7 November 1903, Captain George Comer of the American whaling schooner Era recorded on a phonograph a few songs of the Aivilingmiut and Qaernermiut in northwestern Hudson Bay (Ross, 1984:73). These appear to have been the earliest sound recordings ever made among the Inuit of Canada and Alaska. The recordings made by Diamond Jenness among the Copper Eskimos (1914-1916) and those made by Christian Leden among the Padlimiut (1914-1916) have hitherto been considered as the earliest, but Comer's first recording preceded these by more than a decade and his pioneering work should be recognized.

Diamond Jenness (1886-1969)

... Jenness quickly found his curiosity about anthropology blossoming into a vocation. In 1911 he was appointed Oxford Scholar to Papua, New Guinea, where he spent twelve months studying Northern Entrecasteaux. Upon his return to New Zealand, he was asked to join Canadian Arctic Expedition, an ambitious government-funded scientific enterprise under direction of well-known arctic explorers Vilhjalmur Stefansson and R.M. Anderson. In June, 1913, Jenness found himself aboard refitted whaling vessel Karluk steaming northward to Bering Strait and beyond to Beaufort Sea. ... In autumn of 1913, small vessel became locked in sea ice off northern coast of Alaska. Unable to free itself, ship drifted helplessly westward towards Siberian Sea, where it was finally crushed in ice off Wrangel Island. Eight men perished in their bid to reach mainland. By a stroke of fortune, Jenness was not aboard Karluk when she drifted off; he, Stefansson, and several others had left ship earlier on a routine hunting trip. Abandoning hopeless task of searching for Karluk, which was lost to sight when they returned, hunting party headed for Barrow, Alaska to rendezvous with remaining two vessels of expedition, Alaska and Mary Sachs. Jenness spent his first winter at Harrison Bay, Alaska, where he learned to speak Inuktitut, gathered information about Western Eskimo customs and folklore, and experienced at first-hand precarious existence of northern hunter. In spring of 1914, he set out along coast to expedition's base camp at Bernard Harbour in Coronation Gulf region. Here he engaged in one of most important goals of Canadian Arctic Expedition-the study of Copper Eskimos of Victoria Island, a people first brought to attention of civilized world by Stefansson only four years earlier. When Jenness arrived in Coronation Gulf region, only a handful of Europeans had visited land of Copper Eskimo. Merchants had only just begun to ply their trade in area, and missionaries and Northwest Mounted Police were yet to arrive. As a consequence, Copper Eskimo remained largely unaffected by contact with outside world. Jenness, therefore, was charged with recording a virtually pristine aboriginal way of life that would change radically within a generation. Jenness spent two years with these Central Eskimo people, living for one year as adopted son of hunter Ikpukhuak and his shaman wife Higalik. During that time he hunted and traveled with his family, sharing both their festivities and their famine. The monographs and publications that resulted from this field work have been recognized by scholars as the most comprehensive description of a single Eskimo tribe ever written. ... During his tenure with National Museum, Jenness published two seminal articles on northern archaeology. The first paper identified a new prehistoric culture in eastern Arctic - Dorset Culture - which Jenness believed to have preceded Thule Culture (the ancestors of contemporary Inuit) by a millenium or more. The second paper hypothesized Old Bering Sea Culture of Bering Strait area, a complex which Jenness believed not only preceded Thule Culture in western Arctic but which was ancestral to it. Considered radical at time of their publication, these theories are now widely accepted, having been vindicated by carbon-14 dating and subsequent field research. Jeness's interest in Arctic never waned. As late as 1968 he was still articulating his concern for Inuit struggle to survive. Among his last works was a series of five volumes published by The Arctic Institute of North America that reviewed government policies toward Inuit of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. ...

Ikey Angotisiak Bolt (1894-1981)

The arrival of the Canadian Arctic Expedition (1913-1918) was of profound influence in exposing the Copper Eskimo of Coronation Gulf and Victoria Island to the culture, lifestyle, and technology of Caucasian North America. And Ikey Bolt was one of the most outstanding members of that party. He was an Alaskan Eskimo who, far from his native land, made his home among these people and built a reputation for integrity and community service that will not easily be forgotten. Ikey Bolt was born in Point Hope, Alaska, on 19 January 1894, in a whale-hunting culture that provided him with stories of the hunt with which he would regale his listeners all his life. Recruited in his late teens as an interpreter for the Canadian Arctic Expedition, he made his initial trip to Canada. ... The best appreciation of Ikey Bolt's contribution to the region can only be understood in the context of the times. Here is a native Alaskan whose people had been long exposed to the influence of southerners in the traumatic whaling era, a period of mixed blessings if ever there was one. In joining the Canadian Arctic Expedition he made contact with a people who were literally just emerging from the Stone Age, a people who had no steady contact with explorers until the Canadian Arctic Expedition arrived. They hunted with harpoons and with bows and arrows, and they had no recourse to any products of southern technology except for bits of iron traded with distant neighbours who had obtained them from abandoned ships. The introduction of a different way of life - new methods of trapping animals to be exchanged for trade goods - had all the potential for cultural devastation and the erosion of even the best of their indigenous philosophy. But the presence and influence of natives who had themselves survived similar upheavals and yet maintained a strong sense of spiritual and cultural values made a profound difference. ...

Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962)

One of the last great arctic explorers of the era of boats, dogs, and sledges, Vilhjalmur Stefansson was also a highly articulate and innovative spokesman for the North. He is best known for his field work in anthropology and for his outspoken defence of the North as a rich and habitable land. ... He ... spent eighteen months with the Eskimos of the Mackenzie River delta, learning their language and folkways. From 1908 to 1912, under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History and the Canadian Government, he explored the area from the Colville River in Alaska to Cape Parry, Coronation Gulf, and Victoria Island in Canada's western Arctic, where he observed blond types among the Copper Eskimos. His finale as an active arctic explorer was leadership of the Canadian Government expedition of 1913-18 to the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic. It was marred by eleven fatalities when ice crushed its base ship, Karluk. Stefansson and others, who had gone ashore to hunt, were unable to help the twenty-five people left on board. ... Having completed his last arctic journey at age 39, Stefansson entered the second half of his life, that of a researcher and writer, preaching the gospel of the North - its livability and potentialities. ...

A Preliminary Statement on Neo-Eskimo Occupations in Western Coronation Gulf, N.W.T.

Excavations undertaken in 1980 in the western Coronation Gulf area, arctic Canada, are described. Work concentrated on the Clachan site (NaPi-2), a small Thule winter village. Stylistic analysis of the artifacts recovered suggests affiliation with Alaskan rather than Canadian Thule, despite a comparatively recent date for the site. Also briefly described are two "protohistoric" Copper Inuit sites.

Peaceful Societies: An Introduction

This article is a tentative introduction to the idea of studying the social preconditions of peace by directing attention to a number of actual societies which are peaceful. These societies: 1) do not engage in violence against other groups; 2) have no civil wars or internal collective violence; 3) do not maintain a standing military-police organisation; 4) experience little or no inter-personal lethal violence; and, 5) lack certain forms of structural violence. The societies are: the Semai of Malaya, the Siriono of Eastern Bolivia, the Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari desert, the Mbuti Pygmies of equatorial Africa, the Copper Eskimo of Northern Canada, the Hutterites of North America, and the Islanders of Tristan da Cunha in the South Pacific. Various aspects of these groups were considered: type of economy, cosmology or world view, child rearing practices, conflict resolution methods, and their social control and decision-making processes. The societies displayed a number of commonalities along these dimensions. They are all small, face to face communities with a basically egalitarian social structure. Generally they lack formal patterns of ranking and stratification, place no restriction on the number of people capable of exercising authority or occupying positions of prestige and have economies which are based on generalised reciprocity. Only Tristan and the Hutterites produce a surplus. In none of these societies is there great material inequality between individuals. Sexism and to a lesser extent gerontocracy exist in all groups. It is suggested that it is possible for a society to have social justice without recourse to physical violence.

Demographic aspects of central Eskimo marriage practices

The Iglulik, Netsilik, and Copper Eskimo tribes inhabit two ecological zones. Differences in subsistence opportunities explain demographic contrasts which are reflected in the differential occurrence of exogamic‐endogamic practices. Other aspects of marriage, such as ratios between polygyny and polyandry and the terminological concomitants of marriage practices, must be explained by sociopsychological or historical factors.

Contacts between American Whalemen and the Copper Eskimos

It has often been maintained that the Copper Eskimos did not have contacts with white men between the early eighteen fifties and the first decade of the twentieth century. The earliest recent encounters are generally believed to have occurred in 1902, when David Hanbury conducted explorations on the mainland near Coronation Gulf, and in 1905-06 and 1907-08, when Christian Klengenberg and Captain William Mogg respectively wintered on the schooner Olga at Victoria Island. Stefansson described a whaler's harpoon found by the Eskimos in a dead whale that was stranded in Coronation Gulf, but he believed there had been no direct contacts on Victoria Island before Klengenberg's meeting. Evidence does exist, however, to indicate that American whalers encountered Copper Eskimos during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Captain Hartson Bodfish, who was master of several whaling and trading vessels in the western Canadian Arctic, reported having made contact with these Eskimos long before any explorers had reached the area. These encounters may have begun as early as 1891 because, in the spring of that year, Bodfish, after wintering at Herschel Island, wrote to his mother: Just as soon as we can get out we are going, and are bound to that undiscovered country that lies to the eastward of us. In 1898, while wintering in Langton Bay near Cape Parry in the steam bark Beluga, he noted in the ship's log that one of his native hunters had left the ship in March to look for other Eskimos, and returned several weeks later with a group of them, and added: They report seeing lots of seals and whales as they came along the coast in the neighborhood of Dolphin and Union Straits. Bodfish's ethnographic collection, in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, contains at least one Copper Eskimo artifact, an ulu. The ethnographic collection of Captain Horace P. Smith, at the Old Dartmouth Historical Society Whaling Museum, also suggests an early encounter because it contains a musk-ox horn ladle with a copper rivet in the handle; this piece is similar to other ladles collected from the Copper Eskimos, and Smith's only voyage in the Canadian Arctic took place between 1892 and 1894, when he twice wintered the steam bark Narwhal at Herschel Island. ...

The Eskimo Drum Dance

The drum dance which combines the booming beat of a large tambourine drum with poetic song and dance is perhaps the most pleasurable and intense expression of Eskimo culture. This art is particularly refined among the Copper Eskimos around Coronation Gulf. ... Drum dancing used to take place mainly in winter, when the Copper Eskimos congregated for breathing-hole sealing, or whenever visitors from afar were met. A large snowhouse used to be made, performance outdoors being tabu, though not today .... Decorative festive dress was worn including at times a striped dancing cap surmounted by a loon's beak. Up to about fifty persons might crowd inside, the men forming an inner circle and the rest along the walls. If necessary, the yard-wide drum head of thin dehaired caribou skin is moistened to tighten it to give the desired rumbling resonance. The rim is a thin wood strip two to three inches wide with a handle attached to it. Large and quite heavy, the drum takes strength and practice to be wielded in one hand. Women can lower it for ease. Beating is done on the rim from below with a heavy foot-long stick, the men striking on opposite points of the hoop in alternation while women beat closer to the handle. To begin, the performer sounds a few beats as if testing the instrument, waves it up and down or taps lightly and rapidly on the skin from below. Starting the song, he beats the rim and lets the drum swivel to meet the stick. The audience joins in the singing, commonly led by the performer's spouse, freeing him to concentrate on drumming and dancing and to be transported into an exalted joyous state. With knees slightly bent the dancer moves around the small inner circle, shifting from foot to foot, sometimes hopping lightly. The music is basically in 2/4 time, and the simplest drumming is two equal beats per measure, the tempo ranging from about fifty to eighty measures per minute. A common variation is to beat strongly on the left side of the drum then stop the swing back almost soundlessly on the right. For more complexity this single beat measure may be alternated with the regular double one. Sometimes the heavy beating is suspended while the singing continues unabated. Also "rolls" might be inserted by lightly tapping the skin at four beats per measure. Occasionally the dancer whoops for joy. Carried away, he might continue for over an hour, passing from song to song with scarcely a pause. ... Copper Eskimos call a song pisik if the performer drums and alan if he only dances with abandon while the drumming is done by another or not at all .... Almost everyone has his own song, often simply new words to old tunes. Song alteration by substitution, addition, or combination of words is common, and a dance song usually strings two unrelated compositions together to last ten or fifteen minutes. A good part of the singing is done with burden syllables, e.g., ya-iya iya iya aiya iya iya ai yaa, meaningless but carrying the melody and rhythm. Short sections of words fit in for interesting verse structures. Metaphor abounds .... Most songs are about hunting, fishing, travel, or drum dancing itself, usually glorifying achievements or striking experiences. Other major subjects are shamanizing and social failings in shaman's and derision songs. Another kind, songs of the departed, are more sentimental and philosophic. Then there are non-dance songs of magical incantations for good weather, hunting success, and for invoking spirits. Drum dancing is an important focus for social life. It, together with the shamanistic seance which often accompanies it, is one of the few group activities which are not directly economic in consequence. Not only does it intensify interaction and sentiment within the local group, it helps establish relations with strangers. ... the drum dance should be first considered in its essence as the prime aesthetic manifestation of Eskimo life.

Copper Eskimo Prehistory, by Robert McGhee

Copper Eskimo Prehistory, by Robert McGhee

The Canadian Western Arctic: A Century of Change

The Alaskans, numbering somewhat over 5,000,2 were divided into two separate but interdependent ecological orientations: the whale hunting people of the coast, concentrated between Point Barrow and Point Hope, and the inland caribou hunting peoples of the Brooks Range. The Alaskan coast between Point Barrow and Barter Island was uninhabited, although in summer it was a meeting ground where Mackenzie and Alaskan Eskimos came to trade. To the east of the Mackenzie Eskimo territory, the coast was similarly uninhabited as far as Stapylton Bay, The Copper Es kimos, numbering as many as 1,000,3 inhabited the shores of Dolphin and Union Strait, Coronation Gulf and the eastern margins of Amundsen Gulf.

Diamond Jenness (1886-1969)

Diamond Jenness (1886-1969)

Femte Thuleekspedition. Mod nye fællesskaber

Since 2014, the National Museum of Denmark has collaborated with theCanadian organisations Kitikmeot Heritage Society (Cambridge Bay, Nunavut)and Geomatics & Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University to makematerials from the Inuinnait (Copper Inuit) area collected during the 5th ThuleExpedition (1921–1924) digitally available firstly to people in Cambridge Bay,and secondly to a wider public. The ambition is now to make the totality of the5th Thule Expedition material digitally available through the so-called Tumisiutproject,in order to integrate it into a wider framework of a new Nordic curatorialand research collaboration around Arctic and Sub-Arctic collections. Pivotalaspects of these collaborations are discussions on various domains of ownershiprights such as “world heritage”, “cultural rights”, and “copyright”. The initial stepshave recently been taken by the National Museum of Denmark and the Museumof Cultural History, University of Oslo.

Chemistry Probing the Past

Chemistry Probing the Past

: Songs of the Copper Eskimos . Helen Roberts, D. Jenness.

: Songs of the Copper Eskimos . Helen Roberts, D. Jenness.