Eskimo-Aleut Research Articles

Eskimo Place-Names in Bering Strait and Vicinity

IN BERING STRAIT, ALASKA, naming of places in the Eskimo language stopped almost entirely at the end of the nineteenth century, although Eskimos continued to occupy the land of their ancestors. The Bering Strait Eskimos lived mainly along 1,044miles of coastline (including offshore islands) between the mouth of the Buckland River and the village of St. Michael,with two tribes living inland away from the sea.2 The territory of each tribe, except that of islands and several coastal areas, included tributaries and watersheds of one or more large rivers, one or more permanent villages, and many seasonal camps. Almost every feature had a name. The use of general or modified appellatives like big river, mountain, island, or little island for principal topographic features along all of the western Alaskan coast has produced a duplication of names, which suggests that Eskimo nomenclature was very simple and elementary. On the contrary, this was only part of an extensive toponymic system (there was also an abundance of descriptive and specificnames) and had considerable cultural significance, for the duplication of names indicated the existence of individual tribal identities along an extensive coastline once thought to be occupied by only one huge tribe. In other words, the repetition of names was not an indiscriminate, unimaginative naming by a single group, but was the consequence of numerous tribes having organized constellations of place-names within separate boundaries, each with its own mountain, its own bay, and particularly, its own river.

Eskimo Art Is For Kabloona

Oonark was born in the area around Garry Lake and the Back River about 1906. She was married very young, as was customary among the traditional Eskimos, and had many children, eight of whom survived. Her husband died ... (around 1952). At that time there was a famine in the Garry Lake region and Oonark and one of here daughters were starving. They were rescued by a Government Forces plane ... and were taken to Baker Lake .... She was introduced to drawing by some school teachers, and some people from the Wildlife Service who gave her pencils and paper. ... Her drawings were first exhibited in the form of prints (executed by other Eskimo craftsmen) in 1960. ... Oonark also does sewn felt wallhangings, a number of which were recently exhibited in Toronto. ... When I met Oonark and her interpreter, Ruby Angoateegota Arngnaknark, on the occasion of her exhibition of drawings at the Canadian Guild of Crafts in Montreal, Quebec, we talked about what significance here drawings had for her. I asked whether meant anything specific for her and whether she hoped other people would learn something from her pictures. Ruby replied that Oonark probably didn't think about such things because they are not in the Eskimo language .... Much of Oonark's drawing seems to be done to please the prospective buyer or the crafts officer (for whom the artists have great regard). ... Oonark doesn't have any of her drawings in her house - as Ruby explains there was no notion of in Eskimo life. They view their art primarily as something to sell, in order to be able to buy what need or want. ...

Dispelling the Myth

UNTIL we know more about speech psychology, applied linguistics, and the ultimate processes of language study, it is doubtful whether we can embody in the form of a set of concrete principles the subject treated in this paper. The following considerations are submitted with a certain pique caused by the naivete about linguistic pedagogy among the lay public and even in our own profession. There still exists a related group of harmful and persistent myths about the relative difficulty and values in learning certain foreign languages. Some of the major contributors to and even perpetrators of these myths are many of our own American teachers of German and French. We refer here to the notions so often expounded by these teachers that German, for instance, is harder to learn than Spanish and, therefore, that it must be taught in a different way. Another is that German is, per se, such a difficult and complex language that even the native Germans cannot write it well. Still another and perhaps the most harmful is the myth that German is more important and, consequently, a better language to study with regard to literature, history, and science. Those who hold to the last notion often go so far as to say that the world's best literature, philosophy, drama, history, art, etc. is written in French or German. These myths even include our foreign language students in their assumptions. It is often surmised that only the brighter students take these languages of diplomacy and science, while the less intelligent ones take an easier language like Spanish or Italian. To avoid attempting too broad a scope for a short paper, most of the examples and comparisons from this point on will be between German and Spanish and limited mostly to the linguistic aspects of the prob em. It is our purpose here to see if we can bring ome of the sacred cows of our modern language studies into a more reasonable perspective or perhaps even into clear focus, and also to make some resulting suggestions toward a better methodology. A good place to start might be with the linguistic aspects of the teaching of German as compared to the teaching of Spanish to speakers of American English. It is a well-established linguistic and commoi-sense fact that the Eskimo language is not difficult for the Eskimos, Russian is not a hard language to learn for the Russians, and so on down the list of the approximate 5000 languages of the world. Since it is a distinguishing mark of the Homo sapiens to communicate orally, what the linguist must make of the above fact is that no one particular language is more difficult to learn than any other for normally-functioning human beings. Indeed, linguists have long argued that no single language is more primitive 23

Eskimo Theories of Mental Illness in the Hudson Bay Region

* An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Anthropology and Sociology Chapter of the Canadian Political Science Association, Vancouver, B.C., June, 1965. * Data for the paper were gathered during the late winter and spring of 1963 while the author was engaged in a study of new forms of Eskimo social organization, under contract with the Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre, Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, Ottawa. Later in 1963 and early in 1964 several visits were made to Verdun Protestant Hospital: since that time we have interviewed medical and welfare officials who have had experience with Eskimo mental illness and have had access to official case histories of Eskimo patients. We gratefully acknowledge the help of Mr. V.F. Valentine, Director of the Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre, and his staff and of the following key informants in the field: Mr. J.D. Furneaux, D.N.A. Area Administrator, Povungnituk, Nurses Helen Williams, John McGurl, and Miss J. Nuttley, at Povungnituk, Port Harrison, and Great Whale River respectively: Messrs. Eliasie Sadlualu, N. Killupa, J. Sivua, and T. Tukai, of Povungnituk and Port Harrison; and at Ottawa, Mr. J.F. Neville, chief of the Welfare Division, D.N.A., and Miss Betty Marwood, welfare officer, Arctic District Office. Special mention should be made of the help given by Mr. Raymond Gagne, Eskimo language specialist with the DNANR Welfare Division and his assistant, Mr. Elijah Erkloo, in transforming my crude Eskimo language renditions into the new standard orthography.

In Defence of a Standard Phonemic Spelling in Roman Letters for the Canadian Eskimo Language

Discusses the syllabic system adapted from Rev. James Evans' Cree syllabics to Eskimo use by Rev. E.J. Peck about 1885, and still used by the majority of Canadian Eskimos. The alphabet of the dominant culture however, has advantages for rendering aboriginal speech to writing; Soviet experiments with Asiatic Eskimos are cited. A gradual change from the syllabary to the roman alphabet adapted to Eskimo phonology is advocated. Benefits of a writing system in common with Greenlanders are cited. Several Eskimo alphabetic systems already established among Eskimos in Canada are discussed, each has certain inadequacies. Development of a new standard orthography is required; over- or under-differentiation of Eskimo phonemes, now current, should be eliminated.

Grammar and Vocabulary of the Eskimo Language as Spoken by the Kuskokwim and Southwest Coast Eskimos of Alaska. John Hinz

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsGrammar and Vocabulary of the Eskimo Language as Spoken by the Kuskokwim and Southwest Coast Eskimos of Alaska. John Hinz C. F. VoegelinC. F. Voegelin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by International Journal of American Linguistics Volume 11, Number 4Oct., 1945 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/463879 Views: 1Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.