A vision of Eskimo (Inuit) culture

I remember watching, "The Savage Innocents" as a child and I was highly entertained and awestruck watching a drama movie based on ancient Inuit eskimo culture still practiced for centuries. Even watching this movie today still leaves me with the same wonder and emotion I felt as a child.

The Inuit eskimo people were products of their harsh, unforgiving environment and there was little opportunity or natural resources to evolve into a technologically advanced society. Yet the people remained typically peaceful and forthright in their dealings with each other. This is truly amazing and admirable given the instances in human history where societies took the path down into violence, enslavement, and misanthropy.

You noticed all the inexplicable laughing and childlike giggling the eskimo people do in the movie. My own anthropological explanation is that all the childlike laughter and giggling, especially at the misfortunes of others and unintentional accidents and slights was intentional. The Inuit people evolved a cultural behavior to enable them to cope with each other in close confines for months on end when darkness lasted months. Without the constant laughter and giggling to release stress, the eskimo people could not have coped. Laughter, giggling, guffaws, self-insults, were all ways for people to live harmoniously with each other and achieve the long-sought Christian ideal of forgiving each other. In the movie, the eskimo individuals say and do things to each other that would have led to fistfights in other cultures. But they laughed it off. I believe the Inuit people have something very valuable here to teach us supposedly more civilized, advanced peoples elsewhere.

It took some getting used to hearing the eskimo people referring to themselves in the third person, "...this stupid man here wants his own wife", as opposed to saying, " I am seeking a wife ". They frequently scold each other using the word, 'stupid', which every one else ignores, but elsewhere in the world, such an insult would lead to loud angry arguments, or even possible physical altercation.

I am not looking at these people with rose-tinted glasses. Their ancient custom of abandoning their elderly and infirm out in the snow to become food for passing polar bears is appalling to me, even as I know that the harsh environment and food shortages compelled this custom. I was equally appalled by their custom of practicing infanticide on the first-born child if it was a girl. I winced at these practices and pondered why they couldn't have found an alternative. As a Christian, I could never, never countenance such a custom, no matter what the environmental and climatological compulsions were. The custom of offering one's wife to a visitor is something I shrug about. Historically this type of social custom occurred in those cultures where everyone was of the same or similar race and ethnicity. Therefore a child sired by a male visitor upon your wife would be of the same ethnic background as yourself. More, in prehistoric societies, this practice allowed the influx of new genes into one's small tribal group and helped prevent inbreeding. Interestingly, from what I think I read, the eskimo people did understand the concept of adultery and frowned upon it like everyone else, but the wife-sharing was an act of selfless hospitality and not adultery.

The word, eskimo, means, "eater of raw meat". I don't know if this was meant to be pejorative or simply descriptive, or both. But it's obvious that eating raw meat was not really a choice the Inuits had. How do you find wood and build a fire inside an ice igloo out in a vast snowfield in the middle of winter? Either you eat the raw meat of a freshly-caught seal, or you starve. Make your choice. Eating raw meat takes four times longer than cooked meat and is harder to chew. Hence, you saw the eskimo people in the movie using those tiny, pendulum-shaped blades to cut the raw meat as they held it fast in their teeth. It's amazing no one cut their own lips off. I guess it's an acquired skill. On the other hand, raw meat does provide more vitamins and raw nutrition because cooking degrades much of the nutritional value. That doesn't mean you should go out and start ingesting raw meat. The drawback is the higher risk of food-borne bacteriological illnesses, parasitic infection, and other possible digestive problems. Polar bear meat is known to be frequently infested with parasites.

The Inuit eskimo hunter and the carnivorous polar bear is the rare occasion where two carnivorous predators will willing eat each other. This is done out of necessity. In the far north, either you eat the polar bear or it eats you if the alternative is starvation.