 The following story is
from People of the Deer, an
out-of-print account by Canadian writer Farley Mowat
of his time during the 1940s in the Arctic with the original Canadians,
the Innuit. I would urge you to read it for several reasons. If you are
a writer, read it as an excellent example of research, exposition and
story-telling. If you are an entrepreneur, read it as a powerful lesson
on the abundance of innovation in the natural world all around us, and
think of how such innovations could be adapted to solve pressing human
problems. And if you are an environmentalist or a philosopher, read it
as a tale of how much has been lost since our ubiquitous and
homeogeneous 'taker' culture crowded out the extraordinarily varied and
remarkable hunter-gatherer tribes that once covered the planet and
lived in harmony with it. For the People that Mowat describes in this
story are no more. All that remains of them are stories like this one.
As
I grew to know the People, so my respect for their intelligence and
ingenuity increased. Yet it was a long time before I could reconcile my
feelings of respect with the poor, shoddy dwelling places that they
constructed. As with most Eskimos, the winter homes of the Ihalmiut are
the snow-built domes we call igloos. (Igloo in Eskimo means simply
"house" and thus an igloo can be built of wood or stone, as well as of
snow.) But unlike most other Innuit, the Ihalmiut make snow houses
which are cramped, miserable shelters. I think the People acquired the
art of igloo construction quite recently in their history and from the
coast Eskimos. Certainly they have no love for their igloos, and prefer
the skin tents. This preference is related to the problem of fuel.
Any home in the arctic, in winter, requires some fuel if only for
cooking. The coast peoples make use of fat lamps, for they have an
abundance of fat from the sea mammals they kill, and so they are able
to cook in the igloo, and to heat it as well. But the Ihalmiut can ill
afford to squander the precious fat of the deer, and they dare to burn
only one tiny lamp for light. Willow must serve as fuel, and while
willow burns well enough in a tent open at the peak to allow the smoke
to escape, when it is burned in a snow igloo, the choking smoke leaves
no place for human occupants.
So snow houses replace the skin tents of the Ihalmiut only when winter
has already grown old and the cold has reached the seemingly unbearable
extremes of sixty or even seventy degrees below zero. Then the tents
are grudgingly abandoned and snow huts built. From that time until
spring no fires may burn inside the homes of the People, and such
cooking as is attempted must be done outside, in the face of the
blizzards and gales.
Yet though tents are preferred to igloos, it is still rather hard to
understand why. Great, gaping slits outline each hide on the frame of a
tent. Such a home offers hardly more shelter than a thicket of trees,
for on the unbroken sweep of the plains the winds blow with such
violence that they drive the hard snow through the tents as if the skin
walls did not really exist. But the People spend many days and dark
nights in these feeble excuses for houses, while the wind rises like a
demon of hatred and the cold comes as if it meant to destroy all life
in the land.
In these tents there may be a fire; but consider this fire, this
smouldering handful of green twigs, dug with infinite labour from under
the drifts. It gives heat only for a few inches out from its sullen
coals so that it barely suffices to boil a pot of water in an hour or
two. The eternal winds pour into the tent and dissipate what little
heat the fire can spare from the cook-pots. The fire gives comfort to
the Ihalmiut only through its appeal to the eyes.
However, the tent with its wan little fire is a more desirable place
than the snow house with no fire at all. At least the man in the tent
can have a hot bowl of soup once in a while, but after life in the
igloos begins, almost all food must be eaten while it is frozen to the
hardness of rocks. Men sometimes take skin bags full of ice into the
beds so that they can have water to drink, melted by the heat of their
bodies. It is true that some of the People build cook shelters outside
the igloos but these snow hearths burn very badly, and then only when
it is calm. For the most part the winds prevent any outside cooking at
all, and anyway by late winter the willow supply is so deeply buried
under the drifts, it is almost impossible for men to procure it.
So you see that the homes of the Ihalmiut in winter are hardly models
of comfort. Even when spring comes to the land the improvement in
housing conditions is not great. After the tents go up in the spring,
the rains begin. During daylight it rains with grey fury and the tents
soak up the chill water until the hides hang slackly on their poles
while rivulets pour through the tent to drench everything inside. At
night, very likely, there will be frost and by dawn everything not
under the robes with the sleepers will be frozen stiff.
With the end of spring rains, the hot sun dries and shrinks the hides
until they are drum-taut, but the ordeal is not yet over. Out of the
steaming muskegs come the hordes of bloodsucking and flesh-eating flies
and these find that the Ihalmiut tents offer no barrier to their
invasion. The tents belong equally to the People and to the flies,
until mid-summer brings an end to the plague, and the hordes vanish.
My high opinion of the People was often clouded when I looked at their
homes. I sometimes wondered if the Ihalmiut were as clever and as
resourceful as I thought them to be. I had been too long conditioned to
think of home as four walls and a roof, and so the obvious solution of
the Ihalmiut housing problem escaped me for nearly a year. It took me
that long to realize that the People not only have good homes, but that
they have devised the one perfect house.
The tent and the igloo are really only auxiliary shelters. The real
home of the Ihalmio is much like that of the turtle, for it is what he
carries about on his back. In truth it is the only house that can
enable men to survive on the merciless plains of the Barrens. It has
central heating from the fat furnace of the body, its walls are
insulated to a degree of perfection that we white men have not been
able to surpass, or even emulate. It is complete, light in weight, easy
to make and easy to keep in repair. It costs nothing, for it is a gift
of the land, through the deer. When I consider that house, my opinion
of the astuteness of the Ihalmiut is no longer clouded.
Primarily the house consists of two suits of fur, worn one over the
other, and each carefully tailored to the owner's dimensions. The inner
suit is worn with the hair of the hides facing inward and touching the
skin while the outer suit has its hair turned out to the weather. Each
suit consists of a pullover parka with a hood, a pair of fur trousers,
fur gloves and fur boots. The double motif is extended to the tips of
the fingers, to the top of the head, and to the soles of the feet where
soft slippers of harehide are worn next to the skin.
The high winter boots may be tied just above the knee so that they
leave no entry for the cold blasts of the wind. But full ventilation is
provided by the design of the parka. Both inner and outer parkas hang
slackly to at least the knees of the wearer, and they are not belted in
winter. Cold air does not rise, so that no drafts can move up under the
parkas to reach the bare flesh, but the heavy, moisture-laden air from
close to the body sinks through the gap between parka and trousers and
is carried away. Even in times of great physical exertion, when the
Ihalmio sweats freely, he is never in any danger of soaking his
clothing and so inviting quick death from frost afterwards. The hides
are not in contact with the body at all but are held away from the
flesh by the soft resiliency of the deer hairs that line them, and in
the space between the tips of the hair and the hide of the parka there
is a constantly moving layer of warm air which absorbs all the sweat
and carries it off.
Dressed for a day in the winter, the Ihalmio has this protection over
all parts of his body, except for a narrow oval in front of his face -
and even this is well protected by a long silken fringe of wolverine
fur, the one fur to which the moisture of breathing will not adhere and
freeze.
In the summer rain, the hide may grow wet, but the layer of air between
deerhide and skin does not conduct the water, and so it runs off and is
lost while the body stays dry. Then there is the question of weight.
Most white men trying to live in the winter arctic load their bodies
with at least twenty-five pounds of clothing, while the complete
deerskin home of the Innuit weighs about seven pounds. This, of course,
makes a great difference in the mobility of the wearers. A man wearing
tight-fitting and too bulky clothes is almost as helpless as a man in a
diver's suit. But besides their light weight, the Ihalmiut clothes are
tailored so that they are slack wherever muscles must work freely
beneath them. There is ample space in this house for the occupant to
move and to breathe, for there are no partitions and walls to limit his
motions, and the man is almost as free in his movements as if he were
naked. If he must sleep out, without shelter, and it is fifty below, he
has but to draw his arms into his parka, and he sleeps nearly as well
as he would in a double-weight eiderdown bag.
This is in winter, but what about summer? I have explained how the
porous hide nevertheless acts as a raincoat. Well, it does much more
than that. In summer the outer suit is discarded and all clothing pared
down to one layer. The house then offers effective insulation against
heat entry. It remains surprisingly cool, for it is efficiently
ventilated. Also, and not least of its many advantages, it offers the
nearest thing to perfect protection against the flies. The hood is
pulled up so that it covers the neck and the ears, and the flies find
it nearly impossible to get at the skin underneath. But of course the
Ihalmiut have long since learned to live with the flies, and they feel
none of the hysterical and frustrating rage against them so common with
us.
In the case of women's clothing, home has two rooms. The back of the
parka has an enlargement, as if it were made to fit a hunchback, and in
this space, called the amaut, lives the unweaned child of the family. A
bundle of remarkably absorbent sphagnum moss goes under his backside
and the child sits stark naked, in unrestricted delight, where he can
look out on the world and very early in life become familiar with the
sights and the moods of his land. He needs no clothing of his own, and
as for the moss - in that land there is an unlimited supply of soft
sphagnum and it can be replaced in an instant.
When the child is at length forced to vacate this pleasant apartment,
probably by the arrival of competition, he is equipped with a one-piece
suit of hides which looks not unlike the snow suits our children wear
in the winter. Only it is much lighter, more efficient, and much less
restricting. This first home of his own is a fine home for the Ihalmio
child, and one that his white relatives would envy if they could
appreciate its real worth.
This then is the home of the People. It is the gift of the land.
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