Week 10 Essay: What about the Eskimos?

I took a class here at the University of Oklahoma about a year ago called Indigenous People and Resources where we discussed the Native American, or indigenous, peoples who lived in the Arctic region. Since I already knew so much about the people who lived there I decided I would get to know them further by reading their stories, which is while I chose Eskimo Folk Tales as my reading for this week. What is funny is that the term Eskimo actually means eaters of raw flesh. It is a term that the Inuit gave to the Inupiat since they are kind of like rival tribes. The Inupiat actually do eat raw meat because in order for them to get all of the nutrients and vitamins that we get from eating vegetables they have to eat their meat raw. Their main source of food is the bowhead whale, and if they were to cook it then they would lose all those vitamins and nutrients so they eat it raw. Knowing so much about these people from my previous class was definitely helpful when imagining the stories. I was able to better see the types of clothes they would wear, the houses they lived in, the setting of the area they lived. There were actually several things in the stories that I was able to notice was attributed to their surrounding environment. When they described the houses they lived in they would say that they had to crawl in and out of the houses, this was probably to minimize the amount of cold air that crept into the houses and trapped in the heat. The stories often mentioned sealskin; since there are many seals in the Arctic region the sealskin was probably used as a snow and/or water repellant, as well as a thick layer to keep them warm. I think of it as the original rain jacket! Also, they mentioned putting rocks over people who had died. I attributed this to the ground being so frozen that they could not actually burry the dead, so instead they had to burry them with rocks on the surface. All in all, the Eskimo stories were very interesting and entertaining.  

Inupiat Family (Source)