100 Before Agriculture
Many hunter-gatherer ways of knowing the world have disappeared, along
with hunter-gatherer languages. These are rich and unique parts of human history
that cannot be recovered. If the words are gone, so are the stories. A particular
shape is lost forever. There are fears that hundreds more languages – many of them
those of hunter-gatherers – will have disappeared within another generation. Each
such case represents a harm that is inestimable: the cumulative loss of language
constitutes a diminution in the range of what it means to be human.
There is, however, a story about these stories that has its own importance. The
encounter between hunter-gatherers and farmers is a history of loss to one kind of
society, gain to another. For hunter-gatherers, some losses cannot be compensated.
But the story itself is one form of compensation. If the world can acknowledge
who hunter-gatherers are, how they know and own their lands, what the encounter
with farmers and colonists has meant, then some restitution can be made. An
inquiry into the fate as well as the achievements of hunter-gatherers is, in this
regard, part of a story that hunter-gatherers need to tell and have told. Without the
hunter-gatherers, humanity is diminished and cursed; with them, we can achieve
a more complete version of ourselves.
Notes
Full publication information for the sources cited in these notes is given in the references.
In addition to the specific sources I refer to in the notes that follow, I have received help and inspiration
from a wide range of Arctic literature. Some of this has been popular and anecdotal, as in the case of
the work of Farley Mowat (which some would say is more literary than anecdotal). I have drawn on
detailed ethnography, especially in relation to the central and eastern areas of the Arctic. No fieldwork
proceeds without a background of writing by others that sometimes shapes and sometimes contradicts
one’s own work.
There is, of course, an extensive literature dealing with many aspects of Inuit archaeology, ethnog-
raphy and social organization. The work that gives a particularly wide-ranging but detailed account of
Inuit life across the Arctic is that of Knud Rasmussen, who, as the child of missionaries in Greenland,
grew up speaking Inuktitut, and who therefore, when he became an explorer and ethnographer, had
the rare ability to speak to the peoples he met in their own language. The results of his epic expedition
across the Arctic were published in the Report on the Fifth Thule Expedition. The work runs to several
volumes; Kaj Birket-Smith wrote some, Rasmussen others. I have always found volumes 4, 6, 7, 8 and
9 most compelling; they include shamanic stories, poems and vivid accounts of Inuit elders as well as
a wealth of ethnographic detail. (It should be said, however, that Rasmussen has been criticized for
taking liberties with some of his sources and oddly failing to give Inuktitut versions of all the stories he
includes in the report.)
Prior to Rasmussen’s Thule expedition, two other Arctic ethnographers of great importance were
Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Diamond Jenness. Stefansson wrote a great deal, but his book My Life with
the Eskimo draws together much of his work in a very readable form. Also, his Not by Bread Alone is a
remarkable exploration of Inuit (and other peoples’) diets. Jenness’s most important ethnography is
The People of the Twilight, in which he describes his stay with the Copper Eskimo of the central Arctic.
Jenness subsequently became an influential member of the Canadian administration of northern
affairs, and was associated with plans for relocating Inuit farther south, where, he proposed, they would