Page:Archæology of the Central Eskimos.djvu/452

Of the whole Sadlermiut tribe, which at that time numbered 58, only 4 children survived, these having been adopted by the Aiviliks before the catastrophe, the boy Qingaq and his sister Kikdjualik and the girls Nanertoq and Ikşuautalik; of these, Qingaq and Nanertoq Image missingFig. 97.Nanerloq, the last female Sadlermio. John Murray fot. are still living. Qingaq is a young married man living on Southampton Island; he has been brought up in every way as an Aivilik; but owing to his descent he is looked upon as one of the greatest angakoqs in the tribe; his features (fig. 96) remind one of those of the Polar Eskimos. Nanertoq is now a married woman at Chesterfield Inlet; fig. 97 shows her.

There is hardly any doubt that the Sadlermiut, before they died out, had been declining rapidly; judging from the number of habitation remains the island seems to have had a much more numerous population. Comer, who first came across them in 1870, says that then they numbered 70;^[1] in 1902 they had been reduced to 58. As the cause of their decline Angutimarik says that he has heard that they were at war with the Sikosuilarmiut, who came to Bell Peninsula in women's boats and attacked them in revenge for a former attack; a large number of graves still bear witness of this. However, we hardly need turn to war as an explanation of the decline of the Sadlermiut; such an isolated, fairly limited group of people will, in the course of time through constant intermarrying, be so undermined that it will inevitably suffer a rapid decline; and then when disease comes, the population will not have much power of resistance and will be quickly swept away.

If we now consider more closely the elements which went to make up the culture of the Sadlermiut, it will be seen that its foundation is still the old Thule culture: the Sadlermiut were mainly dependent upon the sea, from which they took the greater part of their hunting spoils, and during the greater part of the year they lived in permanent houses of the same size and construction as the house ruins we have seen on the mainland and in Baffin Land; whaling, at any rate before the whales were exterminated, had played a great part in their lives, while later on walrus hunting was the principal occupation. Of elements which were characteristic of the Thule culture but