Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/122

The woman's knife (ulo) is the indispensable implement of the women; it has a very varied use: For flensing, eating, cutting up skins, scraping the hairs off skins, chopping tobacco and lamp moss, chopping up blocks of ice and cutting sticks of wood. The ulo of the Iglulik Eskimos is composed of a handle of wood or bone, a tang and a blade; the latter two are always of iron. Fig. 65 is a typical modern ulo from Ponds Inlet; the handle is of wood; the tang is fastened to the blade by three rivets, and the blade has a sharp, curved edge; it is 16 cm long, 13 cm broad. An ulo from the Iglullingmiut, Qajûvfik, has a handle 8½ cm long, of wood, a rather short, wide tang of copper and an iron blade 14 cm long; total width 11½ cm.

Three smaller ulos have the following dimensions:

In a qarmaq at Ulukssan, Admiralty Inlet, a broken ulo was found with an iron blade, 13 cm long, and with two arms of bone.

In earlier times the tang was mostly of bone, the blade being inserted in it; one of these is figured by Parry,^[1] and another from Parry's expedition, now in the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, is seen in fig. 66; 10.1 cm long. They also occur in the Anangiarssuk find and a grave find from Qaersuarsuit.^[2] As a rule every woman has several ulos, each with its own purpose. Niviatsianâq, on Southampton Island, in whose house we lived during the winter of 1922–23, had three ulos of different sizes; a large one as a meat knife, a smaller one for skin scraping and sewing, and a little one for cutting tobacco. The ulo is always held with the tang between the third and fourth fingers; when skins are to be cut up, the blade is supported with the index finger; if skins are to be scraped, it is pushed forward in a vertical manner, the second and third fingers resting on the upper edge of the blade.

The scrapers that are used for skin curing are seen fig. 67: the stone scraper (isitqût). 2 (Pingerqalik) is a heavy scraper of black slate with bent-over handle; the edge is slightly curved and rather sharp. Thickness 2.2. length 15.1 cm. A scraper from the Aivilingmiut, Daly Bay, is of reddish sandstone, 10.8 cm long, with the same bent handle.