Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/221

The pipes (pujuluitsit) are for the most part home made: the bowl is cut out of soapstone and the stem made of two longitudinal wooden pieces bound together with sinew-thread.^[1] Fig. 162 a (Ponds Inlet) is one of these pipes of soapstone, with a wooden stem. The head has three brass mountings. Length 10.1 cm. Fig. 162 b (Iglulingmiut) has a soapstone head with three mountings, a wooden stem bound together with sinew-thread and a separate European mouthpiece of bone, held on to the stem by a brass band; on the bowl is a brass cover held on by a chain, and on this chain hang three strings of beads and a pipe-cleaner, needle-shaped, and a spatula-shaped scraper, both of brass.

A small pipe from Ponds Inlet is cut out of one piece of ivory: bowl and stem form an obtuse angle. Length 7.3 cm; diameter of bowl 2.1 cm. A pipe from the Aivilingmiut, Southampton Island, has a cylindrical head of antler, 3.7 cm high, 2.7 cm long, oval in section, and a wooden stem which extends 8.5 cm from the bowl; as usual the stem is formed of two long pieces bound together.

As a rule, tobacco is not smoked pure in the state in which it is bought at the trading post, but is mixed with chopped Vaccinium twigs, Cassiope or cotton grass, as the pure tobacco is too strong. Both men and women smoke, mostly indoors and, as the women are mostly indoors, it is they who smoke most. The pipe does not hold much tobacco and as a rule only a few draws are taken every time it is lighted, before it is laid aside or passed on to another mouth. One peculiar custom is that every time a man or a woman wakes up during the night, the pipe is lighted and a few puffs are taken, whereupon it is laid down and one goes to sleep again.

Smoking has now become quite a passion; when the store of tobacco is exhausted, they start upon old linen bags or the like, in which there has been tobacco, and these are chopped up and mixed with pieces of wood or bilberry twigs; they smoke all kinds of substitutes such as heather, cotton grass and the like, these being mixed with old pipe scrapings as long as they have any. At Christmas, 1922. when I was on Southampton Island, we still had a trifling quantity of tobacco left; an Eskimo woman made me a present of a new pipe mouthpiece which she had made herself; her kindness touched me deeply, but her action turned out to be rather less unselfish: She wanted my old mouthpiece to chop up and smoke!

Alcoholic liquors are, thanks to the prohibition of the Canadian Government, unknown to most of the Eskimos; but many of the older ones can still tell of the orgies of the time of the whalers. when they filled themselves with rum till they were hopelessly drunk.