Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/223

goes hunting, procures food and skins for the house and he is also the artisan who builds the house, makes the sledge, fashions his and his wife's implements, scrapes skins. The wife sews clothing, prepares the skin (except the scraping, with which the husband helps). attends to the lamp, cooks meat and looks after the children. But it is no rare occurrence for women to participate in the hunt, especially salmon fishing, where, however, net fishing is always the task of the men, the women fishing with the hook. At Ponds Inlet I heard of several women who were skilful seal-hunters, both ũtoq and maupoq hunting. The women are often clever at fox-trapping, too; a woman at Ponds Inlet had caught 15 foxes in one winter. Two older. rather lazy men at Ponds Inlet had each two clever wives who also did most of the hunting and were very skilful at catching seals, narwhals and foxes. Most of the women, however, spend nearly all their time indoors, sitting on the platform with their sewing and all day long singing their interminable monotone song with the eternal refrain: aja-aja-aja-a.

Marriage. Children are betrothed at birth; as soon as a man receives a son he buys a wife for him for some utensil or other; the aim is to secure domestic help in good time. But if his fiancée should die in the meantime the young man is often placed in an unfortunate position, very often having to wait for a death or some other opportunity of acquiring a wife, and he frequently has to be content with an old widow. Brothers and sisters may marry, and a man may marry two sisters (this is denied by Lyon 1824, p. 353); the case I quote was a man at Ponds Inlet.

Marriage takes place at an early age. The man, as soon as he is able to feed himself and his wife, the woman as soon as she is able to sew and tend the lamp, even if she is barely mature. One sees married women who are scarcely more than fifteen or sixteen, a fact that is also mentioned by Parry^[1] and Lyon.^[2] Marriage is entered upon without any ceremony; the young man simply comes and fetches his future wife and takes her to his house.^[3]

Some men, usually clever hunters, have two wives; in earlier times it is said that there were some who had three. In all there are now six men who have two wives, but formerly this seems to have been a more common state; thus Parry^[4] says that among the Iglulingmiut twelve had two wives, and some of the younger men were betrothed to two; he also says that as a rule there was a difference of five or six years between the ages of the two wives, but this does not seem to be the case now. And of the Aiviliks Gilder says: "At least half of their married men had two wives." As a general rule the two