Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/225

first two months after confinement; she may receive visitors, however, but has her own lamp and cooking pot and cooks her own food. The birth itself is usually easy and she helps herself; the navel-string is cut with a piece of flint, a strip of skin is tied round it and the after-birth is kept and buried together with the piece of flint. A woman who gave birth to a child in August, 1922, on Danish Island, dug a hole in the gravel in the tent floor, placed a box on two sides of the hole, sat over it with her elbows supported on the boxes and thus brought her child to the world. Before the afterbirth had come, her eldest daughter came running into the tent and began to talk; "that is why the child. which otherwise would have been a boy, became a girl, as he drew the genitals inside him". A woman on Southampton Island who, in the summer of 1922, bore her fourth child, had no skin for a separate tent but spent the time after confinement in the big tent; when the period was over, the tent was moved to another site a few metres from the old one; the old clothing was thrown away.

Immediately after birth the child is given a name, and is usually called after the last relative to die, most frequently of the mother's family, regardless of whether the person was a man or a woman. By this means the old names of the tribe are preserved, and many of the names we find in Parry and Lyon are still to be met with. If no relative has died recently, the husband names the child.

This naming often gives rise to peculiar names, as is eloquently shown by the list given in a previous chapter of the names of all the adult Igluliks and their meaning.

Infanticide does not occur among the Iglulik Eskimos; the custom of abandoning newly born female children which is so widespread among the more westerly Central Eskimos does not seem to have ever been practised here. This may be due to the fact that conditions of life here are rather better, that it is somewhat easier to procure food for these people, to whom the aquatic mammals are of more importance than to the Netsilik, Copper and Caribou Eskimos.

Adoption of children is, on the other hand, very common. A very large number of the children are adoptives (tiguagkat); of the eighteen children at Repulse Bay in the winter of 1921–22, eight were adopted. These are not alone children who have lost their parents and have been adopted by other families, nor are they always children of very large families (for instance twins) or whose parents are poor hunters who have difficulty in procuring food for them. It is often simply a business transaction, the adoptive parents paying for the child; these offers are sometimes so tempting that the parents cannot resist them. For instance, a young married couple at Iglulik,